Stephen Hawking and Networks in Disability Research

(photo via Wired, NASA, Flickr)

Stephen Hawking’s birthday was yesterday, January 8th.  Hawking is certainly the most famous scientist with disabilities alive today, and arguably the most celebrated person  with disabilities in history. With his motorized wheelchair and electronic voicebox, he is an iconic figure.

Wired has a fascinating article on Dr. Hawking, how he does his work, and what his life can tell us about both ‘ordinary’ scientists and people with disabilities. The full thing is worth reading, but I want to pull out some paragraphs which express what I am trying to see in my research more elegantly than I can put it myself.

In one version of Hawking’s eulogistic story, we praise the smartest person in the world, the brilliant physicist, one of the greatest cosmologists of our time. He fits perfectly well with our conception of how science and its heroes work: To be a genius all one needs is a powerful – a “beautiful” – mind. And indeed, because of his disability, Hawking embodies the mythical figure capable of grasping the ultimate laws of the universe with nothing but the sheer strength of his reasoning: He can’t move his body, so everything must be in his mind. What else would a theoretical physicist need?

But in another version of Hawking’s story, we notice that he is more “incorporated” than any other scientist, let alone human being. He is delegated across numerous other bodies: technicians, students, assistants, and of course, machines. Hawking’s “genius,” far from being the product of his mind alone, is in fact profoundly located, material, and collective in nature… What I discovered was that to understand Hawking, you had to understand the people and the machines without whom he would be unable to act and think; you had to understand the ways in which these entities augmented and amplified Hawking’s competencies.

Hawking’s persona, his disability, and his embodied network thus becomes a window on our machines, the nature of work, and even our representation of scientific heroes. Popular media shows us that Hawking is a pure, isolated, once-in-a-lifetime genius; ethnographic analysis shows us that Hawking is not that different from other scientists even though he has a disability. In fact, it’s precisely because of his disability that we get to see how all scientists work … and how the entire world will work one day.

Because, surrounded as we are by our world of technology and digital information, aren’t we all disabled? We, like Hawking… are unable to think and complete the results of our thoughts without being attached to a network of people, instruments, machines – and the living laboratories through which it is all distributed

Indeed.