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Dissertation
Cyborg Futures: Disability, Difference, and Resistance in the University
Washington State University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
05/2025
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000007370
Abstract
This project is an institutional critique of the ways the university routinely debilitates its students and, moreover, relies on that debilitation to sustain itself. The university is not only an academic space, but also a disciplinary and surveilling power deeply invested in regulating student behavior. The institution’s primary goal is not to educate students by empowering them, but rather to produce marketable graduates whose labor can be exploited to ensure both the continued functioning of American social and economic hierarchy and the university’s own positioning within these hierarchies. Accordingly, the university seeks to maintain its own capital and prestige while operating beneath a veneer of accessibility, even as the institution itself relies on the maintenance of boundaries between “inclusion” and “exclusion.”
To address these exigencies, I intertwine speculative fiction alongside theoretical orientations in queer and crip theory to develop what I call a cyborg pedagogy. I contend that
students are already cyborgian and that the student-cyborg ruptures the institutional boundaries that perpetuate systems of racial, gendered, class, and ability-based inequalities. While the cyborg has historically been subject to dehumanization given its positionality as not-fully-human, I suggest a more transgressive reading, one which locates the cyborg within a politics that resists binary notions of normal/abnormal and abled/disabled. I argue that the cyborg is a queer crip figure that is always already whole and that by centering the cyborg consciousness in our conceptualization of higher education, we can create space for possibilities that would otherwise be foreclosed by more traditional understandings of cognition and consciousness.
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Details
- Title
- Cyborg Futures
- Creators
- Elizabeth Holland Forsythe
- Contributors
- Melissa Nicolas (Chair)Nishant Shahani (Committee Member)Pamela Thoma (Committee Member)Patricia Wilde (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Department of English
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 238
- Identifiers
- 99901220475101842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation