Rua M. Williams

Faculty Affiliate

Rua M. Williams is an Assistant Professor in the School of Applied and Creative Computing at Purdue University. As a researcher, their work focuses on the interactions between disability, technology, and politics. They serve as an advisor to multiple national and international initiatives on AI and technology policy, including the Center for Democracy and Technology, the National Disability Institute, and PRIVETDIS, a European coalition researching privacy and neurotechnologies.

Rua M. Williams is an Assistant Professor in the School of Applied and Creative Computing at Purdue University and a former Just Tech Fellow with the Social Science Research Council. As Principal Investigator of the CoLiberation Lab, Dr. Williams’s work explores how disabled people imagine and build their own sociotechnical worlds, and investigate how technology policy and research practice interact to disrupt disabled people’s bodily autonomy and access to meaningful public life. Through their scholarship they illustrate injustice in technology and uplift marginalized peoples' own practices of technosocial resistance. Dr. Williams's book, Disabling Intelligences: Legacies of Eugenics and How we Are Wrong about AI, is forthcoming from Palgrave MacMillan.

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