Embracing Ava: On the Possibility of Disabled Cyborgs — In 2021, I ran a first-year composition course with the introduction of Tobin Siebers’ Disability Theory [1] as the keystone text. For our unit on visual rhetoric, I assigned my class Alex Garland’s Ex Machina and challenged them to produce an analysis of the film that…
Author: Chaim McNamee
Chaim (he/him, they/them) is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric at Indiana University Bloomington (USA). Their dissertation project theorizes skin as a rhetorical site where biopolitical and biomedical power is exerted across bodies. Their broader research interests constellate around embodied rhetorics, crip/disability studies, and the rhetoric of health and medicine. He has completed an MA in English at Western Washington University and a BS in Microbiology from Montana State University. Their non-academic interests include cooking dinner for their wife, playing video games just for the character creator and inventory management, and pretending to know what they're doing with their bonsai.
“It Sits There, Looking at Me”: Scenes on AI, Star Trek, and Medical Education
Synopsis The author experiences multiple encounters with AI discourse and struggles to make sense of the tension in their body that results. The author makes no argument and finds no answers; the author invites you, Reader, into the mess, where it sits there, looking at us. — Scene 1: At the recent Rhetoric of…