The Good Robot

Why is public health struggling to make its technologies good?
In this episode, Yale public health scholar and medical anthropologist Chelsey R. Carter joins Eleanor Drage to explore the technologies of public health. They discuss how eye-gaze devices can help people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) communicate, and why assistive technology can fail when users don’t receive the training and support they need. Chelsey also tells us about racial bias in neurological care that National Football League (NFL) players receive after injuries, and shares how the Black Genome Project approaches representation and lived experience in genomics. From COVID-19 and public health policy to precision medicine and the ethics of health technology, this conversation asks who benefits from innovation, and what it takes to make healthcare more equitable. Essential listening for anyone interested in disability justice, Black health, medical anthropology, health equity, and the relationship between technology, race, and care.
Reading List:
Chelsey’s website
The Difference of Black ALS Anti-Bodies for Survival
Weathering Anti-Blackness
Priorities and Recommendations to Make ALS a Livable Disease Emanating from the 2024 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Report Living with ALS
Are diverse databases actually creating equity in genomics?
Hope tempered by caution: Public beliefs in the United States about the benefits and drawbacks of using epigenetic technologies in clinical care.
Interpersonal associations in mental health outcomes of people living with ALS, caregivers, and dyads: Implications for the role of clinicians
Examining relationships between multifactorial health beliefs and beliefs about the social implications of genetics
The Difference of Black ALS Anti‐Bodies for Survival
Anti‐Bodies, Anti‐Body: A Black Feminist Call and Response: Introduction
St. Louis enhancing engagement and retention (STEER) in HIV/AIDS care: a participatory intersectional needs assessment for intervention and implementation planning
Strengthening the US Health Workforce to End the HIV Epidemic: Lessons Learned From 11 EHE Jurisdictions
Patients as knowledge partners in the context of complex chronic conditions
Qualitative and Mixed Methods Research in Cardiovascular Care: Opportunities in the Coming Decades
Psychological distress and life satisfaction among Black working adults in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic
Past Is Prologue: Dismantling Colonial Legacies to Advance Black Health Equity in the United States
“They need people to actually show up in their lives:” deploying community health workers to improve mental health and substance use outcomes among PLWH
The Weather of Anti-Blackness: Is Health Equity Enough?
Inclusive Recruitment Strategies to Maximize Sociodemographic Diversity among Participants: A St. Louis Case Study
Gaslighting: ALS, anti‐Blackness, and medicine
Edited by: Meibel Dabodabo

In this episode of The Good Robot, Eleanor Drage speaks with Cassandra Hartblay, anthropologist, writer, playwright, and author of Access Vernaculars: Disability and Accessible Design in Contemporary Russia.
They explore disability, accessibility, technology, and inclusive design in contemporary Russia, examining how the unique political context shapes coping mechanisms for disabled people living in inaccessible and poorly maintained cities.
We also discuss the Sochi 2014 Olympics and Paralympics, disability advocacy, and the relationship between war and disability. Through stories of wheelchair users, activists, architects, and everyday experiences of inaccessible environments, the episode asks what it really means to create technology and design that enables people to move, participate, and live with greater freedom.
Reading List:
Access Vernaculars: Disability and Accessible Design in Contemporary Russia
Gleaning for Communism: The Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice by Xenia Cherkaev
Unmaking Russia's Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics by Michele Rivkin-Fish
Keywords for Ethnography and Design,  Cultural Anthropology website
The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning by Tanya Titchkosky
Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Edited by: Meibel Dabodabo

What does it mean to care for people and worlds that cannot simply be “fixed”? In Part 2 of this conversation, Eleanor Drage speaks with Kelly Fritsch and Anne McGuire, authors of Broken Worlds, Disabled Kin: Strategies for Collective Survival, about disability justice, collective care, maintenance, palliation, reproductive technology, and risk.
They explore how mutual aid and disability culture offer alternatives to social abandonment, why palliation can help us live with loss and uncertainty, and how ideas about genetic and psychiatric risk can reinforce ableism and eugenic thinking. The episode asks how we can move beyond “fixing” individual bodies toward building more accessible, supportive, and just worlds.
Reading List:
Broken Worlds, Disabled Kin: Strategies for Collective Survival by  Kelly Fritsch & Anne McGuire
“Crip Technoscience Manifesto” by  Aimi Hamraie & Kelly Fritsch 
“Crip Technoscience” by  Kelly Fritsch and Suze Berkhout
War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence by Anne McGuire 
Disability Injustice: Confronting Criminalization in Canada edited by Kelly Fritsch and colleagues
Edited by: Meibel Dabodabo

What does it mean to live in a world that is already broken, and what can disability justice teach us about creating more livable futures? In this episode of The Good Robot, Eleanor Drage speaks with Kelly Fritsch and Anne McGuire, authors of Broken Worlds, Disabled Kin: Strategies for Collective Survival, about disability, technology, accessibility, care, maintenance, and collective survival.
They explore how technologies from ramps to genetic medicine are shaped by social, political, and economic systems. The conversation takes us from why mainstream tech innovation can distract us from maintenance and repair, how "brokenness" is experienced unevenly, and what AI means for accessibility and disability justice. At its heart, this episode asks a powerful question: What are we maintaining, what are we repairing, for whom, and toward what kind of world?
Reading List:
Broken Worlds, Disabled Kin: Strategies for Collective Survival by  Kelly Fritsch & Anne McGuire
“Crip Technoscience Manifesto” by  Aimi Hamraie & Kelly Fritsch 
“Crip Technoscience” by  Kelly Fritsch and Suze Berkhout
War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence by Anne McGuire 
Disability Injustice: Confronting Criminalization in Canada edited by Kelly Fritsch and colleagues
Edited by: Meibel Dabodabo

What happens when we treat hearing as an economic duty, and global tech corporations turn assistive devices into a lifetime commitment?
In this episode of The Good Robot, Eleanor Drage sits down with medical anthropologist Michele Friedner (University of Chicago) to discuss her groundbreaking book, Sensory Futures: Deafness and Cochlear Implant Infrastructures in India. Together, they dismantle the normative project of "normalization" and expose the immense, hidden labor required to keep assistive technologies up and running.
From the strict boundaries placed on mothers in auditory-verbal therapy sessions to the global shadow economies keeping obsolete devices "on-air," Friedner shares a deeply personal and poignant look at what happens when tech forces a narrowing of the human experience. Ultimately, she points us toward a more beautiful alternative: "fugitive sensing", where multi-sensory care, touch, and love actively resist an ableist failure of the imagination.
Reading List:
Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India
Deaf and Incarcerated in the U.S.
The Obsolescence Issue
Feminist, Queer, Crip
Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds

Edited by: Meibel Dabodabo