Dr. Louise Hickman is a lecturer in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on transcriptive technology (via speech-to-text translation) and the cultural formation of access workers and their labor practices.

Louise has previously served as an access consultant for ‘Catalyst: Feminism, Theory and Technoscience’, a peer-reviewed, open-source journal, advocating for a platform where access will remain a reflexive, collaborative, and distributed effort in digital and disability design. Following this premise, her work has also included installation of The Totem Project, which was shown as part of the exhibition “Senses of Care” in Calit2 (California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology Gallery Space) in Spring 2014.

She completed her Bachelor’s degree with honors in American Studies at King’s College London, and the University of California, Berkeley. During her year at Berkeley she also served as Vice-President of the Disabled Student’s Union.