Hello!
My name is Jonathan Mitchell. I'm a specialist in disability and accessibility. I work for University of Atypical, and oversee a programme that builds knowledge about access in the arts sector, and supports arts organisations to make concrete improvements at their venues and in their practices.
I'm also an independent scholar and critical disability theorist, whose background is in philosophy. I was an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholar in University College Dublin School of Philosophy, where I completed a PhD called 'Distributing Disability: Embodied Difference, Technology, and the Human'. I'm not currently working towards an academic post, but I do some occasional lecturing, and teach in a continuing education capacity.
I'm particularly interested in the persistent tensions between everyday accounts of disability and humanness—different ways disability is understood as a lack of, or deviation from, full or proper humanness—and how these accounts are created or modified through technological change. I'm also interested in ethical frameworks that can accomodate disability without relying on overarching standards of humanness.
This website used to be a place to share conference and workshop papers. I have archived some of these that have been published. You can find out about those in my curriculum vitae. There are still some old presentation texts in the posts section. Some of these contain ideas that I was developing at the time, but do not wholeheartedly subscribe to any longer. I'm working on some new ideas, and will record developments here.
You can find me on Bluesky, Instagram, ORCiD, and ResearchGate. You can also send me an email.