[Commlist] Call for Papers for Journal Special Issue - Disability, Technology and Digital Inclusion in Southeast Asia

*Call for Papers for Journal Special Issue - Disability, Technology and 
Digital Inclusion in Southeast Asia *

Editors: Kuansong Victor ZHUANG (NTU), Gerard GOGGIN (Western Sydney U), 
Jennifer SMITH-MERRY (U Syd)

Asia has been widely noted as the world’s largest market in digital 
technology. While researchers have focused on the efforts of Japan, 
South Korea, and China, Southeast Asia has been on the rise for the past 
5-10 years, especially attracting attention with the prominence of 
digital platform companies such as Gojek (headquartered in Indonesia) 
and Grab (Singapore HQ). These digital platform companies have 
established a foothold not only in their home countries (Indonesia and 
Malaysia) but also expanded across the region. Such extensive 
digitalization of society is mirrored by a longer historical trajectory 
of Southeast Asian countries adopting the smart and technology as 
enablers for economic growth of development, for instance in Singapore 
(Goggin and Zhuang 2022) and Malaysia (Bunnell 2015, 2004), just to name 
two. Notably, various reports have highlighted the proliferation of 
internet users across Southeast Asia, as well as the growing digital 
economy in recent years (Google, Temasek, and Bain 2023; Platform 2023; 
Chadha 2023).


We juxtapose this with the emergence of disability as an area of 
considerable research, social, and policy importance across Southeast 
Asia, underpinned by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of 
Persons with Disabilities, and regional initiatives like the Incheon 
Strategy and the ASEAN Enabling Masterplan. Notably, the third 
Asian-Pacific Decade of Persons with Disabilities 2023-2032 was convened 
in Indonesia and culminated in the Jakarta Declaration. Across Southeast 
Asia, we see vibrant disabled communities and research appearing, as 
well as various government attempts at achieving disability inclusion. 
In particular, the ASEAN Enabling Masterplan puts forth key 
recommendations to support the development of inclusive ICTs. AEC 12 
highlights the importance of “Promot[ing] smart city projects that have 
inclusive infrastructure and technologies that are accessible to urban 
dwellers with disabilities”, while AEC 13 notes the need to “Encourage 
inclusive ICT by improving its accessibility and usability for persons 
with disabilities and by upgrading digital skill sets of developers and 
users to have a more digitally empowered and connected ASEAN people and 
stakeholders” (ASEAN 2019).  Accordingly, digital inclusion for people 
with disability is a high priority area for policymakers, industry, 
technology designs, institutions (such as education, law, and others), 
and civil society organizations, even as digital forms of governance and 
also societal interactions are increasingly prevalent and part of the 
everyday.

We bring together these developments – the extensive digitalization of 
society and the use of technology in all aspects of life (especially 
with disability), the embrace of disability rights globally, and the 
pursuit of digital inclusion by Southeast Asian nation states – into 
productive conversation. While digital technology is a crucial area for 
realizing goals of social and economic participation as well as rights, 
the practices of digital inclusion are however not uniformly spread 
among people with disability across the region; what some have described 
as digital divides and digital inequalities (Goggin 2017; Dobransky and 
Hargittai 2016; Hargittai and Hsieh 2013). There have been estimated to 
be more than 90 million people in Southeast Asia with disability, and 
for many, assistive technology is a key part of their lives. 
Importantly, many disabled people are not able to fully participate in 
society on an equal basis with others and the WHO has called for 
government action and research to promote inclusion.

Importantly, research focused on the intersections of technology, 
digital inclusion, and disability across Southeast Asia is very much 
nascent. Research and policy frameworks, exemplars, and models relating 
to disability and digital inclusion still largely derive from a small 
set of influential jurisdictions, including the US, UK, and Europe. This 
special issue hopes to draw attention to the specificities of how 
disability digital inclusion is unfolding in Southeast Asia, given the 
overt focus of national governments, regional associations, 
institutions, and society on the adoption of technology, with a specific 
focus on the development and application of information and 
communications technologies (ICTs).

Our special issue also parallels an emergent body of work that 
highlights the importance of engaging the digital with research in 
disability and technology (Goggin 2021). Such a focus is even more 
important, given how the pandemic has further exacerbated these digital 
inequalities for disabled people – while the pivot to new forms of 
living and sociality benefited some disabled people, others found 
themselves worse off in a world increasingly reliant on the 
internet (Hargittai 2022). Disability scholars have highlighted how 
technology is embedded in different ways in the lives of disabled 
people, creating affordances to open up new possibilities (Dokumaci 
2023) but also very much situated within socio-economic-political 
contexts (Alper 2017). More important, we pivot to scholarship that 
spotlight the ways in which disability can also generate new forms of 
knowledge. As Hamraie and Fristch (2019) note, disability possesses huge 
potential and insights for design and technology, affording new ways of 
world-building.

We build this special issue off the back of a successful 1-day 
conference on Digital Inclusion in Southeast Asia co-hosted by Centre 
for Disability Research and Policy, University of Sydney; Institute for 
Culture and Society, Western Sydney University; Asian Communication 
Research Centre, Nanyang Technological University and Sydney Southeast 
Asia Centre in March 2024. We invite contributions that may either focus 
on Southeast Asia as a region, and/or specific Southeast Asian 
nation-states. While we draw attention to the region, we are also 
interested in how the global intersects with Southeast Asia.

Specific areas of inquiry can include but are not limited to the following:

1)How do emerging technologies and their deployment impact on disabled 
peoples’ digital inclusion across Southeast Asia, including but not 
limited to issues such as the use of artificial intelligence/large 
language models and automated decision making, data and privacy, 
implementation of digital IDs, smart cities, smart homes, autonomous 
vehicles and transportations … etc affect disabled people?

2)How are information and communication technologies mobilized to 
support disabled peoples’ inclusion? What are disabled people’s lived 
experiences of technology? How do disabled people actively engage with, 
deploy, and use technology and the digital, including social media 
platforms, assistive devices, self-tracking devices, and so on, and how 
does these mediate their experiences with the everyday?

3)And conversely, how are technologies (such as telehealth, covid-19 and 
public health measures such as Bluetooth contact tracing, apps and so 
on) deployed in the lives of disabled people across Southeast Asia by 
states, governments, disability service providers, charities and NGOs, 
public and private healthcare providers?

4)What is the current landscape of policy and governance of digital 
inclusion across Southeast Asia, and how does it measure to other 
jurisdictions? How can we govern technology in support of disabled 
peoples’ inclusion? How can we bridge the digital divide and address 
digital inequalities, taking in consideration the specific contexts and 
needs of Southeast Asian nation-states and/or communities?

5)How does digital inclusion of disabled people relate to, complicate, 
and/or cut across citizenship & wider forms of societal, political, 
economic, cultural participation? For instance, how have disabled 
peoples’ activism for their inclusion changed or used different forms of 
technology? How have debates around digital inclusion and/or the influx 
of new technologies shaped the ways activism and advocacy is carried out?

6)The intersection of the global and the local. Specifically, how does 
digital inclusion in Southeast Asia link to global factors, such as 
standards developed internationally, including but not limited to 
legislation such as the Americans with Disability Act, the European 
Accessibility Act, as well as standards like the WCAG? What role do 
international development and their agencies play in digital inclusion 
in Southeast Asia?

7)What role does the market and its agents (such as corporates, 
businesses, and other institutions) play in digital inclusion? How do 
market forces and global supply chains impact on disabled peoples’ 
access to and use of technology?

Following the submission of an initial proposal, we now invite abstracts 
for a special issue soon to be under full consideration at /Information, 
Communication & Society/ published by Taylor & Francis. We expect a 
final decision on the issue soon after we have completed the selection 
of abstracts. For more info on the journal, see,

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=rics20 
<https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=rics20>


Note: There is no article processing fee associated with publishing in 
this journal in the normal route.


If interested, pls submit an email to (victor.zhuang /at/ ntu.edu.sg) 
<mailto:(victor.zhuang /at/ ntu.edu.sg)>, with the following details by *31 
July 2024*:

·Title your email CFP Special Issue Disability Technology in SEA

·An abstract of between 350 – 500 words, detailing the argument, 
findings, and methodology of the research

·A short 50-word bio of each author(s)

·All queries should be directed to (victor.zhuang /at/ ntu.edu.sg) 
<mailto:(victor.zhuang /at/ ntu.edu.sg)>

We will endeavour to notify accepted abstracts within two weeks of close 
of deadline and henceforth submit the proposal to be considered. If 
accepted by the journal, we expect full papers to be submitted to the 
special issue editors for internal review by 31 March 2025. Thereafter, 
revised papers will be submitted through to the journal for double-blind 
peer review by 31 July 2025.

*_Editors’ Bio_*

*Kuansong Victor, Zhuang* is Visiting Fellow, University of Sydney, and 
International Postdoctoral Scholar at the Wee Kim Wee School of 
Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University. He was 
a Chevening scholar in 2013/14, and a 2022/23 Princeton University Fung 
Global Fellow. His research lies at the intersections of communications, 
media, and cultural studies, and disability studies, especially as it 
pertains to inclusion and the workings of technology. He hopes to use 
his research to contribute to current debates about how inclusion 
happens both in Singapore and around the world.

*Gerard Goggin*is Professor in the Institute for Culture and Society, 
Western Sydney University. Gerard has published widely on media, 
culture, technology, and disability,. His books include /Routledge 
Companion to Disability and Media /(2020), /Normality & Disability 
/(2018), /Disability and the Media /(2005; with Katie Ellis), and with 
Christopher Newell, the two books /Disability in Australia /(2005) and 
/Digital Disability /(2003).

*Jen Smith-Merry* is Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Fellow 
and Professor of Health and Social Policy in the Sydney School of Health 
Sciences. She is Director of the Centre for Disability Research and 
Policy. Her work focuses on creating practical, research-informed policy 
and practice development in partnership with government and 
non-government organisations.

*References*

Alper, Meryl. 2017. /Giving voice: Mobile communication, disability, and 
inequality/. Boston: MIT Press.

ASEAN. 2019. /ASEAN Enabling Masterplan 2025: Mainstreaming the Rights 
of Persons with Disabilities/. Jakarta: ASEAN Secretariat.

Bunnell, Tim. 2004. /Malaysia, modernity and the multimedia super 
corridor: A critical geography of intelligent landscapes/. Routledge.

---. 2015. "Smart city returns." /Dialogues in Human Geography/ 5 (1): 
45-48.

Chadha, Sapna. 2023. "How Southeast Asia can become a $1 trillion 
digital economy." Last Modified 12 December 2023. 
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/12/how-southeast-asia-can-become-trillion-digital-economy/#:~:text=Southeast%20Asia's%20digital%20economy%20has,the%20region%20is%20tech%2Dforward 
<https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/12/how-southeast-asia-can-become-trillion-digital-economy/#:~:text=Southeast%20Asia's%20digital%20economy%20has,the%20region%20is%20tech%2Dforward>.

Dobransky, Kerry, and Eszter Hargittai. 2016. "Unrealized potential: 
Exploring the digital disability divide." /Poetics/58: 18-28.

Dokumaci, Arseli. 2023. /Activist Affordances: How Disabled People 
Improvise More Habitable Worlds/. Durham, NC: Duke UP.

Goggin, Gerard. 2017. "Disability and digital inequalities: Rethinking 
digital divides with disability theory." In /Theorizing Digital 
Divides/, edited by Massimo Ragnedda and Glenn W. Muschert, 63-74. New 
York: Routledge.

---. 2021. "Disability, Internet, and digital inequality: The research 
agenda." In /Handbook of digital inequality/, 255-273. Edward Elgar 
Publishing.

Goggin, Gerard, and Kuansong Victor Zhuang. 2022. "Disability as Smart 
Equality: Inclusive Technology in a Digitally Advanced Nation." In 
/Digital Inclusion: Enhancing Vulnerable People’s Social Inclusion and 
Welfare?/, edited by Panayiota Tsatsou, 257-275. London: Palgrave.

Google, Temasek, and Bain. 2023. /e-Conomy SEA 2023/.

Hamraie, Aimi, and Kelly Fritsch. 2019. "Crip technoscience manifesto." 
/Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience/5 (1): 1-33.

Hargittai, Eszter. 2022. /Connected in isolation: digital privilege in 
unsettled times/. Boston: MIT Press.

Hargittai, Eszter, and Yu-li Patrick Hsieh. 2013. "Digital Inequality." 
In /The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies/, edited by William H 
Dutton, 129-150. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Platform, Southeast Asia Development Solutions Knowledge and Innovation. 
2023. "Southeast Asia’s Digital Economy to Hit $200B in 2022." Last 
Modified 27 Feb 2023. 
https://seads.adb.org/solutions/southeast-asias-digital-economy-hit-200b-2022 
<https://seads.adb.org/solutions/southeast-asias-digital-economy-hit-200b-2022>.

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