Picture of a brown-skinned person starting to smile at the camera, their long black and brown hair falling past their shoulders. They are wearing a black shirt, and are standing against a yellow wall with green foliage in the background.
Hi, I'm Kim!
I am a researcher, writer and educator interested in how the body meets and moves through the world. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, my work lies at the intersections of disability, data, and emerging technologies.
I’m a postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. I am also an affiliate at Data & Society and the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life. I am the Managing Editor of Platypus, an interdisciplinary science studies blog. I hold a joint PhD (with distinction) in Anthropology & Education from the University of Pennsylvania.
My interdisciplinary research is situated between disability studies, science and technology studies, medical anthropology, and critical data studies. My current book project, Quantifying the Body: Disability, Data and Governance in Urban India examines who comes to be counted by the state as disabled, and how this work of making oneself legible to the state impacts peoples’ everyday lives. This work has been generously supported by the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship, the Taraknath Das Foundation’s Marion Jemmott Fellowship, the Center for the Advanced Study of India, the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy, the Mellon Humanities, Urbanism and Design Initiative, and the SNF Paideia Program, among others. It has also been named as a finalist for the 2025 Gail P. Kelly Award for Outstanding Dissertation.If you’d like to learn more about my work, explore potential collaborations, or chat about shared interests, you can contact me at kim.fernandes@utoronto.ca.Updates
Nov 24: At CSCW 2024, I will be co-leading a Special Interest Group on organizing for more just and inclusive futures with disability justice at the center.
Oct 24: I will be presenting work from my second project at the workshop, “Beyond Smart City Transitions: Thinking Through Structural Violence and Possible Radical Futures,” organized by Dr. Syeda Jenifa Zahan at the Politecnico di Torino.
Sep 24: I presented research from my book project on disability justice and/as data justice at the Data Power Conference.
July 24: Randy Burson and I co-organized a double panel on “Corporeal Quantification: Numerical Negotiations of Health and the Body” at the 4S/EASST meeting.
June 24: Our piece Challenging Ableism: A Critical Turn Toward Disability Justice in HCI was published in XRDS.
April 24: I co-organized a workshop on Cultures of Datafication In & Across South Asia with Zehra Hashmi, Ranjit Singh, Rahul Mukherjee and Sandeep Mertia. Stay tuned for further outputs from this workshop!