Dec 3rd, 2025

Drs. Petra Kuppers and Laura Murphy will share a demonstration and discussion of Planting Disabled Futures, a multi-modal VR experience developed to share energy, liveliness, ongoingness, crip joy and experiences of pain. Engineers, designers, and practitioners can explore inclusive VR technology through this disability-centered project.

Event Details

Date: Wed Dec 3rd

Time: 9am PT | 12pm ET

Location: Zoom

This crip intimacy installation invites you into a world of healing plants cultivated by disabled peoples’ embodied ways of knowing. Come, try out a headset, hold a plushy critter, and become entangled with the ways we as disabled people honor and engage with plant elders. 

In the Planting Disabled Futures project, we use live performance approaches and virtual reality (and other) technologies to share energy, liveliness, ongoingness, crip joy and experiences of pain. 

In the development of the Virtual Reality (VR) components of the project, we ask: How can VR allow us to celebrate difference, rather than engage in hyper-mobile fantasies of overcoming and of disembodied life? How can our disabled bodymindspirits develop non-extractive intimacies, in energetic touch, using VR as a tool toward connecting with plants, with the world, even in pain, in climate emergency, in our ongoing COVID world?

If you require accessibility accommodations such as American Sign Language interpretation, please email info@xraccess.org no fewer than 72 hours before the event.

About the Speakers

Petra Kuppers, a white queer disabled cis woman of size with yellow glasses, shaved head, pink lipstick and a black dotted top, smiles up to the sky, arms outstretched, embracing the world. Her mobility scooter’s handlebar is visible at the bottom of the image. She is in front of a multicolored wall: purple, pink, yellow and orange.

Petra Kuppers

Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture, University of Michigan

Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist, writer, dance video maker and community performance artist. Petra grounds herself in disability culture methods. She uses somatics, performance, speculative writing and media to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures.

She teaches at the University of Michigan as the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture. She was an adviser on the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College for 15 years, until the college closed in 2024.

She has been engaged in community dance and disability culture production since the late 80s (first in her native Germany, then in Wales, UK; Aotearoa/New Zealand; and since 2001 in the US).  She continues to lead workshops internationally, in these forms as well as in disability-culture adapted social somatics.

Black and white photo of Laura in a black dress with her head shaved and wearing dangly clay and metal earrings. She is smiling softly and there are stripes of sun falling across her face from the window next to her.

Laura Murphy

Lecturer & Consultant, University of Michigan

Laura is an expert on inclusive design processes, helping engineers across industries center people more intentionally during design. She earned her PhD from the Design Science program at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation is titled: Pursuing Inclusive Engineering Design: Centering People, Exploring Diverse Perspectives, and Promoting Divergent Thinking. Her masters and bachelors degrees are in Mechanical Engineering, also from the University of Michigan.

Her work explores ways to make engineering design processes more empathetic and inclusive so that design outcomes across industries are more inclusive. It’s informed by disability studies and qualitative front-end design research as well as her prior practice in product design and manufacturing supply chains.