Misfitting

A concept from disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson describing the incongruent relationship between a body and its environment — when the world is not designed to accommodate a particular embodiment, creating disability through mismatch rather than individual deficit. In technology contexts, misfitting highlights how AI systems, interfaces, and digital environments embed assumptions (about sightedness, hearing, cognition, language, culture) that produce barriers for people whose embodied experiences differ from the assumed norm. The concept shifts focus from fixing individuals to redesigning environments and systems.