From Autonomy to Sovereignty — A New Telos for Socially Assistive Technology
JiWoong (Joon) Jang, Patrick Carrington, Andrew Begel · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26) · doi:10.1145/3772318.3791585
Summary
This CHI 2026 theory paper argues that assistive-technology (AT) research has long treated 'independence' as its primary goal — a framing codified in the 1988 U.S. Technology-Related Assistance Act — even though disabled people's lived experience is saturated with interdependence, collective access, and chosen reliance on other people and infrastructures. Through a systematic analysis of 90 theoretically rich social-accessibility papers (curated from an 8,731 → 1,599 → 605 → 90 PRISMA-style funnel across ACM and IEEE venues from 2011 to June 2025), Jang, Carrington and Begel map how the HCI field oscillates between independence and interdependence — and find that neither pole, nor a spectrum between them, resolves the recurring tensions that disabled users describe. The authors then perform a meta-synthesis, placing their inductive findings in 'diffractive dialogue' with three bodies of theory used as conflicting analytic lenses: (1) Self-Determination Theory (SDT) for the self and individual volition, (2) Symbolic Interactionism for negotiated meaning, stigma, and impression management, and (3) Posthumanism plus Crip Technoscience for governance of human-machine assemblages. From the productive conflict among these lenses they propose 'relational sovereignty' — the recognised authority of disabled people to choose their relational mode (independence or interdependence) and set the terms on which that mode is upheld. The shift operationalises a move from 'Can they do it?' to 'Do they get to decide?'. Contributions include the Relational Sovereignty Matrix (2×2 of independence/interdependence × conditional/recognised), a sovereignty-centred reframing of SDT, generative justice-oriented design questions, the idea of building with sovereign technical primitives, and explicit attention to power in AT design.
Key findings
The inductive grounded-theory coding produced 362 concepts clustered into 46 codes and six overarching themes (Identity Sovereignty Complex, Communication as World-Building, Access Ecologies, Critical Making Practices, Algorithmic Disability Encounters, Methodological Justice). A single cross-cutting pattern — the 'Independence–Interdependence Complex' — emerged: users repeatedly demanded both greater individual control AND more robust collective support in the same encounter, and the same surface arrangement (e.g., 'getting help', 'doing it alone') could be empowering or oppressive depending on whether the user set the terms. Each theoretical lens disclosed a different missing dimension: SDT showed that 'autonomy' in HCI is often conflated with 'independence' and used without attention to relatedness or need-frustration; Symbolic Interactionism showed that stigma, disclosure, and identity are ongoing negotiations rather than binary states; Crip Technoscience and Posthumanism showed that compulsory independence and universal 'needs' encode ableist norms and obscure the governance of human-nonhuman assemblages. The Relational Sovereignty Matrix formalises four quadrants — Conditional Independence (abandonment masked as self-reliance), Conditional Interdependence (coerced reliance under external gatekeeping), Recognised Independence (chosen solitude, reversible), and Recognised Interdependence (self-determined collective access) — with sovereignty-oriented design aiming rightward movement toward the 'Recognised' column regardless of relational mode. Three shifts characterise 'telic sovereignty': from productivity to user-defined value (rest and pacing legitimised), from replacement to augmentation on one's own terms, and from individual performance metrics to collective access obligations.
Relevance
For accessibility researchers, AT designers, and policy-makers, this paper provides a principled alternative to the reflexive 'independence-at-all-costs' framing that still drives funding, procurement, and evaluation in the assistive-technology industry. The Relational Sovereignty Matrix is directly usable as a design audit: examine any AT deployment and ask which quadrant users end up in, and whether they set the terms. The six reflective questions (goals and values, interaction design, identity and disclosure, distributed support, system governance, equity and recourse) are pragmatic prompts for design reviews, ethics boards, and grant proposals. The idea of building with 'sovereign technical primitives' — interoperable, user-controlled components rather than black-box 'on-rails' experiences — has concrete implications for AAC, video-conferencing accessibility features, algorithmic disclosure controls, and platform moderation. The authors acknowledge several limitations: the corpus is English-language, drawn from premier HCI venues (ACM/IEEE) and therefore excludes disability studies, STS, regional venues, and Global South scholarship; the sovereignty framework is also translated from Indigenous sovereignty movements, which the authors flag explicitly as conceptual borrowing that does not substitute for decolonisation. Despite these boundaries, the paper is a rare theory-first contribution that gives the field vocabulary for naming what independence-focused AT has repeatedly failed to deliver.
Tags: social accessibility · assistive technology · relational sovereignty · interdependence · independence · crip technoscience · disability justice · self-determination theory · symbolic interactionism · posthumanism · design theory · systematic literature review · power and governance
Standards referenced: Technology-Related Assistance Act (1988)