From Autonomy to Sovereignty - A New Telos for Socially Assistive Technology
This paper proposes a new theoretical framework and design interventions to address the misalignment between assistive technology design goals and the preferences of disabled people.
Social accessibility research has historically prioritized independence, but disabled individuals often prefer interdependence. This paper introduces "relational sovereignty" as an alternative goal, shifting focus from a user's ability to their power to choose between independence and interdependence.
Social accessibility research faces a persistent tension: assistive technologies (AT) predominantly pursue independence, yet disabled people's experiences reveal rich preferences for interdependence. Our analysis of 90 papers from 2011-2025 uncovered that this stems from a deeper issue - which crystallized through dialogue with three bodies of theories: (1) self-determination theory (SDT), (2) symbolic interactionism, and (3) posthumanist perspectives and crip technoscience. SDT illuminates individual needs; symbolic interactionism addresses construction of social meaning and stigma; Posthumanist and crip technoscience together challenges normalcy, governance, and the human-machine boundary. Through their tensions, we identify relational sovereignty as an alternative telos - or goal - to autonomy. While our corpus equates autonomy with independence, sovereignty centers the power to choose between independence and interdependence. To operationalize this shift - from "Can they do it?" to "Do they get to decide?" - we introduce the Relational Sovereignty Matrix and four design interventions: (1) a sovereignty-centered reframing of SDT, (2) generative questions for justice-oriented reflection, (3) the idea of building through sovereign technical primitives, and (4) explicit consideration of power in AT design.