Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang has children with severe physical disabilities given new lives, bodies, and possibilities as 'shell people' - brains grafted into ships. An amazing new view on what it is to be human.

Nah, Chronicles of Riddick has ship telepaths who live in pods. Battlestar Galactica has something similar. The video game Homeworld had galactic travel ships that were controlled by a human grafted to the computer, that turned out to he reversible and had lower stakes as time went on. That's probably the closest thing because the ship controller is responsible for plotting hyperspace jumps by ripping holes in reality.

The navigators in Dune are almost like this but you can carry them offship in a giant fishtank. So not grafted but kind of non-ambulatory outside of spaceflight.

I guess the theme I latch on to here is people who trade their body and autonomy to gain interstellar flight and provide for others. Is it not the same with conjoiner drives?

You know I'd say that's pretty close. I forgot I should read those, somebody recommended that to me for liking Enders Game