This article uses disability theory frameworks to analyze an infamous phenomenon in addiction life writing: Beat generation semi-autobiographical novels. I analyze William Burroughs, connecting his aesthetics to his intentional substance abuse and understanding of his addiction and status as drug user as a site of identity formation, marginalization, and sociopolitical organization. Through forms like the cut-up technique, and through content involving bodily and mental distortion and fragmentation, Burroughs uses drugs to invoke a modern, disabled aesthetic. Through writing of his own experience to resist state systems of oppression and situate themselves alongside other marginalized groups, I argue that the formal elements of genre constrain the ability to represent the incurable and multifaceted realities of addiction, but these Beat novels have generative elements that can help us conceptualize a more inclusive future of drug and addiction storytelling.
This paper introduces Crip storywork, a framework nurturing the relationship between disability and pedagogy, articulating the connections between teaching disabled people’s and community’s stories, and storywork as a pedagogical process of doing so that highlights the linkages and relations between disability and everyday life. Through crip storytelling, it centers disabled knowledge as a form of engagement with a crip spatial imaginary that resists dominant narratives of the future where disability and disabled people seldom exist. I invite readers to engage with disabled futures, crystallize crip imaginings, and reimagine crip storytelling as both research and worldbuilding grounded in the politics of bodily knowledge. In this piece, I detail the ways Crip storywork taps into political movement work, bodily knowledge, history, cosmology, and the environment—addressing a process that allows disabled folks to reclaim space, both figuratively and literally, across time rather than being passively erased. As both method and pedagogy, Crip storywork challenges white, ableist knowledge construction and storytelling traditions by honoring narrative, embodied, and ancestral ways of knowing. It resists extractive approaches to methodology and instead uplifts the wisdom of disabled stories—holding space for disabled realities, griefs, joys, and liberatory visions. Crip storywork demands that we not only witness disabled lives but co-create stories that reclaim lost histories and imagine accessible, liberated futures through our embodied stories. In doing so, it offers a radical refusal of normative methodological and pedagogical boundaries through a bold embrace of disabled futures and worldbuilding.
The question of “fairness” is prominent in the discourse surrounding whether athletes who utilize prosthetic limbs such as running blades should be allowed to compete against athletes with only organic limbs. While the idealized “whole” body is generally perceived as inherently superior to a disabled body, the view of advanced technology as quasi-miraculous contributes to “cyborg anxiety,” wherein the presumed superiority of nondisabled bodies is directly challenged, sparking feelings of discomfort, distrust, and defensiveness. Applying concepts from disability studies with science and technology studies (STS) and cultural analysis, alongside analysis of various technologies’ real and perceived affordances, this paper argues that fairness is the wrong framework through which to explore this issue. Rather, this analysis reveals that the concept of fairness in sport is socially constructed and subjectively reinforced as a way of reifying essentialist notions of categories such as race, gender, and (dis)ability. Thus, the notion of a “level playing field” is weaponized to maintain a false binary between disabled and nondisabled bodies.
Although recent decades have observed rapid developments in technology, communication, and educational practice, contemporary culture remains deeply shaped by the so-called ocularcentric paradigm: the assumption that sight is the principal sense and that knowledge is fundamentally derived from visual inspection. This approach is particularly pronounced in mathematics, a discipline commonly associated with demonstrable certainty, while also being frequently regarded as dependent upon graphical representation of abstract ideas. As a result, mathematical activity is often non-accessible to individuals with low or no sight. This paper seeks to challenge this pervasive misconception. It first traces the historical emergence of ocularcentrism, with particular attention to its entrenchment in Western intellectual traditions. It then examines a selection of notable contributions by blind scientists over the past three centuries, highlighting the generative, structural influence that blindness exerted on their cognitive approaches, research practices, and innovative achievements. By foregrounding these often-overlooked epistemic dynamics, the paper argues for a reconsideration of blindness not as a deficit, but as a potentially productive mode of engaging with mathematical thought.
Scholars are increasingly partnering with local communities and turning to participatory and codesign approaches to the study of disability. In this article, I document the 2024 Invisible Aspects of Disability and Neurodiversity arts exhibition’s organizational process, featured art and lessons learned. Though I served as the primary organizer, I spent four months working closely with contributors from the Cornell University community to “co-curate” the exhibition, a process I define by its collaborative nature as I regularly sought and implemented input that shaped numerous exhibition elements (e.g., exhibition title, art descriptions, visitor engagement activities) in response to a broader theme of invisible and often misunderstood aspects of disability and neurodiversity. The exhibition featured visual, tactile, and sonic art from nine students and staff across campus, including myself. From fiber to plaster and pill bottles to rocks, each piece was constructed to communicate its creator’s unique experiences of invisibility. This article is organized by its contributions to our understanding of (co-)curatorial practices, disability representation, and invisible experiences of disability and neurodiversity. Highlighting the full process, from art development and planning workshops through dialogue between art contributions and visitor responses to the opening event, I conclude with key takeaways and open questions for readers who may engage with disability arts as curators, artists, and visitors, at present and in future. I hope they inspire others to implement disability arts events within their communities.
Though existing research suggests that co-curricular involvement in disability-related initiatives is associated with more positive attitudes regarding disability among college students, little is known about how members of disability-focused campus organizations (DFCOs) conceive of disability and ableism, and how these understandings relate to their perception of their organization’s work. Drawing upon Broderick and Lalvani’s (2017) notion of dysconscious ableism, a state of mind that accepts the marginalization of disabled people as a given, this study analyzes interviews with 27 college students involved in DFCOs to explore how they perceive disability and how they describe the purpose and goals of their campus organizations. Participant discourses represented varied levels of critical (dys)consciousness, with some participants describing disability as an inherent negative trait and a problem unto itself, while others articulated the systemic and structural roots of disablement. Participant descriptions of organizational work, including goals, activities, and impact, were similarly varied, and reflected the conceptions of disability and disablement associated with each of the levels of dysconsciousness. These findings suggest that involvement with a DFCO alone is not sufficient for the development of critical consciousness regarding disability and ableism, though many DFCOs are engaged in impactful, community-based work rooted in critical understandings of disability. Based upon these findings, I make recommendations for fostering college students’ critical consciousness and expanding efforts towards diversity, equity, and inclusion to better incorporate disability.
This article examines the complex depictions of disability in the classic children’s novel Heidi (1880-81) by Johanna Spyri. Anglophone disability scholars have sometimes pigeonholed Heidi as inspirational and problematic, but have allowed memory and cultural consensus to supersede a rigorous examination of the text itself—potentially because of its reputation as a sentimental work for girls. Heidi offers intriguing portrayals of several characters with disabilities, including Heidi herself. Her diagnosis, nostalgia, was understood as a severe medical condition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The history of nostalgia exemplifies how diagnostic categories rise and fall, but also how sexism and the legacy of eugenic thought can still impede historically attentive readings of disabled bodies in older literature. Reinforcing this point, close reading reveals the purported “miracle cure” of wheelchair user Klara Sesemann to be a fairly grounded depiction of rehabilitation. This article seeks to recover Spyri’s message of taking young girls seriously when it comes to their accounts of their own bodies and minds.
This article explores how disabled content creators enact crip joy, desire, and collective care as resistant practices in the face of ableist and racialized digital infrastructures. Focusing on the TikTok and Instagram presences of Shelby Lynch, a Black disabled content creator, and Alex Dacy, a white disabled content creator, I analyze how these creators navigate the tensions between hypervisibility, surveillance, and self-representation. While grief and insidious trauma remain part of their narrative terrains, this article reframes such affective experiences not as endpoints but as catalysts for joy, relationality, and digital solidarity. Drawing on the work of Moya Bailey, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Jules Gill-Peterson, and Alyson Spurgas, I argue that visibility itself is not neutral; it is structured through intersecting regimes of race, gender, ability, and desirability. By centering crip time, care work, and aesthetics of refusal, this article theorizes disabled digital storytelling as a form of grassroots activism and political imagination—one that insists on complex, joyful, and racially conscious forms of being.
Cure narratives are a major trope of Western science fiction. Such stories prominently feature a speculative cure for physical and developmental disabilities (Allan 2013). I analyze two Soviet classics – the science fiction novel Roadside Picnic (1972) by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and the film Stalker (1979), loosely based on the novel and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Using disability studies approaches, as well as close readings, to argue that Roadside Picnic presents both a cure and an anti-cure narrative: a child’s disability is a motivator for a parent’s quest for her wellness, but this motivator is ultimately abandoned in favor of a utopian approach to human yearning which emphasizes happiness for all. Tarkovsky’s Stalker entirely rejects the idea of a cure for the same child, alongside its rejection of materialistic motivations. While Western cure narratives might be intimately tied to the history of able-bodiedness as a capitalist value, examining these Soviet works highlights that cure narratives exist beyond capitalist societies. The trope of “cure” and the pushback against it are a concern of literary production beyond Western imaginaries. Rejecting cure not just as a trope, but as a legitimate desire of a parental figure for their child, these Soviet speculative classics refuse to embed disabled, neurodivergent, and mentally ill people in systems that dehumanize them, and envision alternate possibilities – which are often in contrast with the lived experiences of disability in the Soviet Union.
In this article, I describe the concept of Cyborg Maintenance: the being and doing of upkeeping a bodymind that relies on technologies. I focus on the “common” or “everyday” cyborg: the disabled person who relies on prosthetics, wheelchairs, medications, or other technologies to function in day-to-day life. I describe the historical and economic forces that push cyborg maintenance into hiding, what it is like to live and maintain a cyborg bodymind, and what it might mean to foreground the sorts of work necessary to maintain the cyborg bodymind. I argue that Cyborg Maintenance is a maintenance of relationships first, and that it reveals the multiple ways we are all dependent upon the wide care networks of our communities.
In this article, I draw on oral histories from the Queer Pandemic project conducted with queer disabled and nondisabled people in England about their experiences in relation to the process of “returning to normal” once COVID-19 precautions were lifted. I analyze their experiences through the lens of the disabled oracle, arguing that the wisdom gained from an oracle perspective allowed queer disabled people to prioritize their cripistemologies despite their devaluation from society and assert their rejection of the ableist norms promoted in England by engaging in different kinds of queer/crip negativity. Thus, this article provides insight into how queer disabled people navigate a landscape of increased ableism during COVID and establishes a framework for further research on COVID-19.
Increasingly intersecting work in disability and animal studies reveals the interconnection of oppressive hierarchies and how these operate within and across species. This article extends such dialogues into the home, considering the ways that disability, ableism, and speciesism show up in multispecies care. Pulling from thematic analysis of twenty semi-structured interviews exploring dog-human caregiving practices, we argue that humans make sense of their care relationships with dogs in ways which both reinforce and ‘muddy’ ableist logics within the home. We explore six themes: (1) Intimate carework and disabled animal companions; (2) Breeds and capital; (3) Pathologization of ‘problem’ dog behaviour; (4) Animal carework and disabled human companions; (5) Trauma and recovery in and across species; and (6) Intelligence and madness in interspecies relationships. Overall, mobile and place-based interviews with twenty participants on caregiving in multispecies homes reveal language and discourses that reproduce ableist and anthropocentric understandings of, and relationships with, animals, alongside transgressive relationalities grounded in reciprocity, vulnerability, and care.
In this essay I focus on two documentaries about disability—Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies” (1967) and Nicole Newnham and James Lebrecht’s “Crip Camp” (2020)—to explore how institutional approaches to care support disabled people and their articulation of personhood. Rather than abstract discussions of care, attending to care qualitatively reveals the fundamental differences between institutions and institutional effects on disabled people. I identify connectivity, modularity, facilitation, and animation as four qualities of care. Disabled people and their carers provide these four qualities, which enable a grounded approach to theory-building. These qualities help demonstrate the conceptual underpinnings of institutions and their relation to disability as lived experience. By focusing on disparate portrayals of care for disabled people, a clearer language about the aims and processes of care provides the basis for scholarly inquiry and institutional reform.
An estimated 300,000 individuals with disabilities were murdered between 1939-1945 by the Nazi government via the clandestine T4 program. This essay first explains the historical context of the T4 program. Then, guided by Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory and the notion of “vicarious witnessing” developed by Froma Zeitlin and expanded by Susanne Knittel, it lays out the strengths of using creative writing in T4 memory mediation. I explore this in part through the personal example of my accompanying poem “Smoke & Ash”, speaking to the creative writing process, my incentive, and the poetic interventions undertaken.
Recent scholarship has revealed that excessive out-of-school suspension compels some parents to remove their children from punitive schools. However, little is known about how parents respond to harmful restraint and seclusion practices, which can be especially consequential for students with disabilities. Using disability critical race theory (DisCrit) as a theoretical framework, this study examines the experiences of parents (N=50) of Black and white children who were diagnosed with cognitive, physical, and behavioral disabilities and restrained and secluded in school between one and over thirty times. The qualitative findings indicate that Black parents were more inclined to remove their children from punitive schools following harmful restraint and seclusion practices. In contrast, white parents were more inclined to hire disability and legal professionals to challenge such practices. Despite spending thousands of dollars on legal proceedings, these parents stated their efforts were hindered because (a) school officials and taxpayer-funded legal teams attempted to mislead and silence parents who chose due process, and (b) school officials retaliated against them by filing complaints to child protective services, which triggered invasive investigations that disrupted parents’ households. Collectively, the narratives shed light on the financial and social expenditures that parents contend with in their efforts to challenge school restraint and seclusion practices.
This paper invites educators to engage in Mad dreaming with SF. Mad dreaming with SF is conceptualized at the intersections of Mad Studies, Critical Disability Studies (CDS), decolonial studies and posthumanism. This interdisciplinary approach is intended to offer an urgent provocation to educators to stop reproducing western colonialism in its current neoliberal iteration. Through a contestation of the western colonial notion that progress and developmentalism are leading to better futures, this paper is a plea to educators to create spaces for the reimagining of definitively Mad futures. Mad dreaming with SF considers what it might mean to refuse to repeat past and present abuses of power. In order to stop the progress and further development of the neoliberal order of things, I propose the need for the kind of Mad Dreaming with SF that will remain haunted by the perils of perpetuating injustices between each other. Mad Dreaming with SF also desires the enactment of futures that have yet to be imagined. This paper ultimately seeks to enact mad methods wherein teachers and students play in and with Mad dreaming as a vital strategy of human survival that embraces the potentialities in anti-colonial, anti-ableist, and anti-sanist futures.
This article begins with the question: “Why do we archive?” It reflects on art collections produced within contemporary psychiatric institutions in Portugal. It explores the ethical, bureaucratic, and political dimensions involved in the care and circulation of these works, created by people with lived experience of madness. Considering efforts to deinstitutionalize large psychiatric hospitals, the article examines specific cases of still-operational Portuguese institutions that house artistic archives. It problematises the status of these productions, which often oscillate between becoming defunct archives, being discarded, or circulating within art brut and outsider art circuits, raising questions regarding artist rights and the use of these works following the death or discharge of their creators. The analysis is structured around two main axes: first, the role of psychiatric institutions in light of the challenges posed by reforms to Mental Health Law; and second, the circulation of these artistic expressions and their contemporary discourses, with a focus on the Portuguese context. Finally, the article emphasises the urgent need to reconsider the management and preservation of these artistic archives, highlighting the tension between protecting privacy and providing access to the memory of institutionalised subjects, and questioning the current role of asylums as custodians of these cultural and human legacies.
This work explores the conventional ways that blindness and sight are differentiated. It makes use of this differentiation to establish first, how it imagines that such a difference is necessary and, second, how this difference is itself imagined. The difference between blindness and sight is, like all differences, not neutral; it springs from a cultural need to distinguish the variety of ways there are to perceive the world and differentiate the validity and fidelity of these ways. I conduct this exploration from my place of blindness, from what I perceive from this place and from what it tells me about the place of sight and the connection between the two. It opens with a poem, a poem I wrote during a specific time of my blindness. I wrote this poem as a way to preserve my emotion in a moment that, at the time, I was not yet ready to engage. This poem tells of my time as a blind graduate student. It tells, too, of tracks, of my tracks and their eraser. This work, then, understands blindness as a geography, as a place from where the world is not only perceived, but experienced. It treats sight in the same way. As geography, the movement of blindness suggests “tracks.” Even when blindness is not concretely present, its tracks are; within the geography of sight, the tracks of blindness are everywhere. And yet, sight and sighted people are compelled to erase these tracks when they are noticed. Tracks of blindness in the geography of sight are tantamount to a “sighting” of the enemy in a territory wholly committed to destroying its enemies. Understood as the opposite of sight and as a threat to its very existence, blindness becomes something that must be avoided and, if this proves impossible, ignored. This poetic work explores this particular and conventional relation between blindness and sight as it is culturally evoked as a way to differentiate between the two. It explores, too, how such a differentiation is lived.
Contemporary US public discourse, psychiatric practices, and legal policies often frame suicidal people as inherently incapable of understanding their own realities and making their own healthcare decisions. This subjects suicidal people to various human rights abuses, including carceral care practices such as involuntary hospitalization. Alexandre Baril refers to this unique form of sanist-ableist oppression as “suicidism” and calls for the use of disability and Mad justice frameworks to challenge such practices. To build on his theorizations, this article unpacks suicide as it has been conceptualized—and notably medicalized—throughout the course of Western thought. It focuses specifically on historical conceptualizations that may have played a role in informing present-day suicidist beliefs about the nature of suicidality and how suicidal people should be treated. The article offers concrete inroads for activists and scholars aiming to resist suicidism in their research and advocacy by unpacking how suicidist beliefs have been challenged in the past and posing critical questions about how these prior activisms might inform future resistance.
In this poem, I try to bring the poetic body closer to my physical body. To do this, I try to give to the verses an aesthetic form that dialogues with conditions that are part of me, such as autism, depression, anxiety, asthmatic bronchitis, respiratory allergies, deviated septum, astigmatism, myopia, lordosis, scoliosis. In short, I found a way to express the experience of my body in the world through some crooked and fragmented stanzas, with a short and broken rhythm, with patterns of repetition and rupture, with echolalia, with obsessive lists, and other characteristics.
