Critical Disability Studies Caucus: Cripistemologies of Continuous Crisis I: Exploring/Speculating/Imagining Crip Space and Time

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

In this second panel of a two-panel series sponsored by the Critical Disability Studies Caucus, we continue to engage with the current turn in disability studies toward theorizing collective social experiences of impairment and crip temporality coincides with a turn in critical theory to deconstructing temporalities of crisis (Berlant), and attending to “chronicity” (Freeman). Lauren Berlant’s understanding of “slow death” and “crisis ordinariness,” Jasbir Puar’s theoriziations of “debility,” and Rob Nixon’s formulation of “slow violence” demand that we conceive of violence, devastation, and spectacular loss as endemic to the very systems that seek to exceptionalize them. Critical disability studies, in turn, exposes the limits of conceiving of disability as only a traumatic and devastating disruption of everyday life, and offers recent theorizations of crip time as a way to understand the complex ways of living with/in disability. We intentionally bring together these bodies of scholarship to ask what emerges from the conversation across lines of inquiry that fundamentally challenge dominant temporal epistemologies and foreground experiences of living and surviving precarity (Butler). We content that disability epistemologies, or cripistemologies (Johnson and McRuer), vitally complicates the time and pace of “crisis.” Indeed, the recent “emergence” or recognition of critical disability studies as a theoretically vibrant and generative body of work is inseparable from current and ongoing moments of socio-political crisis, emergency, and exceptionality.

From the speculative to the stage, from the investigative focus within memoirs to the institutional setting of the higher education, Exploring, Speculating, and Imagining Crip Space and Time reflects these possibilities by moving across diverse locations and points of analysis to cultivate crip imaginaries built from the dynamic, fraught, and generative contestation between crip time and the binary temporalities of acute/chronic, crisis/stasis, exceptional/banal. Responding to a call to think “beyond recovery” and explore the “Cripistemologies of Continuous Crisis,” each of the panelists consider questions of how crisis, emergency, and/or exceptionality shape the experiences and knowledges of bodyminds in time and space. In doing so, the panel foregrounds the rhetorical, ideological, and material linkages of disability experience and socio-political crises in order to locate and/or theorize specific crip epistemologies emerging from such linkages.Building on the conference call’s foregrounding of the importance of critical analytics for understanding and surviving the contemporary moment(s), panelists undertake the task of leveraging cripistemologies of crisis in order to outline and cultivate what each paper variously posits as crip imaginaries.

The panel asks, then, how cripistemologies model emergent approaches to survival, care, accommodation, and community formation. Papers explore the critical tools offered by thinking through lived experiences of disability, trauma, and chronic illness. They ask, with varying focal points, what the creative staging of such experiences can offer to larger projects of navigating states of perceived emergency and exceptionality. In sum, we aim to foster an intellectual exchange that places crip theorizations of the bodymind (Price) alongside cultural critiques of space, place and time in order to access the lived political insights that might emerge from dwelling in chronic and continuous states of crisis and survival.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Alyson Patsavas, University of Illinois at Chicago

Individual Presentations

• Speculating Crip Temporalities Against Eugenics and State Science Fictions of Health - Jess Whatcott, San Diego State University

• Cripping Environmental Memoir and the Toxic Body: Moving beyond Cure - Ally L Day, University of Toledo

• Thinking Beyond Recovery: Cripestemologies of Continuous Crisis Staging Crip Time in Lisa Kron’s Well - Stevi Costa, Cornish College of the Arts

• Crip Spacetime: Some Thoughts Away from the Neoliberal University - Margaret Price, The Ohio State University

Comment

• Alyson Patsavas, University of Illinois at Chicago