CDSC Sponsored - Crip (De)Professionalization: Strategies for Survival and Liberation in the Crisis of Empire (HYBRID)

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Professional Development Format

Abstract

The rise of fascism and current onslaught of catastrophes, climate crises, global pandemics, genocide, and war are not exceptions but the norm. Disability Justice activists, harnessing wisdom and skill sets borne from lived experience surviving hostile social environments and exclusionary right-based movements, have gained newfound visibility in recent years as political organizing increasingly shifts towards collective care and mutual aid. Yet, the mainstreaming of Disability Justice frameworks and practices allow for easy co-optation and sanitization, especially of Disability Justice’s intersectional, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperial politics.

This professionalization session grapples with the incorporation of Disability Justice principles and practices into the neoliberal university in a period of intensifying social, political, environmental, and economic crisis. We question how to “do Disability Justice” within ableist, hierarchical, and exclusionary institutions, and whether Disability Justice demands an alternative orientation– something akin to deprofessionalization. Attentive to the urgency of these questions and our collective need for survival and liberation, this roundtable discussion roots itself in praxis, seeking to generate strategies and skill-sets for transforming our social conditions from a variety of standpoints within and beyond the university.

Framing our discussion around the Ten Principles of Disability Justice (Berne, et al) and embracing “crip” as an anti-assimilationist, politicized orientation generated from embodiments and subjectivities of disablement and debility, we ask:

What does it mean or look like to crip academic professionalism, during the apocalyptica of late-stage neoliberal empire? What ethics should guide our praxis?
Can crip professionalization and Disability Justice be a kind of dismantling of professionalization in refusal of the institution's interpellation? If so, what does this look like?
What strategies may help us navigate the tensions of our liminality - as folks who are directly impacted by multiple oppressive forces, who know the state was never going to save us (Spade) - and who nonetheless have undeniable privileges and safety nets?
What can Disability Justice organizing and movement spaces teach us? How do we as a field of academic inquiry strengthen relationships with comrades and thought partners outside of the academy? How can we do this while we also try to maintain our positions inside of academia?
What does it mean to professionalize liberatory thinking? To institutionalize liberatory action in our pedagogy, theory, and practice? Is it possible to professionalize and be professional without losing a radical anti-hegemonic stance, without being complicit in Disability Justice’s co-optation? What's possible within this paradox?

After brief reflections from session panelists, everyone in attendance will be invited to share skills and approaches they use to crip (de)professionalization. This collective brainstorming will be documented and shared as an Open Access resource afterward.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Angela M Carter, University of Minnesota

Panelists

• Jessica Horvath Williams, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

• Shayda Kafai, Cal Poly Pomona

• Mimi Khúc, Independent scholar, adjunct

• Alexia Arani, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo

Virtual Accommodation Panelists

• David J Jaulus, Arizona State University

• Ly Xīnzhèn M. Zhǎngsūn Brown, Georgetown University

Biographical Information

Alexia Arani (they/them) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s Gender and Queer Studies at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Their research and teaching on queer/trans/crip of color social movements are informed by their work as a mutual aid organizer, political educator, and PIC abolitionist. They have published in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking and Feminist Studies, and have book chapters in the edited collections Decolonizing Bodies: Stories of Embodied Resistance, Healing, and Liberation and All This Safety is Killing Us: Healing Justice Beyond Prisons, Police, and Borders.

As a Ronald E. McNair scholar, Angela M. Carter (she/her) became a first-generation college graduate in 2009 when she earned her BA in English from Truman State University. Dr. Carter completed her Ph.D. in Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota in 2019. She has worked in various capacities over the last 20 years teaching, researching, and advocating, around experiences of injustice and inequity in higher education. In addition to co-authoring a chapter in the anthology Negotiating Disability: Disclosure and Higher Education, Dr. Carter’s work has appeared in Lateral and Disability Studies Quarterly. Her most recent publication “The Politics of Praxis: Or, What if I Never Make it to the Mountaintop?” appears in the open access anthology Dear Higher Education: Stories from the Social Justice Mountain. Angela is currently working as the Associate Director of the University of Minnesota’s CDS initiative. She otherwise works as an independent educator-scholar-organizer and is a founding member of the grassroots community organization, AmplifyMN: A Disability Justice Collective.

Jessica Horvath Williams is an Assistant Professor in English at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches and researches, on one hand, at the crossroads of 19th-century U.S literature and critical disability studies, and on the other, at the intersection of neurodiversity, theory, and social justice. Her current project, Raising Abel: Neurodivergent Hermeneutics and the Spacetime of Justice explores anti-teleological formulations for research, humanistic study, and justice movements modeled after dynamics of neurodivergent thought. Nationally, she serves as Board Vice-President for the Autistic Women & Non-Binary Network. Her work has appeared in Studies for American Fiction and on PBS: Art + Medicine: Disability, Culture, & Creativity.


David Jaulus is faculty associate at Arizona State University. My work focuses on how to build community to promote inclusion in a space such as academia that was not built or imagined for people with disabilities like myself. It is critically important to build community across students, faculty, staff and community members.

Shayda Kafai (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Ethnic and Women’s Studies department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. As a queer, disabled, Mad Iranian femme, she commits to practicing the many ways we can reclaim our bodyminds from systems of oppression. To support this work as an educator-scholar, Shayda applies disability justice and collective care practices in the spaces she cultivates. Shayda’s writing and speaking presentations focus on intersectional body politics, particularly on how bodies are constructed and how they hold the capacity for rebellion. She is the author of Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice and Art Activism of Sins Invalid (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021) and the co-editor of the anthology Mad Scholars: Reclaiming and Reimagining the Neurodiverse Academy (Syracuse University Press, 2024).

Mimi Khúc, PhD, is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is the creator of the acclaimed mental health projects Open in Emergency and the Asian American Tarot, and the author of *dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss*, a deep dive into the depths of Asian American unwellness at the intersections of ableism, model minoritization, and the university, and an exploration of new approaches to building collective care.

Ly Xīnzhèn Zhǎngsūn, J.D. (Lydia X. Z. Brown) is a feminist disability studies and critical legal studies scholar working in science and technology. Their work focuses on interpersonal and state violence against disabled people at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, faith, language, and nation; carcerality and institutional violence; asexuality as queerness; algorithmic harm as an accelerating force of systemic injustice; and the ableism-racism nexus of transracial and transnational adoption. Ly Xīnzhèn is Assistant Teaching Professor of Disability Studies at Georgetown University, as well as Law and Public Policy Discipline Coordinator for the Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities Program. They have taught courses on disability, race, and gender to students at all levels from middle grades to graduate students. They have recent publications in FUTURE/PRESENT: Arts in a Changing America, Autism in Adulthood, The American Journal of Law and Medicine, Critical Sociology, Critical Studies in Education, and Disability Studies Quarterly.

Outside of their scholarly work, Ly Xīnzhèn founded The Autistic People of Color Fund, a project of collective care, redistributive justice, and mutual aid, and they have been creating Disability Justice Wisdom Tarot since 2020. They are a disability law and public policy expert with over fifteen years of experience working in the nonprofit and public sectors, including having previously led the nation’s only project focused on disability rights, AI, and tech policy at Georgetown Law’s Institute for Tech Law & Policy and later at the Center for Democracy & Technology. Often, their most important work has no title, job description, or funding, and probably never will.