Writing in Crip Time: New and Forthcoming Books in Critical Disability Studies

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This proposed roundtable spotlights several authors of forthcoming and recently published disability studies monographs to discuss the process and utility of writing about pain and disability, in and beyond American Studies and the academy. The authors collectively grapple with two overarching questions: How and why do we write? And, what does thinking about and writing about pain and disability offer us in this moment—characterized by a pernicious backdrop, including (but not limited to) the increasing attacks on higher education and DEI, academic ableism, and the day-to-day struggle of living on in perpetual crisis?

The first author’s book blends critical disability studies with feminist science and technology studies to reimagine how we create knowledge in an increasingly technological world. As healthcare and medical surveillance dominate our social and political lives, how might embracing the embodied expertise of marginalized bodyminds transform not just how we use medical and assistive technology, but the fundamental nature of those technologies? The second author’s book brings together critical pain studies and feminist, queer, and crip theory to rethink the bodymind in pain. Cultural discourses that depict pain as totalizing and devastating make experiences of chronic pain tragic, individualized, and isolating, and they rely on disability discourses to do so. Their book asks how cripistemologies help us place, think, and live pain in relation at a time when the current geopolitical conjuncture thrives on medicalized and individualized understandings of pain. The third author’s book asks us unsettle assumptions about disabled girls and girlhoods. In bringing together crip theory, feminist disability studies, girlhood studies, and media studies, the book stakes a claim in disabled girls’ cripistemological insight, arguing that disabled girls offer new ways to think about care, community, and intimacy in a mediated world. The fourth author’s book utilizes critical race studies, women of color feminisms, and crip studies to propose a new concept called gestational ableism; the flesh this concept out, the book addresses the intersection of disability and birth through several sites of pregnancy and disability, from Zika to doula trainings, home birth movements to infertility industries.

The participants will speak to the technical and embodied aspects of the writing process. For example, they will discuss how to craft critical disability studies book proposals that speak across multiple disciplines. They will also speak to the ethics of writing, thinking through Margret Price’s (2024) concepts of transparency and accountability and through ‘slowness’ as crip praxis. One author asks, what does it mean and look like to embrace ‘slowness’ in the writing process? Another asks, can we ever do justice to the communities we write about? A third asks, how can our writing (and the other ways we share our work) challenge the methods and mores of academic writing that have historically denied certain types of knowledge-contributions, especially those from disabled and otherwise marginalized perspectives?

Lastly, the authors will reflect on the vital importance of making scholarly knowledge accessible. How do we take critical disability studies out of the academy? Where should it go?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Panelists

• Ally L Day, Maine Health

• Rebecca Monteleone, University of Toledo

• Alyson Patsavas, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Anastasia Todd, University of Kentucky

Biographical Information

Ally Day
dr.allyday@gmail.com

Ally Day, PhD, is an experienced scholar in Disability Studies, Gender Studies and Sexuality Studies. Her book, The Political Economy of Stigma: HIV, Memoir, Medicine and Crip Positionalities (The Ohio State University Press 2021) won the 2022 Alison Piepmeier Prize from the National Women's Studies Association. In addition, she has written 19 peer reviewed articles and book chapters and is co-producer and lead researcher of the HIV in the Rust Belt Film Project (dir Holly Hey); the episode "Sister Eileen and Her Boyz" received national distribution on PBS stations through NETA. She is also co-founder, co-producer, and co-host of the Telling It Our Way Podcast (WGTE Public Media), which received the 2025 American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD) Media Award and the Press Club of Toledo's Touchstone Journalism Award. Her forthcoming book, Gestational Ableism: Disability, Pregnancy and the Future of Care addresses the intersection of disability and pregnancy and includes qualitative research with disabled pregnant people about how they navigate complex and often oppressive medical systems. Dr. Day works as a Research Navigator for Maine Health following her tenure as an Associate Professor of Disability Studies at the University of Toledo. Outside of her research and writing, Dr. Day is a certified doula and accessible yoga instructor.

Becca Monteleone
Rebecca.Monteleone@utoledo.edu

Dr. Becca Monteleone is an assistant professor in the Disability Studies program at the University of Toledo. She is the author of the forthcoming book The Double Bind of Disability: How Medical Technology Shapes Bodily Authority (University of Minnesota Press, Fall 2025) and co-editor of the 2022 collection Disability and Social Justice in Kenya: Scholars, Policymakers, and Activists in Conversation (University of Michigan Press). Her scholarship sits at the intersection of critical disability studies, science and technology studies, and feminist inquiry. She is a co-founder of the Plain Truth Project, an initiative bringing together journalists, academics, and self-advocates with intellectual disabilities to create more inclusive and accessible news media, and co-host/producer of Telling It Our Way (WGTE Public Media, recipient of 2025 AAIDD Media Award, 2024 Toledo Press Club Touchstone Award), which features stories from self-advocates with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She has received recognition as a Fulbright Scholar, a National Science Foundation IGERT Trainee, and a Christine Mirzayan Science Policy Fellow with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She is also one of the leading experts on plain language for cognitive accessibility, having provided plain language translations for ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, and Emily Ladau’s Demystifying Disability, among others.

Anastasia Todd
anastasia.todd@uky.edu

Anastasia Todd is an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Cripping Girlhood (University of Michigan Press, 2024), which was awarded the 2022 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities. Her scholarship is broadly at the intersection of feminist disability studies, girlhood studies, and media studies. She is currently working on a new project that extends her work on crip digital cultures to think more deeply about disabled youth and their affective attachment to their smartphone, as a material, intimate, and survival object. Her research has also been published in Disability Studies Quarterly, Societies, NEOS, Girlhood Studies, and Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy.

Alyson Patsavas
apatsa2@uic.edu
Alyson Patsavas is Assistant Professor in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). Her scholarship is situated at the intersections of disability studies, queer theory, and feminist theory and focuses on cultural discourses of pain, chronic illness, trauma, and disability. Her book, Pain in Relation: Causality, Chronicity, and Crip Evidence, won the 2023 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities and is forthcoming with Michigan University Press. Patsavas is a writer and producer on the documentary film Code of the Freaks (2020). She co-edited “Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry” a 24-piece collection of essays, creative work, and praxis projects found across two special-sections of Lateral. Her work has also appeared in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, Crip Magazine, Feminist Wire, and the Czech Sociological Review.