How To Be Disabled In A Pandemic

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This roundtable will celebrate and offer critical reflection on the book How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic (NYU Press, 2025), an edited collection that chronicles experiences of ableism and disability activism in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic. Two of the book’s editors and chapter contributors (Harris Kornstein and Mara Mills) will be joined by three of the book’s chapter authors (Salonee Bhaman, Rachel Kuo, and Aiyuba Thomas), as well as commentator Ted Kerr (organizer and co-author of We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production).

How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic documents the pivotal experiences of disabled people living in an early epicenter of COVID-19: New York City. Among those hardest hit by the pandemic, disability communities across the five boroughs have been disproportionately impacted by city and national policies, work and housing conditions, stigma, racism, and violence—as much as by the virus itself. Disabled and chronically-ill activists have protested plans for medical rationing and refuted the eugenic logic of mainstream politicians and journalists who “reassure” audiences that only older people and those with disabilities continue to die from COVID-19. At the same time, as exemplified by the viral hashtag #DisabledPeopleToldYou, disability expertise has become widely recognized in practices such as accessible remote work and education, quarantine, and distributed networks of support and mutual aid. This edited volume charts the legacies of this “mass disabling event” for uncertain viral futures, exploring the dialectic between disproportionate risk and the creativity of a disability justice response.

As a whole, How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic includes contributions by wide-ranging disability scholars, writers, and activists whose research and lived experiences chronicle the pandemic’s impacts in migrant detention centers, Chinatown senior centers, subways, schools, social media, and other locations of public and private life. By focusing on New York City over the course of three years, the book reveals key themes of the pandemic, including hierarchies of disability "vulnerability," the deployment of disability as a tool of population management, and innovative crip pandemic cultural production—while offering insights that apply to other geographic and cultural contexts across the US and globally. Ultimately, How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic honors those lost, as well as those who survived, by calling for just policies and caring infrastructures, not only in times of crisis but for the long haul.

This particular roundtable features contributors whose research focuses on: frictions and solidarities around post-viral chronic illness (including ME and Long COVID); care rationing policies and procedures, specifically access to ventilators; histories of activism around disability and HIV/AIDS in housing shelters; abolitionist feminist Asian-American activism to challenge anti-Asian and anti-Black violence; and experiences of debility and disablement in prisons in the early days of Covid-19. We will also discuss the process of compiling this book—in the context of a broader documentary oral history and ethnographic project, including an archival website of digital ephemera—and theorizing the realities of disabled pandemic life in real time.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Harris Kornstein, University of Arizona

Panelists

• Salonee Bhaman, New York University

• Rachel Kuo, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Mara Mills, New York University

• Aiyuba Thomas

Comment

• Theodore Kerr, The New School

Biographical Information

Salonee Bhaman is a Faculty Fellow at New York University’s program in Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement (XE) and was previously the Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s and Public History at the New York Historical. She is also a member of the New York City-based gender justice group the Asian American Feminist Collective and produces queer history for public audiences with the Close Friends Collective. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of gender and sexuality, migration, law, and social movements in the twentieth century. She received her PhD in History and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Yale in 2023.

Theodore (ted) Kerr is an educator, writer, and organizer. He is an adjunct instructor at The New School and Manhattan College offering classes on sociology, HIV, literature, and more. He is the co-author of We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (Duke University Press, 2022, with Alexandra Juhasz). He is a founding member of What Would an HIV Doula Do?. He curated the 2021 exhibition AIDS, Posters and Stories of Public Health: A People's Pandemic for the National Libraries of Medicine. He was one of 4 oral historians who worked on Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project for the Smithsonian, Archives for American Art in 2017 / 2018.

Harris Kornstein is a scholar and artist whose research and practice broadly focuses on queer play through contemporary technologies and digital cultures, media art/activism, visual culture, disability, and queer and trans studies. Their current book project, supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, considers what we might learn from drag performers to creatively counter many of the harms of digital technologies through playful techniques of misuse, obfuscation, and reinvention. They also co-edited How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic (NYU Press) analyzing the experiences of disabled New Yorkers during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Harris's research has been published in journals like Surveillance & Society and Curriculum Inquiry, alongside several edited volumes such as Queer Data Studies, and their essays have appeared in publications like The Guardian, Wired, and Salon. As a media artist, curator, and drag queen, they have presented work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Institute for Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, ONE Archives, and numerous universities, galleries, and festivals. Harris is currently Assistant Professor of Public & Applied Humanities at the University of Arizona.

Rachel Kuo writes, teaches, and researches race, feminist politics, social movements, and digital technology. Bringing together archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, her current monograph, Movement Media: In Pursuit of Solidarity, demonstrates how technologies enhance and foreclose possibilities for political organization across uneven racial and class difference. She works closely with community partners in developing her research, and her longer-term research goals and questions center and engage emergent questions and practices from grassroots social movements. Her research has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Social Science Research Council. She is a founding member and current affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and also a co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective, where she is co-editing the anthology Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities. Her writing has been published in Media, Culture, and Society, Political Communication, Social Media and Society, New Media and Society, Journal of Communication, and Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. She has also co-edited the World Without Cages and Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities projects with the Asian American Writer’s Workshop. Rachel is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies.

Mara Mills is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and co-founding Director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies. She is also a founding editorial board member of the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. In addition to her wide-ranging scholarship at the intersection of disability and technology, she has made the Center for Disability Studies a hub for public humanities and disability arts programming. She is recently coeditor of the collections How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic (NYU Press, 2025), funded by the National Science Foundation; Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (NYU Press, 2023); and a special issue of the journal Osiris on "Disability and the History of Science" (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Upcoming publications include a coauthored book with media scholar Jonathan Sterne on blind reading practices and time stretching technology and a collaborative research project with anthropologist Michele Friedner, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, on "The Global Cochlear Implant."

Aiyuba Thomas is a justice-impacted researcher, advocate, and educator. He is the Project Manager for Movements Against Mass Incarceration at Incite Institute (Columbia University). Aiyuba holds a MA from NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He is also a co-author of Abolition Labor, examining the experiences of incarcerated workers and chronicling the movement to end slavery and involuntary servitude in US prisons and jails, as well as a contributor to How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic, which offers insight on carceral spaces in New York State during the Covid-19 pandemic.