Crip Time Travel (Hughes, Lao, & Yergeau)
It’s no secret that universities understand disability through the logics of a cost-burden model. This cost-burden model positions disability as a condition antithetical to university life, relegating disability to the domain of individual improvement rather than understanding disability as social, intersectional, and dynamic or as something to be valued. While these bureaucratic dynamics long predated our present moment, COVID has thrown cost-burden models and the routine devaluation of nonnormative bodyminds into stark relief. Our home institution, for example, made national news for its failure to provide needed remote work accommodations to its employees, many of whom have been forced to risk their health and safety in the name of our institution’s “return to normalcy.”
Our university, of course, is not unique in this regard. Crip Time Travel stories the everydayness of these institutional violences in the form of a hypertext game: Through the institution, time merely shifts. Time is not given. Crip Time Travel winds us through the aggressions of university accommodations, asking fellow travelers to rethink our relationships with time, documentation, surveillance, and digitality. Normalcy mandates clash against crip efforts to create more robust, just infrastructures for supporting disabled students and faculty. In this way, there is no “winning” in the accommodation game. If access is the work of risk, then surely it is also the work of reconfiguring institutional tempo/ralities. How might we lurch, tic, and stim to/ward these exploded tempos?
Un/Just Care (Adelman)
An essay/manifesto (in the vein of Liz Jackson’s Disabled List) mapping out the curious tendency to presume complex medical technologies as a neutral tabula rasa, rendering it both ahistorical as a genre, and also apolitical—the result of a “natural” technoprogressivism or capitalist “innovation.” Moving from the (recent) Phillips respirator scandal to the always already depreciated presence of the wheelchair-as-technological-savior, and finally touching on the fluid network of crip cyber sexualities—as evidenced by accessible sex toys, and teledildonics. This piece draws on both critical accessibility studies and a feminist preoccupation with care.
Accessing Disability Culture (Carichner, Adelman, Agne, Hughes, Menon, Mills, Nagy, & Yergeau)
A multi-institutional born-digital anthology that highlights disability culture, lived experience, and inaccessibility at the University of Michigan. Without a Disability Cultural Center, it can be hard for neurodivergent / chronically ill / disabled / Deaf / questioning students to find each other. However, we are here. We meet our community members here and there, at club meetings, classes, strikes, sports games, protests, parties — often in an accidental way. Through this digital series, we can meet intentionally. Here we can talk about our experiences freely, with and for each other. Accessing Disability Culture is for all of us who benefit from the sharing and celebration of disability culture and community. Call for submissions now open (closing November 15, 2023).