Speculating the Futurity of Disability Studies: A Collaborative Knowing-Making Project

Abstract

Disability Studies is a wild, contentious, sideways slipping, rhetorically denied, enthusiastically stimming, insistent and defiant field. In short, it is Home. But homes can need to be remodeled…a room added here, the wallpaper updated there, the thresholds and countertops adjusted to better support changing abilities, adapted lives. A collection of three essays, this dissertation seeks to engage with Disability Studies to imagine a futurity of the field grounded in relationality and radical empathy. In the first essay, I investigate the relationship between Disability Justice theory and ungrading praxes. In this article, I claim that one of the key challenges to implementing ungrading stems from attempting to tack alternative assessment onto our existing pedagogical frameworks. By utilizing a disability justice approach, I offer a praxis-based primer to support educators in shifting their habits of mind to facilitate ungrading. In the second essay, I shift from praxis to theory, examining the intra-community tension that has resulted in multiple differing communities of disability scholarship. Applying lessons learned from Jennifer Nash in Black Feminism Reimagined, I name disciplinary border-policing as defensive posturing that undermines coalitional potential. By urging adoption of a methodology of ‘letting go,’ this article speculates a collaborative disciplinary future, answering the call for a (Disability)(Mad)(Neurodiverse)(Crip) Studies that is enacted by and with community members and offers a pluralistic approach to knowledge production and narratives of lived experience. In the final essay, I move to futurity, issuing a call for collaboration on an open-access, interdisciplinary, community-constructed relationality mapping project, the Disability Studies Community Archive. This digital humanities project maps disability studies artifacts, including research, activism, community contributions, and art. The central goal of this project is to develop a dynamic network of disability scholarship that pays specific attention to the interdisciplinary genesis of Disability Studies by incorporating contributions from Black Feminist, Critical Race, Queer, and other scholarships of difference.