An expansive volume presenting crip approaches to writing, research, and publishing. Crip Authorship: Disability as Method is an expansive volume presenting the multidisciplinary methods brought into being by disability studies and activism. Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez have convened leading scholars, artists, and activists to explore the ways disability shapes authorship, transforming cultural production, aesthetics, and media. Starting from the premise that disability is plural and authorship spans composition, affect, and publishing, this collection of thirty-five compact essays asks how knowledge about disability is produced and shared in disability studies. Disability alters, generates, and dismantles method. Crip authorship takes place within and beyond the commodity version of authorship, in books, on social media, and in creative works that will never be published. The chapters draw on the expertise of international researchers and activists in the humanities, social sciences, education, arts, and design. Across five sections—Writing, Research, Genre/Form, Publishing, Media—contributors consider disability as method for creative work: practices of writing and other forms of composition; research methods and collaboration; crip aesthetics; media formats and hacks; and the capital, access, legal standing, and care networks required to publish. Designed to be accessible and engaging for students, Crip Authorship also provides theoretically sophisticated arguments in a condensed form that will make the text a key resource for disability studies scholars. Essays include Mel Y Chen on the temporality of writing with chronic illness; Remi Yergeau on perseveration; La Marr Jurelle Bruce on mad Black writing; Alison Kafer on the reliance of the manifesto genre on disability; Jaipreet Virdi on public scholarship for disability justice; Ellen Samuels on the importance of disability and illness to autotheory; Xuan Thuy Nguyen on decolonial research methods for disability studies; Emily Lim Rogers on virtual ethnography; Cameron Awkward-Rich on depression and trans reading methods; Robert McRuer on crip theory in translation; Kelsie Acton on plain language writing; and Georgina Kleege on description as an access and aesthetic technique.

This lyrical hybrid memoir revisits a lifetime's worth of personal journals to slowly piece together a narrative of chronic illness—a moving account of survival, memory, loss, and hope. Shahd Alshammari is just eighteen when she is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and told by her neurologist that she would not make it past age thirty. Despite what she is told, by thirty, she has become a professor of literature, and has managed to navigate education systems in both Kuwait and the United Kingdom and inspire generations of students. Head above Water is the painstaking, philosophical memoir of Shahd Alshammari's life of triumph and resistance, as the daughter of a Palestinian mother and Bedouin father, as a woman marked "ill" by society, and as a lifelong reader, student, and teacher. Charting her journey with raw honesty, Shahd explores disability, displacement, and belonging—not only of the body, but of culture, gender, and race, and imparts wisdom of profound philosophical value throughout. It is people, human connections, that keep us afloat, she argues—"and in storytelling we have the power to gain a sense of agency over our lives."

This book is an interdisciplinary collection of twenty-four essays which critically examine contemporary exhibitions and artistic practices that focus on conceptual and creative aspects of access. Oftentimes exhibitions tack on access once the artwork has already been executed and ready to be installed in the museum or gallery. But what if the artists were to ponder access as an integral and critical part of their artwork? Can access be creative and experimental? And furthermore, can the curator also fold access into their practice, while working collaboratively with artists, considering it as a theoretical and practical generative force that seeks to make an exhibition more engaging for a wider diversity of audiences? This volume includes essays by a growing number of artists, curators, and scholars who ponder these ideas of ad-hoc, experimental and underground approaches within exhibition-making and artistic practices. It considers how, through these nascent exhibition models and art practices, enhanced experiences of access in the museum can be a shared responsibility amongst museum workers, curators, and artists, in tandem with the public, so that access becomes a zone of intellectual and creative "accommodation," rather than strictly a discourse on policy. The book provides innovative case studies which provide a template for how access might be implemented by individuals, artists, curators, museum administrators and educators given the growing need to offer as many modalities of access as possible within cultural institutions. This book shows that anyone can be a curator of access and demonstrates how to approach access in a way that goes beyond protocol and policy. It will thus be of interest to students and scholars engaged in the study of museums, art history and visual culture, disability, culture, and communication.

This book interrogates the role games and playfulness bear in both formal education and informal social learning. Responsive to contemporary social and ecological challenges, this book especially explores games’ interactions with social power. On one hand, games sometimes operate to reinforce ideologies that normalise social injustice and environmental disregard. On the other, games offer rich possibilities for questioning such ideologies and encouraging change. Strongly interdisciplinary, the book assembles 20 chapters written by 50 experts across fields including education, game design, cultural studies, sociology, Indigenous studies, disability studies, queer studies, STEM, legal studies, history, creative writing, visual arts, music, the creative industries, and social inclusion. These contributions not only make games a focus but incorporate playful research writing strategies, demonstrating methods of what we term ludic inquiry. This includes chapters written using arts-based research, practice-led research, poetic inquiry, narrative inquiry, autoethnography, duoethnography, and more. Organised across four themes – ‘philosophical sparks’, ‘lived experiences’, ‘pedagogical perspectives’, and ‘the spirit of play’ – this book emphasises the radical egalitarian possibilities inherent in critical attention to games and how we play (or get played by) them. Its fresh insights will interest all readers interested in creatively remaking our worlds.

Presents a powerful new vision of the history of science through the lens of disability studies. Disability has been a central—if unacknowledged—force in the history of science, as in the scientific disciplines. Across historical epistemology and laboratory research, disability has been “good to think with”: an object of investigation made to yield generalizable truths. Yet disability is rarely imagined to be the source of expertise, especially the kind of expertise that produces (rational, neutral, universal) scientific knowledge. This volume of Osiris places disability history and the history of science in conversation to foreground disability epistemologies, disabled scientists, and disability sciencing (engagement with scientific tools and processes). Looking beyond paradigms of medicalization and industrialization, the volume authors also examine knowledge production about disability from the ancient world to the present in fields ranging from mathematics to the social sciences, resulting in groundbreaking histories of taken-for-granted terms such as impairment, infirmity, epidemics, and shōgai. Some contributors trace the disabling impacts of scientific theories and practices in the contexts of war, factory labor, insurance, and colonialism; others excavate racial and settler ableism in the history of scientific facts, protocols, and collections; still others query the boundaries between scientific, lay, and disability expertise. Contending that disability alters method, authors bring new sources and interpretation techniques to the history of science, overturn familiar narratives, apply disability analyses to established terms and archives, and discuss accessibility issues for disabled historians. The resulting volume announces a disability history of science.

In Intoxicated Mel Y. Chen explores the ongoing imperial relationship between race, sexuality, and disability. They focus on nineteenth-century biopolitical archives in England and Australia to show how mutual entanglements of race and disability take form through toxicity. Examining English scientist John Langdon Down’s characterization of white intellectual disability as Asian interiority and Queensland’s racialization and targeting of Aboriginal peoples through its ostensible concern with black opium, Chen explores how the colonial administration of race and disability gives rise to “intoxicated” subjects often shadowed by slowness. Chen charts the ongoing reverberations of these chemical entanglements in art and contemporary moments of political and economic conflict or agitation. Although intoxicated subjects may be affected by ongoing pollution or discredited as agents of failure, Chen affirmatively identifies queer/crip forms of unlearning and worldmaking under imperialism. Exemplifying an undisciplined thinking that resists linear or accretive methods of inquiry, Chen unsettles conventional understandings of slowness and agitation, intellectual method, and the toxic ordinary.

In Disability Worlds, Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp chronicle and theorize two decades of immersion in New York City’s wide-ranging disability worlds as parents, activists, anthropologists, and disability studies scholars. They situate their disabled children’s lives among the experiences of advocates, families, experts, activists, and artists in larger struggles for recognition and rights. Disability consciousness, they show, emerges in everyday politics, practices, and frictions. Chapters consider dilemmas of genetic testing and neuroscientific research, reimagining kinship and community, the challenges of “special education,” and the perils of transitioning from high school. They also highlight the vitality of neurodiversity activism, disability arts, politics, and public culture. Disability Worlds reflects the authors’ anthropological commitments to recognizing the significance of this fundamental form of human difference. Ginsburg and Rapp’s conversations with diverse New Yorkers reveal the bureaucratic constraints and paradoxes established in response to the disability rights movement, as well as the remarkable creativity of disabled people and their allies who are opening pathways into both disability justice and disability futures.