Crip Peripheries as Crip Centres: access stories\/art\/realities\/activations from the Global South<\/h1>\r\n\r\n\r\nWhat are (y)our contexts in this moment in time? What are the dimensions of your relationship to (y)our body-mind-land(s)?\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\nfrom Sama:\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nI want us to re-enter this space by reintroducing ourselves and our positionalities in the context of settler colonialism. Dylan Robinson, a scholar of St\u00f3:l\u014d descent, believes that land acknowledgements are always relational. Robinson urges us to move beyond the \u201cspectacle of acknowledgement as a public performance of contrition.\u201d\u00a0 Instead, it is our duty as settlers to consider and centre our relationships with and duties to the land and its stewards, in the context of any given moment.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nWhat are your contexts in this moment in time? Here are mine:\r\n\r\n\r\nNote: Third World is a denomination you\u2019ll hear used often. West Indian and anti-imperialist psychiatrist Franz Fanon is generally agreed to have been the first to talk about the Three Worlds and oft refers to colonized geographies and peoples as well as former colonies whose economies and beings remain bankrupt and bleeding by the afterlives of coloniality. This term is not intended to massify nor to denigrate what hegemonism names \u201cunderdeveloped nations\u201d but rather to coalitionize us in our collective struggle against our shared enemy of empire. It is also a means by which we imagine an architecture of otherwise. We are not interested in maintaining this world, nor a second one whose roots are the same, but a third one entirely, struggled for and sublimed, seeded and sown, by way of our own revolutionary deeds.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nMy name is\r\n\r\n\u0633\u0645\u0627\u00a0 \u0646\u0639\u0645\u0629 \u0671\u0644\u0644\u064e\u0651\u0670\u0647\/\/sama nemat Allah. I am a mad-crip thinker, dreamer, and writer of otherwise with a fungal appetite for liberationist lifeways. I am guerilla access worker and activator and disability justice doula, whose conceptions of disability justice and body-mind-land emancipation are inspirited by and indebted to her siblings of the third world\/global majority\r\n\r\nI am a community researcher who asks questions far more than they answer them. I ground my makership, poetry, labours, and prayers in a transnational cartography of crip\/mad\/sick genealogies that hold her always in the subjunctive: towards the more and abundant, the imagined, the prefigurative, the possible\/probable\/inevitable. I yearn to architect an undisciplined, ungovernable, anachronic, and feeling praxis that mutualizes beingness and honours trans-corporeality and plural realities in productive tension.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nI am bodymind opaque, illogical, untraceable, and incoherent to all but their comrades in struggle and in love (though she reads the two as synonymous). Were you to cut me open, i would bleed hues of egyptian ancestors passed, gazzawi kindred spirits, mycorrhizal mushroom ephemera, love letters, decolonial modulations of time, sunflower seeds, obscure words, cpc mouthwash, and masry mangoes.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nas a diasporic settler who gets to breathe, live, learn, futurize and revolt on unceded, stolen, and occupied, i am indebted in perpetuity to the stewards of Tkaronto, Turtle Island: the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Chippewa, and the Huron-Wendat Peoples. Our interdependent liberations hinge on the return of land to their Original Caretakers. From Turtle Island to Palestine, landback forevermore.\r\n\r\n \r\nQuestion<\/h2>\r\nWe begin, as Toni Cade Bambara implores us to, with the recognition that we are at war. We are at war with many things: settler-colonialism, empire, racial capitalism, disablement, debility, technological and ecological fascism and devastation, racial and abled superiority, dispossession and displacement, mass incarceration, industrial complexes and pipelines abound, the list (devastatingly) goes on.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nMatrices of power have produced and promised these states not only as normal and common sense, but also as inevitable, as fixed, as unchangeable, as irreconcilable.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nBambara goes on to say that the war we are waging is \u201cnot simply a hot debate between the capitalist camp and the socialist camp on which economic, political, social arrangement will have hegemony in the world. It's not just the battle over turf and who has the right to utilize resources for whomever's benefit. The war is also being fought over the truth. What is the truth about human nature, about the human potential?\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nI invite us to begin our several weeks of intimate, togethered conversations, and the protracted struggle against the casino of colonialism (Fidel Castro) which we take up both within and beyond this space, with an invitation: What new fruits can we bear when we demand that the normate world around us which dissatisfies us and our bodymindlands to the point of devastation, is not in fact natural? Rather, what happens if we understand it as naturalized? (emphasis on the process, the verb over the word).\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThink about the ongoingness of the dominating systems that buttress the world as we know it; why would disablism, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, settler colonial epistemes have to be continually reinforced, reified, shapeshifted and transmuted time and time again if they were natural epiphenomenon (a secondary symptom, phenomenon that occurs alongside or in parallel to a primary one)? Why would the ruling class have to \u201cdevise ideological systems that normalize state violence\u201d if our beingness inhered them (Jaffee and Sheehi, 2024)? Neo-liberalism\u2019s biological rubrics play a role in this as philosopher Mihalio Markovic discusses in Women\u2019s Liberation and Human Emancipation: \u201cIf selfishness, aggressiveness, the drive to conquer and dominate really are among the defining human traits\u2026the oppression in civil society is a fact of life.\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nWhat we will unravel in the weeks to come, through activities, dialogues, contentions, conversations, assemblages and connections is that oppression is not a fact of life; it is a fact of power and ideology. That is what we are loggerheads with. That is what are here to belie and reject. Undoing this fixity\u2014of concentrated and consecrated power, of axiomatic capital production, eco-cides and genocides and slow, social death, of of of ad nauseaum\u2014that is the nexus wherein we gather and wherein our crip aims come into full focus.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nIn Disrupting Fixity: Palestine as Central to Decolonial Disability Justice, Lara Sheehi says that when our entry point is disability justice, which for our purposes it is, \u201cas an integral part of abolitionist thinking and enacting, we need to disrupt the processes that are regularized, modes of being and doing and functioning as normative\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThis disruption of not what we know is true but what we\u2019ve been made to believe is true acts as bedrock of disability justice and of the decolonial crip outcroppings that we take up today henceforth. And I think daily and necessarily every single one of us penetrates these so-called immovable systems regularly. So I ask:\r\n\r\n\r\nwhat is something given or fixed within this world-order that you (whether intentionally or unintentionally) refuse to abide by? said differently: What is something socially, culturally, politically disruptive that you engage in?\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nI practice my anarchistic calisthenics by not straightening my hair, eating on the floor instead of on a table, intentionally gaining weight and revelling in the pliability of my egyptian bodymind, crossing the street when there are no cars around even when the crosswalk signals otherwise. Wearing a mask.<\/em>\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nFritsch (2010), discursively follows through with our ethos of non-assimilation and subjective reality refusal here in reiterating that \u201cthere is no necessity that the structures of the present subject must persist. Through an ongoing critical engagement with new practices, it is possible to form new kinds of subjects and create kinds of social relations that do not re-inscribe the same social inequities that have historically marginalized disabled people and others. The point, then, is neither to glorify nor to dismiss the status of the marginal but to transform the very foundation of any political interaction\u201d.\r\nHave the Audacity: Epistemological Justice and Crossing the Epistemic Line<\/h2>\r\nSo let us begin, though normative spaces rarely do, from the outskirts and the peripheries of disability justice. In twin-time (in simultaneity) and in the legacy of crip un-sense and dis\/order, we affirm the peripheries (of knowledge, embodiment, labour, thought, and ontology) as our centre.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nIn their text on the dynamics of epistemological decolonization; towards epistemic freedom, Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni outlines five-ways-forward in the African struggles for epistemic freedom. 1) Return to the base\/locus of enunciation 2) shifting the geo and bio-of knowledge\/moving the centre 3) decolonizing the normative foundation of critical theory 4) rethinking thinking itself and finally 5) learning to unlearn in order to relearn. These will serve as honorary interventions that we lean on and architect from to challenge the ongoing privileging, primacy, and omnipotence of the Global North and the West as the founders and maker(s) of universal histories and presents (Bhambra, 2007) (if such a universality can exist).\r\n\r\nBeginning with an epistemically liberated discourse on disability within and beyond cultural institutional contexts calls for what Lewis R Gordon (2006) renders as \u201cshifting the geography of reason.\u201d It requires us to agitate the ways in which disability in the Global North has been coded through the interstices of colonial structures and systems of thought (Nguyen, 2018; Meekosha, 2011; Ervelles, 2011; Puar, 2023). The knowledge and ontological economy has a \u201chegemonic centre from which it circulates,\u201d argues Ndlou-Gatsheni. And that centre is Europe and North America. Epistemological justice and decolonization is thus defined as \u201cthe right to think, theorize, interpret the world, develop own methodologies and write from where one is located and unencumbered by Eurocentrism\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nSo if we understand colonial whiteness as having imposed itself as the fulcrum of the social, political, onto-epistemological stratosphere\u2014as in our imaginaries, our behaviours, our knowledges, our studies, our worlds and their operations are bred by (and breed) a white and imperial order\u2014 then we can understand with greater facility that this too implicates disability studies, disability arts, and even our own projects of cultural accessibility. An ingress of resonance can come from the sheer fact that an unforgivable corollary, or more accurately, a condition of producing this work is the theft and settlement of Indigenous land and the multi-generational genocide of the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island. Consider also how the government grant (of a settler-colonial nation state) which has financed this work is accrued at the expense of mass de-soverignitizing, disabling, disappearing projects carried out against the Global South (Puar, 2017).\r\n\r\n\r\nTo nuance and maybe even contradict our activity earlier about positionality, \u201cfrom a structural perspective,\u201d writes Ol\u00faf\u1eb9\u0301mi O. T\u00e1\u00edw\u00f2 in Elite Capture, \u201cthe rooms we don\u2019t enter, the experiences we don\u2019t have (and the reasons we are able to avoid them) might have more to teach us about the world and our place in it than anything said inside.\u201d Moreover, the insularity of these institutions, and the ways (as witnessed above in our conversation about the violences of liberalized disability identity) dissuades us from \u201cengaging empathetically and authentically of the struggles of other people\u2014a prerequisite of coalitional politics\u201d which is in itself a pretext for disability justice (T\u00e1\u00edw\u00f2, 2020).\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nPeripheralized narratives, which ought to be focalized in a discipline that promises an anti-establishment and anti-assimilationist doctrine, are subsumed, submerged and silenced in what the late Chris Bell (2018) calls the \u201cwhitewashing of disability history, ontology and phenomenology\u201d (p.406). Nguyen adds to this (2018, p.6) arguing that \u201ccolonialism has continued to manifest itself through the knowledge practices which have rendered the experiences of disabled people in the global South invisible.\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nIf non-metropolitan or southern theory, praxis and widsoms are indeed named in our work, they are mere footnotes, drivebys, or \u201crelegated to a place of epistemic difference and alterity\u201d (Puar, 2023) \u2014 all of which continue to reify white, imperial, western capital D Disability and its outcroppings as the central, the dominant, the nucleus, the sun.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nNguyen enumerates 4\u00a0 key ways that settler-colonial disability studies reproduces the epistemic empire:\r\n\r\n\r\nfirst, the claim of universality (disability is universal and can be studied from the same point of view); second, reading from the centre (there is a general disability theory which can be read from the metropole); third, gestures of exclusion (excluding ideas from the periphery as a part of the dialogue on disability); and fourth, grand erasure (erasure of the majority of disability experiences from the foundations of social thought)\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nFalastine<\/h2>\r\nFor example, in their world-reordering chapter Critical Disability Studies and the Question of Palestine in Crip Genealogies, Jasbir Puar renders messy the perceived merit and perfection of disability justice and access work. What happens when, as Laura Jaffee (2024) asks, the \u201chypervisibility of disability\u2014some disability\u2014[justifies] practices, programs, and politics that harm or exploit disabled and (non)disabled oppressed groups?\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\u201cAccess and what is accessible in Palestine,\u201d writes Puar, \u201ccenter the relationships of occupied space and colonized mobility.\u201d Puar offers readers the example of access maps architected by taxi and bus drivers to accommodate the evergreen-shifting roadblocks (impromptu IOF checkpoints, settler presence, mass protests, and drone surveillance to name a few. Saraj Orsak (as cited in Puar, 2023) luminates these non-dominating comings to disability further in stating that \u201cimpairment here is not marginalized as incapable or lacking, but rather becomes a valuable resource that is productive for capital and empire.\u201d\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nPalestinian disability justice ontologies will frequently offer us these counter-readings, rubrics and directives that bang on our doors once, twice, three times until they break down the galvanized propensity in white settler disability studies to lay claim to disability as an identity to hold rather than a politic to wield (especially when and because said identity is cohered, made legible and valuable through and only through the logics and grammars of empire and its liberal humanisms).\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThink for example to the military program \u201cRo\u2019im Rachok,\u201d started by three mosad agents in the Ziowestern entity of the apartheid state of Israel. It purports to \u201charness the superpowers\u201d of Autistics whose so-called unique aptitude prime them to visually analyze satellite images \u201cfor the slightest sign of enemy activity\u201d (Jaffee and Sheehi, 2024). Disability and neurodivergence is rendered prideful, meaningful, useful when it services the settler-colonial nationstate (of settler colonialism, a structure that requires \u201cperpetual injury as genocide,\u201d and its eliminationist violence against Indigenous Palestinian Peoples. The category of disability is instrumentalized by state discourses of inclusion not only to obscure forms of debility but also to actually produce debility and sustain its proliferation. Though empire and its outposts attempt recursively to convince us otherwise, social maturation and redress do not come at the heels of offshoring the colonial labours of the elite to the marginalized.\r\n\r\n\r\nwhere\/when\/how do you see disability weaponized towards the life support systems of the state and its outposts\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nwhere\/when\/how do you see disability weaponized in service of revolutionary culture?\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nSouthern crip theory offers us pedagogies and praxis that enable a reckoning with disability outside the genealogies or narratives that centre the canonical. As critical disability studies scholars and access practitioners, it\u2019s integral that we consider how the colonial production of disability challenges the idea that disability is universal and natural, especially as we steep ourselves further in the terrain of study that hinges on an exalt of embodied and experienced difference.\r\n\r\nBecause the moment we push ourselves beyond the myopic colonial lens of Global North disability activism and its single stories, we notice that perhaps the Indigenous Elder who acquires disability through colonial trauma or the domestic worker who is rendered mad by the cataclysms of war, or the communities forced to inhale poisoned and polluted air or live in ecosystems ravaged by legacy factory sites and environmentally racist practices of eco-fascism, industrial growth, and developmentalism (Jampel, 2018), may not see their identities as markers of pride. As Jasbir Puar writes in her preface to Right to Maim, \u201cDisability empowerment and pride are part of rights discourses even as expressions of maiming, debility and disabling are central to economies and vocabularies of violence and exploitation.\u201d\u00a0 Helen Meekosha (2011) parallels this indictment in Decolonizing Disability, noting that \u201cthe production of impaired peoples continues as a result of a multiplicity of phenomena including: war and civil strife, nuclear testing, the growth of the arms trade, the export of pollution to \u2018pollution havens\u2019 and the emergence of sweatshops\u201d.\r\n\r\n\r\nWhat other examples come up for you?\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nThese examples highlight that many of the main tenets of the disability movements by Western advocates\u2014a rejection of the medical model, identity and pride, human rights\u2014do not carefully weigh in transnational experiences of disability. So as we come to the final parts of this module, we must challenge ourselves by asking: How do we reconcile the colonial experiences of manufactured disability with the (more centred, more colonial, and often times more desired) discourse on human rights and disability pride? Can we hold both without denying the lived experiences of either, namely those in the Global South whose non-White lifeworlds are seldom first on the agenda if they make the list at all? How can we ensure that our disability justice practices are always rooted in a dismantling of the colonial enterprise, without pathologizing and undignifying the very body-minds that have been disabled by it? How do we account and name and weaponize the privileges accrued as power-laden disabled subjects absorbed into regimes of visibility to organize insurrectionary access scripts that embolden dissent rather than deference? How are we centring disability and access realities and knowledges the world over?\r\n\r\n\r\n \t- Moving beyond identity rubrics<\/li>\r\n \t
- \u201cDisability imaginaries and economies\u201d (Puar, 2017)<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nEarlier, we spoke to positionality. I raise this point again to engage with the biopolitical risk of being that differentiates debilitation from disability. This is important to do now as we, in painful and yet rhizomatic simultaneity, witness the \u201cslow violence\u201d of Global Southern communities as well as the quiet and slow death, capture, and disappearance of our assemblages of capacity, disability, and debility here, \u201cmodulated across historical time, geopolitical space, institutional mandates, and discursive regimes\u201d (Puar, 2017, xiv)\r\n\r\n \r\n
Access Washing<\/h2>\r\nThe co-optation and absorption of access by imperial systems and dictates has wrought about terrains of \u201caccess-washing,\u201d a term that the late disability justice activist Stacey Park Milbern (2019) describes as both the \u201cleveraging \u2018accessibility\u2019 as justification to harm communities of color and poor & working-class communities\u201d and as \u201cantithesis to disability justice.\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nIn their dissertation, Access Washing at the Imperial University: Militarism, Occupation, and Struggles Toward Disability Justice, Jaffee (2020) accents, through transnational crip frameworks, the ways that this practice and logic is deployed systematically by Zioamerican and western hegemony, with their universities acting as their tool and trojan horse, to \u201cconceal imperial and settler-colonial complicities in the U.S. and Israel.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn naming higher education institutions as ecosystems of disability injustice, Jaffee necessarily implicates us too.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nAs access activators, we are implicated in erecting a movement that sprouts from, is invested in, is indebted to the periphery. It is not merely a duty, but a necessity for southern crip narratives and access attunements and cravings to penetrate this hegemonic core (Kelly, 2013) if a desire for fulsome justice is really the lighthouse of our praxis. As Theri A Pickens (2023) writes in the forward of Crip Genealogies, citing the text\u2019s editorial inquiry of aim: \u201c[W]ho is left out of a field that champions itself as the most marginalized?\u201d How do we remedy this with cultural and collective access instead of reaffirming it with access washing (Milbern, 2020)) or access exceptionalism (Chen, Kafer, Kim, Minich, 2023)?\r\n\r\n \r\nExample:<\/h4>\r\nAccess Exceptionalism, as nominated and defined by Mel Y. Chen. Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich, anticipates and indexes the ways access is weaponized to exert whiteness, \u201csevering disability access from broader social justice.\u201d This happens, these thinkers argue, when access is understood in atomistic or individualized ways, \u201cas something with which to comply\u201d instead of as something that demands us to be non-compliant (against euro-american paradigm, against world orders, against reform, against deathmaking, against coloniality and colonial ablenationalism\u2026,,,) This results opportunistically and intentionally in aggressions against BIPOC crips who are then forced to carry the purported burdens of access failures.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nOur purposes come into a fully and politically sharp view at these junctures and playgrounds of dreaming accesses and accessibilities of alterity\u2014as in a cultural accessibility buttressed and scaffolded by and steeped in anti-empire modalities, feelings, justifications, and futures.\r\n\r\n\r\nWhat if the milieu we inhabit as access activators becomes radically re(dis)organized? What would access (and our activations of it) look, feel, sound, like if it obviated a rehabilitative regime, which in the words of Sony Coranez Bolton \u201csilences the realities of the colonial, repackaging them as abstract freedoms\u201d? When we demand access, what would it take for us to first and foremost demand access to life?\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\nGroup Ideating Activity<\/h2>\r\nLet\u2019s make a changeable list together of our desired orientations as access activators. We will discuss this together in class, as well as on the discord in\u00a0General<\/a>.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nHere are some suggested starting points:<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n\r\n \t- Politicizing the relationships between ourselves, one another, our environments and ecologies, our feelings,<\/li>\r\n \t
- Theory and praxis is to be action-driven, learning from, citing and circulating anti-colonial movements and uprisings the world over<\/li>\r\n \t
- Refuses access surveillance (quantifying access in certain and preferential way)<\/li>\r\n \t
- Understandings ableism\u2019s entwinements and attachments to settler colonialism and settler futures.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Acknowledging our complicity and implications in the settler-colonial regime in Turtle Island and beyond it for Indigenous and colonized subjects everywhere<\/li>\r\n \t
- Coalitional creation between ourselves and crip thinkers, workers, resistance fighters, activists, healers, and doulas in transnational contexts and geographies,,<\/li>\r\n \t
- Attending to histories and ever-changing contexts\/presents\/realities<\/li>\r\n \t
- Learning from and through one another and our differences<\/li>\r\n \t
- What normate tools are inconsistent with the work that we\u2019re doing together? These can be material (A.I) or ideological (saviourism, disposability)?<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/advancingculturalaccessibilitypractices\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/440\/2025\/07\/tangle-1-300x62.png\")
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<\/p>\n
Lecture Recording, Slides and Transcripts<\/h1>\n
Crip Perpheries as Crip Centres – slides with audio (prerecorded before class): https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/17VNdM1jbLoFSg4ljtnYxnTZZbFwnHyaq\/view?usp=drive_web<\/a><\/p>\nLecture Recording:<\/p>\n
https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1vgbmtytIFdfnT7BJN7SF1Hmki1GweF3n\/view?usp=drive_open<\/a><\/p>\nZoom Transcript (as yet unedited):<\/p>\n
https:\/\/drive.google.com\/drive\/folders\/1Oj9L3z5c-XJTJ1poZ0Tk6CrPtppm6FX4<\/a><\/p>\nChat file:<\/p>\n
\r\n\r\nfrom Sama:\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nI want us to re-enter this space by reintroducing ourselves and our positionalities in the context of settler colonialism. Dylan Robinson, a scholar of St\u00f3:l\u014d descent, believes that land acknowledgements are always relational. Robinson urges us to move beyond the \u201cspectacle of acknowledgement as a public performance of contrition.\u201d\u00a0 Instead, it is our duty as settlers to consider and centre our relationships with and duties to the land and its stewards, in the context of any given moment.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nWhat are your contexts in this moment in time? Here are mine:\r\n
\r\n\r\nNote: Third World is a denomination you\u2019ll hear used often. West Indian and anti-imperialist psychiatrist Franz Fanon is generally agreed to have been the first to talk about the Three Worlds and oft refers to colonized geographies and peoples as well as former colonies whose economies and beings remain bankrupt and bleeding by the afterlives of coloniality. This term is not intended to massify nor to denigrate what hegemonism names \u201cunderdeveloped nations\u201d but rather to coalitionize us in our collective struggle against our shared enemy of empire. It is also a means by which we imagine an architecture of otherwise. We are not interested in maintaining this world, nor a second one whose roots are the same, but a third one entirely, struggled for and sublimed, seeded and sown, by way of our own revolutionary deeds.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nMy name is\r\n\r\n\u0633\u0645\u0627\u00a0 \u0646\u0639\u0645\u0629 \u0671\u0644\u0644\u064e\u0651\u0670\u0647\/\/sama nemat Allah. I am a mad-crip thinker, dreamer, and writer of otherwise with a fungal appetite for liberationist lifeways. I am guerilla access worker and activator and disability justice doula, whose conceptions of disability justice and body-mind-land emancipation are inspirited by and indebted to her siblings of the third world\/global majority\r\n\r\nI am a community researcher who asks questions far more than they answer them. I ground my makership, poetry, labours, and prayers in a transnational cartography of crip\/mad\/sick genealogies that hold her always in the subjunctive: towards the more and abundant, the imagined, the prefigurative, the possible\/probable\/inevitable. I yearn to architect an undisciplined, ungovernable, anachronic, and feeling praxis that mutualizes beingness and honours trans-corporeality and plural realities in productive tension.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nI am bodymind opaque, illogical, untraceable, and incoherent to all but their comrades in struggle and in love (though she reads the two as synonymous). Were you to cut me open, i would bleed hues of egyptian ancestors passed, gazzawi kindred spirits, mycorrhizal mushroom ephemera, love letters, decolonial modulations of time, sunflower seeds, obscure words, cpc mouthwash, and masry mangoes.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nas a diasporic settler who gets to breathe, live, learn, futurize and revolt on unceded, stolen, and occupied, i am indebted in perpetuity to the stewards of Tkaronto, Turtle Island: the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Chippewa, and the Huron-Wendat Peoples. Our interdependent liberations hinge on the return of land to their Original Caretakers. From Turtle Island to Palestine, landback forevermore.\r\n\r\n \r\nQuestion<\/h2>\r\nWe begin, as Toni Cade Bambara implores us to, with the recognition that we are at war. We are at war with many things: settler-colonialism, empire, racial capitalism, disablement, debility, technological and ecological fascism and devastation, racial and abled superiority, dispossession and displacement, mass incarceration, industrial complexes and pipelines abound, the list (devastatingly) goes on.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nMatrices of power have produced and promised these states not only as normal and common sense, but also as inevitable, as fixed, as unchangeable, as irreconcilable.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nBambara goes on to say that the war we are waging is \u201cnot simply a hot debate between the capitalist camp and the socialist camp on which economic, political, social arrangement will have hegemony in the world. It's not just the battle over turf and who has the right to utilize resources for whomever's benefit. The war is also being fought over the truth. What is the truth about human nature, about the human potential?\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nI invite us to begin our several weeks of intimate, togethered conversations, and the protracted struggle against the casino of colonialism (Fidel Castro) which we take up both within and beyond this space, with an invitation: What new fruits can we bear when we demand that the normate world around us which dissatisfies us and our bodymindlands to the point of devastation, is not in fact natural? Rather, what happens if we understand it as naturalized? (emphasis on the process, the verb over the word).\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThink about the ongoingness of the dominating systems that buttress the world as we know it; why would disablism, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, settler colonial epistemes have to be continually reinforced, reified, shapeshifted and transmuted time and time again if they were natural epiphenomenon (a secondary symptom, phenomenon that occurs alongside or in parallel to a primary one)? Why would the ruling class have to \u201cdevise ideological systems that normalize state violence\u201d if our beingness inhered them (Jaffee and Sheehi, 2024)? Neo-liberalism\u2019s biological rubrics play a role in this as philosopher Mihalio Markovic discusses in Women\u2019s Liberation and Human Emancipation: \u201cIf selfishness, aggressiveness, the drive to conquer and dominate really are among the defining human traits\u2026the oppression in civil society is a fact of life.\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nWhat we will unravel in the weeks to come, through activities, dialogues, contentions, conversations, assemblages and connections is that oppression is not a fact of life; it is a fact of power and ideology. That is what we are loggerheads with. That is what are here to belie and reject. Undoing this fixity\u2014of concentrated and consecrated power, of axiomatic capital production, eco-cides and genocides and slow, social death, of of of ad nauseaum\u2014that is the nexus wherein we gather and wherein our crip aims come into full focus.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nIn Disrupting Fixity: Palestine as Central to Decolonial Disability Justice, Lara Sheehi says that when our entry point is disability justice, which for our purposes it is, \u201cas an integral part of abolitionist thinking and enacting, we need to disrupt the processes that are regularized, modes of being and doing and functioning as normative\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThis disruption of not what we know is true but what we\u2019ve been made to believe is true acts as bedrock of disability justice and of the decolonial crip outcroppings that we take up today henceforth. And I think daily and necessarily every single one of us penetrates these so-called immovable systems regularly. So I ask:\r\n
Question<\/h2>\r\nWe begin, as Toni Cade Bambara implores us to, with the recognition that we are at war. We are at war with many things: settler-colonialism, empire, racial capitalism, disablement, debility, technological and ecological fascism and devastation, racial and abled superiority, dispossession and displacement, mass incarceration, industrial complexes and pipelines abound, the list (devastatingly) goes on.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nMatrices of power have produced and promised these states not only as normal and common sense, but also as inevitable, as fixed, as unchangeable, as irreconcilable.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nBambara goes on to say that the war we are waging is \u201cnot simply a hot debate between the capitalist camp and the socialist camp on which economic, political, social arrangement will have hegemony in the world. It's not just the battle over turf and who has the right to utilize resources for whomever's benefit. The war is also being fought over the truth. What is the truth about human nature, about the human potential?\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nI invite us to begin our several weeks of intimate, togethered conversations, and the protracted struggle against the casino of colonialism (Fidel Castro) which we take up both within and beyond this space, with an invitation: What new fruits can we bear when we demand that the normate world around us which dissatisfies us and our bodymindlands to the point of devastation, is not in fact natural? Rather, what happens if we understand it as naturalized? (emphasis on the process, the verb over the word).\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThink about the ongoingness of the dominating systems that buttress the world as we know it; why would disablism, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, settler colonial epistemes have to be continually reinforced, reified, shapeshifted and transmuted time and time again if they were natural epiphenomenon (a secondary symptom, phenomenon that occurs alongside or in parallel to a primary one)? Why would the ruling class have to \u201cdevise ideological systems that normalize state violence\u201d if our beingness inhered them (Jaffee and Sheehi, 2024)? Neo-liberalism\u2019s biological rubrics play a role in this as philosopher Mihalio Markovic discusses in Women\u2019s Liberation and Human Emancipation: \u201cIf selfishness, aggressiveness, the drive to conquer and dominate really are among the defining human traits\u2026the oppression in civil society is a fact of life.\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nWhat we will unravel in the weeks to come, through activities, dialogues, contentions, conversations, assemblages and connections is that oppression is not a fact of life; it is a fact of power and ideology. That is what we are loggerheads with. That is what are here to belie and reject. Undoing this fixity\u2014of concentrated and consecrated power, of axiomatic capital production, eco-cides and genocides and slow, social death, of of of ad nauseaum\u2014that is the nexus wherein we gather and wherein our crip aims come into full focus.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nIn Disrupting Fixity: Palestine as Central to Decolonial Disability Justice, Lara Sheehi says that when our entry point is disability justice, which for our purposes it is, \u201cas an integral part of abolitionist thinking and enacting, we need to disrupt the processes that are regularized, modes of being and doing and functioning as normative\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThis disruption of not what we know is true but what we\u2019ve been made to believe is true acts as bedrock of disability justice and of the decolonial crip outcroppings that we take up today henceforth. And I think daily and necessarily every single one of us penetrates these so-called immovable systems regularly. So I ask:\r\n\r\n\r\nwhat is something given or fixed within this world-order that you (whether intentionally or unintentionally) refuse to abide by? said differently: What is something socially, culturally, politically disruptive that you engage in?\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nI practice my anarchistic calisthenics by not straightening my hair, eating on the floor instead of on a table, intentionally gaining weight and revelling in the pliability of my egyptian bodymind, crossing the street when there are no cars around even when the crosswalk signals otherwise. Wearing a mask.<\/em>\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nFritsch (2010), discursively follows through with our ethos of non-assimilation and subjective reality refusal here in reiterating that \u201cthere is no necessity that the structures of the present subject must persist. Through an ongoing critical engagement with new practices, it is possible to form new kinds of subjects and create kinds of social relations that do not re-inscribe the same social inequities that have historically marginalized disabled people and others. The point, then, is neither to glorify nor to dismiss the status of the marginal but to transform the very foundation of any political interaction\u201d.\r\nHave the Audacity: Epistemological Justice and Crossing the Epistemic Line<\/h2>\r\nSo let us begin, though normative spaces rarely do, from the outskirts and the peripheries of disability justice. In twin-time (in simultaneity) and in the legacy of crip un-sense and dis\/order, we affirm the peripheries (of knowledge, embodiment, labour, thought, and ontology) as our centre.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nIn their text on the dynamics of epistemological decolonization; towards epistemic freedom, Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni outlines five-ways-forward in the African struggles for epistemic freedom. 1) Return to the base\/locus of enunciation 2) shifting the geo and bio-of knowledge\/moving the centre 3) decolonizing the normative foundation of critical theory 4) rethinking thinking itself and finally 5) learning to unlearn in order to relearn. These will serve as honorary interventions that we lean on and architect from to challenge the ongoing privileging, primacy, and omnipotence of the Global North and the West as the founders and maker(s) of universal histories and presents (Bhambra, 2007) (if such a universality can exist).\r\n\r\nBeginning with an epistemically liberated discourse on disability within and beyond cultural institutional contexts calls for what Lewis R Gordon (2006) renders as \u201cshifting the geography of reason.\u201d It requires us to agitate the ways in which disability in the Global North has been coded through the interstices of colonial structures and systems of thought (Nguyen, 2018; Meekosha, 2011; Ervelles, 2011; Puar, 2023). The knowledge and ontological economy has a \u201chegemonic centre from which it circulates,\u201d argues Ndlou-Gatsheni. And that centre is Europe and North America. Epistemological justice and decolonization is thus defined as \u201cthe right to think, theorize, interpret the world, develop own methodologies and write from where one is located and unencumbered by Eurocentrism\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nSo if we understand colonial whiteness as having imposed itself as the fulcrum of the social, political, onto-epistemological stratosphere\u2014as in our imaginaries, our behaviours, our knowledges, our studies, our worlds and their operations are bred by (and breed) a white and imperial order\u2014 then we can understand with greater facility that this too implicates disability studies, disability arts, and even our own projects of cultural accessibility. An ingress of resonance can come from the sheer fact that an unforgivable corollary, or more accurately, a condition of producing this work is the theft and settlement of Indigenous land and the multi-generational genocide of the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island. Consider also how the government grant (of a settler-colonial nation state) which has financed this work is accrued at the expense of mass de-soverignitizing, disabling, disappearing projects carried out against the Global South (Puar, 2017).\r\n\r\n\r\nTo nuance and maybe even contradict our activity earlier about positionality, \u201cfrom a structural perspective,\u201d writes Ol\u00faf\u1eb9\u0301mi O. T\u00e1\u00edw\u00f2 in Elite Capture, \u201cthe rooms we don\u2019t enter, the experiences we don\u2019t have (and the reasons we are able to avoid them) might have more to teach us about the world and our place in it than anything said inside.\u201d Moreover, the insularity of these institutions, and the ways (as witnessed above in our conversation about the violences of liberalized disability identity) dissuades us from \u201cengaging empathetically and authentically of the struggles of other people\u2014a prerequisite of coalitional politics\u201d which is in itself a pretext for disability justice (T\u00e1\u00edw\u00f2, 2020).\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nPeripheralized narratives, which ought to be focalized in a discipline that promises an anti-establishment and anti-assimilationist doctrine, are subsumed, submerged and silenced in what the late Chris Bell (2018) calls the \u201cwhitewashing of disability history, ontology and phenomenology\u201d (p.406). Nguyen adds to this (2018, p.6) arguing that \u201ccolonialism has continued to manifest itself through the knowledge practices which have rendered the experiences of disabled people in the global South invisible.\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nIf non-metropolitan or southern theory, praxis and widsoms are indeed named in our work, they are mere footnotes, drivebys, or \u201crelegated to a place of epistemic difference and alterity\u201d (Puar, 2023) \u2014 all of which continue to reify white, imperial, western capital D Disability and its outcroppings as the central, the dominant, the nucleus, the sun.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nNguyen enumerates 4\u00a0 key ways that settler-colonial disability studies reproduces the epistemic empire:\r\n\r\n\r\nfirst, the claim of universality (disability is universal and can be studied from the same point of view); second, reading from the centre (there is a general disability theory which can be read from the metropole); third, gestures of exclusion (excluding ideas from the periphery as a part of the dialogue on disability); and fourth, grand erasure (erasure of the majority of disability experiences from the foundations of social thought)\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nFalastine<\/h2>\r\nFor example, in their world-reordering chapter Critical Disability Studies and the Question of Palestine in Crip Genealogies, Jasbir Puar renders messy the perceived merit and perfection of disability justice and access work. What happens when, as Laura Jaffee (2024) asks, the \u201chypervisibility of disability\u2014some disability\u2014[justifies] practices, programs, and politics that harm or exploit disabled and (non)disabled oppressed groups?\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\u201cAccess and what is accessible in Palestine,\u201d writes Puar, \u201ccenter the relationships of occupied space and colonized mobility.\u201d Puar offers readers the example of access maps architected by taxi and bus drivers to accommodate the evergreen-shifting roadblocks (impromptu IOF checkpoints, settler presence, mass protests, and drone surveillance to name a few. Saraj Orsak (as cited in Puar, 2023) luminates these non-dominating comings to disability further in stating that \u201cimpairment here is not marginalized as incapable or lacking, but rather becomes a valuable resource that is productive for capital and empire.\u201d\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nPalestinian disability justice ontologies will frequently offer us these counter-readings, rubrics and directives that bang on our doors once, twice, three times until they break down the galvanized propensity in white settler disability studies to lay claim to disability as an identity to hold rather than a politic to wield (especially when and because said identity is cohered, made legible and valuable through and only through the logics and grammars of empire and its liberal humanisms).\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThink for example to the military program \u201cRo\u2019im Rachok,\u201d started by three mosad agents in the Ziowestern entity of the apartheid state of Israel. It purports to \u201charness the superpowers\u201d of Autistics whose so-called unique aptitude prime them to visually analyze satellite images \u201cfor the slightest sign of enemy activity\u201d (Jaffee and Sheehi, 2024). Disability and neurodivergence is rendered prideful, meaningful, useful when it services the settler-colonial nationstate (of settler colonialism, a structure that requires \u201cperpetual injury as genocide,\u201d and its eliminationist violence against Indigenous Palestinian Peoples. The category of disability is instrumentalized by state discourses of inclusion not only to obscure forms of debility but also to actually produce debility and sustain its proliferation. Though empire and its outposts attempt recursively to convince us otherwise, social maturation and redress do not come at the heels of offshoring the colonial labours of the elite to the marginalized.\r\n\r\n\r\nwhere\/when\/how do you see disability weaponized towards the life support systems of the state and its outposts\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nwhere\/when\/how do you see disability weaponized in service of revolutionary culture?\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nSouthern crip theory offers us pedagogies and praxis that enable a reckoning with disability outside the genealogies or narratives that centre the canonical. As critical disability studies scholars and access practitioners, it\u2019s integral that we consider how the colonial production of disability challenges the idea that disability is universal and natural, especially as we steep ourselves further in the terrain of study that hinges on an exalt of embodied and experienced difference.\r\n\r\nBecause the moment we push ourselves beyond the myopic colonial lens of Global North disability activism and its single stories, we notice that perhaps the Indigenous Elder who acquires disability through colonial trauma or the domestic worker who is rendered mad by the cataclysms of war, or the communities forced to inhale poisoned and polluted air or live in ecosystems ravaged by legacy factory sites and environmentally racist practices of eco-fascism, industrial growth, and developmentalism (Jampel, 2018), may not see their identities as markers of pride. As Jasbir Puar writes in her preface to Right to Maim, \u201cDisability empowerment and pride are part of rights discourses even as expressions of maiming, debility and disabling are central to economies and vocabularies of violence and exploitation.\u201d\u00a0 Helen Meekosha (2011) parallels this indictment in Decolonizing Disability, noting that \u201cthe production of impaired peoples continues as a result of a multiplicity of phenomena including: war and civil strife, nuclear testing, the growth of the arms trade, the export of pollution to \u2018pollution havens\u2019 and the emergence of sweatshops\u201d.\r\n\r\n\r\nWhat other examples come up for you?\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nThese examples highlight that many of the main tenets of the disability movements by Western advocates\u2014a rejection of the medical model, identity and pride, human rights\u2014do not carefully weigh in transnational experiences of disability. So as we come to the final parts of this module, we must challenge ourselves by asking: How do we reconcile the colonial experiences of manufactured disability with the (more centred, more colonial, and often times more desired) discourse on human rights and disability pride? Can we hold both without denying the lived experiences of either, namely those in the Global South whose non-White lifeworlds are seldom first on the agenda if they make the list at all? How can we ensure that our disability justice practices are always rooted in a dismantling of the colonial enterprise, without pathologizing and undignifying the very body-minds that have been disabled by it? How do we account and name and weaponize the privileges accrued as power-laden disabled subjects absorbed into regimes of visibility to organize insurrectionary access scripts that embolden dissent rather than deference? How are we centring disability and access realities and knowledges the world over?\r\n\r\n\r\n \t- Moving beyond identity rubrics<\/li>\r\n \t
- \u201cDisability imaginaries and economies\u201d (Puar, 2017)<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nEarlier, we spoke to positionality. I raise this point again to engage with the biopolitical risk of being that differentiates debilitation from disability. This is important to do now as we, in painful and yet rhizomatic simultaneity, witness the \u201cslow violence\u201d of Global Southern communities as well as the quiet and slow death, capture, and disappearance of our assemblages of capacity, disability, and debility here, \u201cmodulated across historical time, geopolitical space, institutional mandates, and discursive regimes\u201d (Puar, 2017, xiv)\r\n\r\n \r\n
Access Washing<\/h2>\r\nThe co-optation and absorption of access by imperial systems and dictates has wrought about terrains of \u201caccess-washing,\u201d a term that the late disability justice activist Stacey Park Milbern (2019) describes as both the \u201cleveraging \u2018accessibility\u2019 as justification to harm communities of color and poor & working-class communities\u201d and as \u201cantithesis to disability justice.\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nIn their dissertation, Access Washing at the Imperial University: Militarism, Occupation, and Struggles Toward Disability Justice, Jaffee (2020) accents, through transnational crip frameworks, the ways that this practice and logic is deployed systematically by Zioamerican and western hegemony, with their universities acting as their tool and trojan horse, to \u201cconceal imperial and settler-colonial complicities in the U.S. and Israel.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn naming higher education institutions as ecosystems of disability injustice, Jaffee necessarily implicates us too.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nAs access activators, we are implicated in erecting a movement that sprouts from, is invested in, is indebted to the periphery. It is not merely a duty, but a necessity for southern crip narratives and access attunements and cravings to penetrate this hegemonic core (Kelly, 2013) if a desire for fulsome justice is really the lighthouse of our praxis. As Theri A Pickens (2023) writes in the forward of Crip Genealogies, citing the text\u2019s editorial inquiry of aim: \u201c[W]ho is left out of a field that champions itself as the most marginalized?\u201d How do we remedy this with cultural and collective access instead of reaffirming it with access washing (Milbern, 2020)) or access exceptionalism (Chen, Kafer, Kim, Minich, 2023)?\r\n\r\n \r\nExample:<\/h4>\r\nAccess Exceptionalism, as nominated and defined by Mel Y. Chen. Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich, anticipates and indexes the ways access is weaponized to exert whiteness, \u201csevering disability access from broader social justice.\u201d This happens, these thinkers argue, when access is understood in atomistic or individualized ways, \u201cas something with which to comply\u201d instead of as something that demands us to be non-compliant (against euro-american paradigm, against world orders, against reform, against deathmaking, against coloniality and colonial ablenationalism\u2026,,,) This results opportunistically and intentionally in aggressions against BIPOC crips who are then forced to carry the purported burdens of access failures.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nOur purposes come into a fully and politically sharp view at these junctures and playgrounds of dreaming accesses and accessibilities of alterity\u2014as in a cultural accessibility buttressed and scaffolded by and steeped in anti-empire modalities, feelings, justifications, and futures.\r\n\r\n\r\nWhat if the milieu we inhabit as access activators becomes radically re(dis)organized? What would access (and our activations of it) look, feel, sound, like if it obviated a rehabilitative regime, which in the words of Sony Coranez Bolton \u201csilences the realities of the colonial, repackaging them as abstract freedoms\u201d? When we demand access, what would it take for us to first and foremost demand access to life?\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\nGroup Ideating Activity<\/h2>\r\nLet\u2019s make a changeable list together of our desired orientations as access activators. We will discuss this together in class, as well as on the discord in\u00a0General<\/a>.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nHere are some suggested starting points:<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n\r\n \t- Politicizing the relationships between ourselves, one another, our environments and ecologies, our feelings,<\/li>\r\n \t
- Theory and praxis is to be action-driven, learning from, citing and circulating anti-colonial movements and uprisings the world over<\/li>\r\n \t
- Refuses access surveillance (quantifying access in certain and preferential way)<\/li>\r\n \t
- Understandings ableism\u2019s entwinements and attachments to settler colonialism and settler futures.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Acknowledging our complicity and implications in the settler-colonial regime in Turtle Island and beyond it for Indigenous and colonized subjects everywhere<\/li>\r\n \t
- Coalitional creation between ourselves and crip thinkers, workers, resistance fighters, activists, healers, and doulas in transnational contexts and geographies,,<\/li>\r\n \t
- Attending to histories and ever-changing contexts\/presents\/realities<\/li>\r\n \t
- Learning from and through one another and our differences<\/li>\r\n \t
- What normate tools are inconsistent with the work that we\u2019re doing together? These can be material (A.I) or ideological (saviourism, disposability)?<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\n","rendered":"
<\/p>\n
Lecture Recording, Slides and Transcripts<\/h1>\n
Crip Perpheries as Crip Centres – slides with audio (prerecorded before class): https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/17VNdM1jbLoFSg4ljtnYxnTZZbFwnHyaq\/view?usp=drive_web<\/a><\/p>\nLecture Recording:<\/p>\n
https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1vgbmtytIFdfnT7BJN7SF1Hmki1GweF3n\/view?usp=drive_open<\/a><\/p>\nZoom Transcript (as yet unedited):<\/p>\n
https:\/\/drive.google.com\/drive\/folders\/1Oj9L3z5c-XJTJ1poZ0Tk6CrPtppm6FX4<\/a><\/p>\nChat file:<\/p>\n
Have the Audacity: Epistemological Justice and Crossing the Epistemic Line<\/h2>\r\nSo let us begin, though normative spaces rarely do, from the outskirts and the peripheries of disability justice. In twin-time (in simultaneity) and in the legacy of crip un-sense and dis\/order, we affirm the peripheries (of knowledge, embodiment, labour, thought, and ontology) as our centre.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nIn their text on the dynamics of epistemological decolonization; towards epistemic freedom, Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni outlines five-ways-forward in the African struggles for epistemic freedom. 1) Return to the base\/locus of enunciation 2) shifting the geo and bio-of knowledge\/moving the centre 3) decolonizing the normative foundation of critical theory 4) rethinking thinking itself and finally 5) learning to unlearn in order to relearn. These will serve as honorary interventions that we lean on and architect from to challenge the ongoing privileging, primacy, and omnipotence of the Global North and the West as the founders and maker(s) of universal histories and presents (Bhambra, 2007) (if such a universality can exist).\r\n\r\nBeginning with an epistemically liberated discourse on disability within and beyond cultural institutional contexts calls for what Lewis R Gordon (2006) renders as \u201cshifting the geography of reason.\u201d It requires us to agitate the ways in which disability in the Global North has been coded through the interstices of colonial structures and systems of thought (Nguyen, 2018; Meekosha, 2011; Ervelles, 2011; Puar, 2023). The knowledge and ontological economy has a \u201chegemonic centre from which it circulates,\u201d argues Ndlou-Gatsheni. And that centre is Europe and North America. Epistemological justice and decolonization is thus defined as \u201cthe right to think, theorize, interpret the world, develop own methodologies and write from where one is located and unencumbered by Eurocentrism\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nSo if we understand colonial whiteness as having imposed itself as the fulcrum of the social, political, onto-epistemological stratosphere\u2014as in our imaginaries, our behaviours, our knowledges, our studies, our worlds and their operations are bred by (and breed) a white and imperial order\u2014 then we can understand with greater facility that this too implicates disability studies, disability arts, and even our own projects of cultural accessibility. An ingress of resonance can come from the sheer fact that an unforgivable corollary, or more accurately, a condition of producing this work is the theft and settlement of Indigenous land and the multi-generational genocide of the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island. Consider also how the government grant (of a settler-colonial nation state) which has financed this work is accrued at the expense of mass de-soverignitizing, disabling, disappearing projects carried out against the Global South (Puar, 2017).\r\n\r\n\r\nTo nuance and maybe even contradict our activity earlier about positionality, \u201cfrom a structural perspective,\u201d writes Ol\u00faf\u1eb9\u0301mi O. T\u00e1\u00edw\u00f2 in Elite Capture, \u201cthe rooms we don\u2019t enter, the experiences we don\u2019t have (and the reasons we are able to avoid them) might have more to teach us about the world and our place in it than anything said inside.\u201d Moreover, the insularity of these institutions, and the ways (as witnessed above in our conversation about the violences of liberalized disability identity) dissuades us from \u201cengaging empathetically and authentically of the struggles of other people\u2014a prerequisite of coalitional politics\u201d which is in itself a pretext for disability justice (T\u00e1\u00edw\u00f2, 2020).\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nPeripheralized narratives, which ought to be focalized in a discipline that promises an anti-establishment and anti-assimilationist doctrine, are subsumed, submerged and silenced in what the late Chris Bell (2018) calls the \u201cwhitewashing of disability history, ontology and phenomenology\u201d (p.406). Nguyen adds to this (2018, p.6) arguing that \u201ccolonialism has continued to manifest itself through the knowledge practices which have rendered the experiences of disabled people in the global South invisible.\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nIf non-metropolitan or southern theory, praxis and widsoms are indeed named in our work, they are mere footnotes, drivebys, or \u201crelegated to a place of epistemic difference and alterity\u201d (Puar, 2023) \u2014 all of which continue to reify white, imperial, western capital D Disability and its outcroppings as the central, the dominant, the nucleus, the sun.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nNguyen enumerates 4\u00a0 key ways that settler-colonial disability studies reproduces the epistemic empire:\r\n\r\n\r\nfirst, the claim of universality (disability is universal and can be studied from the same point of view); second, reading from the centre (there is a general disability theory which can be read from the metropole); third, gestures of exclusion (excluding ideas from the periphery as a part of the dialogue on disability); and fourth, grand erasure (erasure of the majority of disability experiences from the foundations of social thought)\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nFalastine<\/h2>\r\nFor example, in their world-reordering chapter Critical Disability Studies and the Question of Palestine in Crip Genealogies, Jasbir Puar renders messy the perceived merit and perfection of disability justice and access work. What happens when, as Laura Jaffee (2024) asks, the \u201chypervisibility of disability\u2014some disability\u2014[justifies] practices, programs, and politics that harm or exploit disabled and (non)disabled oppressed groups?\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\u201cAccess and what is accessible in Palestine,\u201d writes Puar, \u201ccenter the relationships of occupied space and colonized mobility.\u201d Puar offers readers the example of access maps architected by taxi and bus drivers to accommodate the evergreen-shifting roadblocks (impromptu IOF checkpoints, settler presence, mass protests, and drone surveillance to name a few. Saraj Orsak (as cited in Puar, 2023) luminates these non-dominating comings to disability further in stating that \u201cimpairment here is not marginalized as incapable or lacking, but rather becomes a valuable resource that is productive for capital and empire.\u201d\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nPalestinian disability justice ontologies will frequently offer us these counter-readings, rubrics and directives that bang on our doors once, twice, three times until they break down the galvanized propensity in white settler disability studies to lay claim to disability as an identity to hold rather than a politic to wield (especially when and because said identity is cohered, made legible and valuable through and only through the logics and grammars of empire and its liberal humanisms).\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThink for example to the military program \u201cRo\u2019im Rachok,\u201d started by three mosad agents in the Ziowestern entity of the apartheid state of Israel. It purports to \u201charness the superpowers\u201d of Autistics whose so-called unique aptitude prime them to visually analyze satellite images \u201cfor the slightest sign of enemy activity\u201d (Jaffee and Sheehi, 2024). Disability and neurodivergence is rendered prideful, meaningful, useful when it services the settler-colonial nationstate (of settler colonialism, a structure that requires \u201cperpetual injury as genocide,\u201d and its eliminationist violence against Indigenous Palestinian Peoples. The category of disability is instrumentalized by state discourses of inclusion not only to obscure forms of debility but also to actually produce debility and sustain its proliferation. Though empire and its outposts attempt recursively to convince us otherwise, social maturation and redress do not come at the heels of offshoring the colonial labours of the elite to the marginalized.\r\n\r\n\r\nwhere\/when\/how do you see disability weaponized towards the life support systems of the state and its outposts\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nwhere\/when\/how do you see disability weaponized in service of revolutionary culture?\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nSouthern crip theory offers us pedagogies and praxis that enable a reckoning with disability outside the genealogies or narratives that centre the canonical. As critical disability studies scholars and access practitioners, it\u2019s integral that we consider how the colonial production of disability challenges the idea that disability is universal and natural, especially as we steep ourselves further in the terrain of study that hinges on an exalt of embodied and experienced difference.\r\n\r\nBecause the moment we push ourselves beyond the myopic colonial lens of Global North disability activism and its single stories, we notice that perhaps the Indigenous Elder who acquires disability through colonial trauma or the domestic worker who is rendered mad by the cataclysms of war, or the communities forced to inhale poisoned and polluted air or live in ecosystems ravaged by legacy factory sites and environmentally racist practices of eco-fascism, industrial growth, and developmentalism (Jampel, 2018), may not see their identities as markers of pride. As Jasbir Puar writes in her preface to Right to Maim, \u201cDisability empowerment and pride are part of rights discourses even as expressions of maiming, debility and disabling are central to economies and vocabularies of violence and exploitation.\u201d\u00a0 Helen Meekosha (2011) parallels this indictment in Decolonizing Disability, noting that \u201cthe production of impaired peoples continues as a result of a multiplicity of phenomena including: war and civil strife, nuclear testing, the growth of the arms trade, the export of pollution to \u2018pollution havens\u2019 and the emergence of sweatshops\u201d.\r\n\r\n\r\nWhat other examples come up for you?\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nThese examples highlight that many of the main tenets of the disability movements by Western advocates\u2014a rejection of the medical model, identity and pride, human rights\u2014do not carefully weigh in transnational experiences of disability. So as we come to the final parts of this module, we must challenge ourselves by asking: How do we reconcile the colonial experiences of manufactured disability with the (more centred, more colonial, and often times more desired) discourse on human rights and disability pride? Can we hold both without denying the lived experiences of either, namely those in the Global South whose non-White lifeworlds are seldom first on the agenda if they make the list at all? How can we ensure that our disability justice practices are always rooted in a dismantling of the colonial enterprise, without pathologizing and undignifying the very body-minds that have been disabled by it? How do we account and name and weaponize the privileges accrued as power-laden disabled subjects absorbed into regimes of visibility to organize insurrectionary access scripts that embolden dissent rather than deference? How are we centring disability and access realities and knowledges the world over?\r\n\r\n\r\n \t- Moving beyond identity rubrics<\/li>\r\n \t
- \u201cDisability imaginaries and economies\u201d (Puar, 2017)<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nEarlier, we spoke to positionality. I raise this point again to engage with the biopolitical risk of being that differentiates debilitation from disability. This is important to do now as we, in painful and yet rhizomatic simultaneity, witness the \u201cslow violence\u201d of Global Southern communities as well as the quiet and slow death, capture, and disappearance of our assemblages of capacity, disability, and debility here, \u201cmodulated across historical time, geopolitical space, institutional mandates, and discursive regimes\u201d (Puar, 2017, xiv)\r\n\r\n \r\n
Access Washing<\/h2>\r\nThe co-optation and absorption of access by imperial systems and dictates has wrought about terrains of \u201caccess-washing,\u201d a term that the late disability justice activist Stacey Park Milbern (2019) describes as both the \u201cleveraging \u2018accessibility\u2019 as justification to harm communities of color and poor & working-class communities\u201d and as \u201cantithesis to disability justice.\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nIn their dissertation, Access Washing at the Imperial University: Militarism, Occupation, and Struggles Toward Disability Justice, Jaffee (2020) accents, through transnational crip frameworks, the ways that this practice and logic is deployed systematically by Zioamerican and western hegemony, with their universities acting as their tool and trojan horse, to \u201cconceal imperial and settler-colonial complicities in the U.S. and Israel.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn naming higher education institutions as ecosystems of disability injustice, Jaffee necessarily implicates us too.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nAs access activators, we are implicated in erecting a movement that sprouts from, is invested in, is indebted to the periphery. It is not merely a duty, but a necessity for southern crip narratives and access attunements and cravings to penetrate this hegemonic core (Kelly, 2013) if a desire for fulsome justice is really the lighthouse of our praxis. As Theri A Pickens (2023) writes in the forward of Crip Genealogies, citing the text\u2019s editorial inquiry of aim: \u201c[W]ho is left out of a field that champions itself as the most marginalized?\u201d How do we remedy this with cultural and collective access instead of reaffirming it with access washing (Milbern, 2020)) or access exceptionalism (Chen, Kafer, Kim, Minich, 2023)?\r\n\r\n \r\nExample:<\/h4>\r\nAccess Exceptionalism, as nominated and defined by Mel Y. Chen. Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich, anticipates and indexes the ways access is weaponized to exert whiteness, \u201csevering disability access from broader social justice.\u201d This happens, these thinkers argue, when access is understood in atomistic or individualized ways, \u201cas something with which to comply\u201d instead of as something that demands us to be non-compliant (against euro-american paradigm, against world orders, against reform, against deathmaking, against coloniality and colonial ablenationalism\u2026,,,) This results opportunistically and intentionally in aggressions against BIPOC crips who are then forced to carry the purported burdens of access failures.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nOur purposes come into a fully and politically sharp view at these junctures and playgrounds of dreaming accesses and accessibilities of alterity\u2014as in a cultural accessibility buttressed and scaffolded by and steeped in anti-empire modalities, feelings, justifications, and futures.\r\n\r\n\r\nWhat if the milieu we inhabit as access activators becomes radically re(dis)organized? What would access (and our activations of it) look, feel, sound, like if it obviated a rehabilitative regime, which in the words of Sony Coranez Bolton \u201csilences the realities of the colonial, repackaging them as abstract freedoms\u201d? When we demand access, what would it take for us to first and foremost demand access to life?\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\nGroup Ideating Activity<\/h2>\r\nLet\u2019s make a changeable list together of our desired orientations as access activators. We will discuss this together in class, as well as on the discord in\u00a0General<\/a>.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nHere are some suggested starting points:<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n\r\n \t- Politicizing the relationships between ourselves, one another, our environments and ecologies, our feelings,<\/li>\r\n \t
- Theory and praxis is to be action-driven, learning from, citing and circulating anti-colonial movements and uprisings the world over<\/li>\r\n \t
- Refuses access surveillance (quantifying access in certain and preferential way)<\/li>\r\n \t
- Understandings ableism\u2019s entwinements and attachments to settler colonialism and settler futures.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Acknowledging our complicity and implications in the settler-colonial regime in Turtle Island and beyond it for Indigenous and colonized subjects everywhere<\/li>\r\n \t
- Coalitional creation between ourselves and crip thinkers, workers, resistance fighters, activists, healers, and doulas in transnational contexts and geographies,,<\/li>\r\n \t
- Attending to histories and ever-changing contexts\/presents\/realities<\/li>\r\n \t
- Learning from and through one another and our differences<\/li>\r\n \t
- What normate tools are inconsistent with the work that we\u2019re doing together? These can be material (A.I) or ideological (saviourism, disposability)?<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\n","rendered":"
<\/p>\n
Lecture Recording, Slides and Transcripts<\/h1>\n
Crip Perpheries as Crip Centres – slides with audio (prerecorded before class): https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/17VNdM1jbLoFSg4ljtnYxnTZZbFwnHyaq\/view?usp=drive_web<\/a><\/p>\nLecture Recording:<\/p>\n
https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1vgbmtytIFdfnT7BJN7SF1Hmki1GweF3n\/view?usp=drive_open<\/a><\/p>\nZoom Transcript (as yet unedited):<\/p>\n
https:\/\/drive.google.com\/drive\/folders\/1Oj9L3z5c-XJTJ1poZ0Tk6CrPtppm6FX4<\/a><\/p>\nChat file:<\/p>\n
\r\n\r\nfirst, the claim of universality (disability is universal and can be studied from the same point of view); second, reading from the centre (there is a general disability theory which can be read from the metropole); third, gestures of exclusion (excluding ideas from the periphery as a part of the dialogue on disability); and fourth, grand erasure (erasure of the majority of disability experiences from the foundations of social thought)\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nFalastine<\/h2>\r\nFor example, in their world-reordering chapter Critical Disability Studies and the Question of Palestine in Crip Genealogies, Jasbir Puar renders messy the perceived merit and perfection of disability justice and access work. What happens when, as Laura Jaffee (2024) asks, the \u201chypervisibility of disability\u2014some disability\u2014[justifies] practices, programs, and politics that harm or exploit disabled and (non)disabled oppressed groups?\u201d\r\n
Falastine<\/h2>\r\nFor example, in their world-reordering chapter Critical Disability Studies and the Question of Palestine in Crip Genealogies, Jasbir Puar renders messy the perceived merit and perfection of disability justice and access work. What happens when, as Laura Jaffee (2024) asks, the \u201chypervisibility of disability\u2014some disability\u2014[justifies] practices, programs, and politics that harm or exploit disabled and (non)disabled oppressed groups?\u201d\r\n\r\n\r\n\u201cAccess and what is accessible in Palestine,\u201d writes Puar, \u201ccenter the relationships of occupied space and colonized mobility.\u201d Puar offers readers the example of access maps architected by taxi and bus drivers to accommodate the evergreen-shifting roadblocks (impromptu IOF checkpoints, settler presence, mass protests, and drone surveillance to name a few. Saraj Orsak (as cited in Puar, 2023) luminates these non-dominating comings to disability further in stating that \u201cimpairment here is not marginalized as incapable or lacking, but rather becomes a valuable resource that is productive for capital and empire.\u201d\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nPalestinian disability justice ontologies will frequently offer us these counter-readings, rubrics and directives that bang on our doors once, twice, three times until they break down the galvanized propensity in white settler disability studies to lay claim to disability as an identity to hold rather than a politic to wield (especially when and because said identity is cohered, made legible and valuable through and only through the logics and grammars of empire and its liberal humanisms).\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThink for example to the military program \u201cRo\u2019im Rachok,\u201d started by three mosad agents in the Ziowestern entity of the apartheid state of Israel. It purports to \u201charness the superpowers\u201d of Autistics whose so-called unique aptitude prime them to visually analyze satellite images \u201cfor the slightest sign of enemy activity\u201d (Jaffee and Sheehi, 2024). Disability and neurodivergence is rendered prideful, meaningful, useful when it services the settler-colonial nationstate (of settler colonialism, a structure that requires \u201cperpetual injury as genocide,\u201d and its eliminationist violence against Indigenous Palestinian Peoples. The category of disability is instrumentalized by state discourses of inclusion not only to obscure forms of debility but also to actually produce debility and sustain its proliferation. Though empire and its outposts attempt recursively to convince us otherwise, social maturation and redress do not come at the heels of offshoring the colonial labours of the elite to the marginalized.\r\n\r\n\r\nwhere\/when\/how do you see disability weaponized towards the life support systems of the state and its outposts\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nwhere\/when\/how do you see disability weaponized in service of revolutionary culture?\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nSouthern crip theory offers us pedagogies and praxis that enable a reckoning with disability outside the genealogies or narratives that centre the canonical. As critical disability studies scholars and access practitioners, it\u2019s integral that we consider how the colonial production of disability challenges the idea that disability is universal and natural, especially as we steep ourselves further in the terrain of study that hinges on an exalt of embodied and experienced difference.\r\n\r\nBecause the moment we push ourselves beyond the myopic colonial lens of Global North disability activism and its single stories, we notice that perhaps the Indigenous Elder who acquires disability through colonial trauma or the domestic worker who is rendered mad by the cataclysms of war, or the communities forced to inhale poisoned and polluted air or live in ecosystems ravaged by legacy factory sites and environmentally racist practices of eco-fascism, industrial growth, and developmentalism (Jampel, 2018), may not see their identities as markers of pride. As Jasbir Puar writes in her preface to Right to Maim, \u201cDisability empowerment and pride are part of rights discourses even as expressions of maiming, debility and disabling are central to economies and vocabularies of violence and exploitation.\u201d\u00a0 Helen Meekosha (2011) parallels this indictment in Decolonizing Disability, noting that \u201cthe production of impaired peoples continues as a result of a multiplicity of phenomena including: war and civil strife, nuclear testing, the growth of the arms trade, the export of pollution to \u2018pollution havens\u2019 and the emergence of sweatshops\u201d.\r\n\r\n\r\nWhat other examples come up for you?\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nThese examples highlight that many of the main tenets of the disability movements by Western advocates\u2014a rejection of the medical model, identity and pride, human rights\u2014do not carefully weigh in transnational experiences of disability. So as we come to the final parts of this module, we must challenge ourselves by asking: How do we reconcile the colonial experiences of manufactured disability with the (more centred, more colonial, and often times more desired) discourse on human rights and disability pride? Can we hold both without denying the lived experiences of either, namely those in the Global South whose non-White lifeworlds are seldom first on the agenda if they make the list at all? How can we ensure that our disability justice practices are always rooted in a dismantling of the colonial enterprise, without pathologizing and undignifying the very body-minds that have been disabled by it? How do we account and name and weaponize the privileges accrued as power-laden disabled subjects absorbed into regimes of visibility to organize insurrectionary access scripts that embolden dissent rather than deference? How are we centring disability and access realities and knowledges the world over?\r\n\r\n\r\n \t- Moving beyond identity rubrics<\/li>\r\n \t
- \u201cDisability imaginaries and economies\u201d (Puar, 2017)<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nEarlier, we spoke to positionality. I raise this point again to engage with the biopolitical risk of being that differentiates debilitation from disability. This is important to do now as we, in painful and yet rhizomatic simultaneity, witness the \u201cslow violence\u201d of Global Southern communities as well as the quiet and slow death, capture, and disappearance of our assemblages of capacity, disability, and debility here, \u201cmodulated across historical time, geopolitical space, institutional mandates, and discursive regimes\u201d (Puar, 2017, xiv)\r\n\r\n \r\n
Access Washing<\/h2>\r\nThe co-optation and absorption of access by imperial systems and dictates has wrought about terrains of \u201caccess-washing,\u201d a term that the late disability justice activist Stacey Park Milbern (2019) describes as both the \u201cleveraging \u2018accessibility\u2019 as justification to harm communities of color and poor & working-class communities\u201d and as \u201cantithesis to disability justice.\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nIn their dissertation, Access Washing at the Imperial University: Militarism, Occupation, and Struggles Toward Disability Justice, Jaffee (2020) accents, through transnational crip frameworks, the ways that this practice and logic is deployed systematically by Zioamerican and western hegemony, with their universities acting as their tool and trojan horse, to \u201cconceal imperial and settler-colonial complicities in the U.S. and Israel.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn naming higher education institutions as ecosystems of disability injustice, Jaffee necessarily implicates us too.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nAs access activators, we are implicated in erecting a movement that sprouts from, is invested in, is indebted to the periphery. It is not merely a duty, but a necessity for southern crip narratives and access attunements and cravings to penetrate this hegemonic core (Kelly, 2013) if a desire for fulsome justice is really the lighthouse of our praxis. As Theri A Pickens (2023) writes in the forward of Crip Genealogies, citing the text\u2019s editorial inquiry of aim: \u201c[W]ho is left out of a field that champions itself as the most marginalized?\u201d How do we remedy this with cultural and collective access instead of reaffirming it with access washing (Milbern, 2020)) or access exceptionalism (Chen, Kafer, Kim, Minich, 2023)?\r\n\r\n \r\nExample:<\/h4>\r\nAccess Exceptionalism, as nominated and defined by Mel Y. Chen. Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich, anticipates and indexes the ways access is weaponized to exert whiteness, \u201csevering disability access from broader social justice.\u201d This happens, these thinkers argue, when access is understood in atomistic or individualized ways, \u201cas something with which to comply\u201d instead of as something that demands us to be non-compliant (against euro-american paradigm, against world orders, against reform, against deathmaking, against coloniality and colonial ablenationalism\u2026,,,) This results opportunistically and intentionally in aggressions against BIPOC crips who are then forced to carry the purported burdens of access failures.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nOur purposes come into a fully and politically sharp view at these junctures and playgrounds of dreaming accesses and accessibilities of alterity\u2014as in a cultural accessibility buttressed and scaffolded by and steeped in anti-empire modalities, feelings, justifications, and futures.\r\n\r\n\r\nWhat if the milieu we inhabit as access activators becomes radically re(dis)organized? What would access (and our activations of it) look, feel, sound, like if it obviated a rehabilitative regime, which in the words of Sony Coranez Bolton \u201csilences the realities of the colonial, repackaging them as abstract freedoms\u201d? When we demand access, what would it take for us to first and foremost demand access to life?\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\nGroup Ideating Activity<\/h2>\r\nLet\u2019s make a changeable list together of our desired orientations as access activators. We will discuss this together in class, as well as on the discord in\u00a0General<\/a>.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nHere are some suggested starting points:<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n\r\n \t- Politicizing the relationships between ourselves, one another, our environments and ecologies, our feelings,<\/li>\r\n \t
- Theory and praxis is to be action-driven, learning from, citing and circulating anti-colonial movements and uprisings the world over<\/li>\r\n \t
- Refuses access surveillance (quantifying access in certain and preferential way)<\/li>\r\n \t
- Understandings ableism\u2019s entwinements and attachments to settler colonialism and settler futures.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Acknowledging our complicity and implications in the settler-colonial regime in Turtle Island and beyond it for Indigenous and colonized subjects everywhere<\/li>\r\n \t
- Coalitional creation between ourselves and crip thinkers, workers, resistance fighters, activists, healers, and doulas in transnational contexts and geographies,,<\/li>\r\n \t
- Attending to histories and ever-changing contexts\/presents\/realities<\/li>\r\n \t
- Learning from and through one another and our differences<\/li>\r\n \t
- What normate tools are inconsistent with the work that we\u2019re doing together? These can be material (A.I) or ideological (saviourism, disposability)?<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\n","rendered":"
<\/p>\n
Lecture Recording, Slides and Transcripts<\/h1>\n
Crip Perpheries as Crip Centres – slides with audio (prerecorded before class): https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/17VNdM1jbLoFSg4ljtnYxnTZZbFwnHyaq\/view?usp=drive_web<\/a><\/p>\nLecture Recording:<\/p>\n
https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1vgbmtytIFdfnT7BJN7SF1Hmki1GweF3n\/view?usp=drive_open<\/a><\/p>\nZoom Transcript (as yet unedited):<\/p>\n
https:\/\/drive.google.com\/drive\/folders\/1Oj9L3z5c-XJTJ1poZ0Tk6CrPtppm6FX4<\/a><\/p>\nChat file:<\/p>\n
\r\n\r\nwhere\/when\/how do you see disability weaponized towards the life support systems of the state and its outposts\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nwhere\/when\/how do you see disability weaponized in service of revolutionary culture?\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nSouthern crip theory offers us pedagogies and praxis that enable a reckoning with disability outside the genealogies or narratives that centre the canonical. As critical disability studies scholars and access practitioners, it\u2019s integral that we consider how the colonial production of disability challenges the idea that disability is universal and natural, especially as we steep ourselves further in the terrain of study that hinges on an exalt of embodied and experienced difference.\r\n\r\nBecause the moment we push ourselves beyond the myopic colonial lens of Global North disability activism and its single stories, we notice that perhaps the Indigenous Elder who acquires disability through colonial trauma or the domestic worker who is rendered mad by the cataclysms of war, or the communities forced to inhale poisoned and polluted air or live in ecosystems ravaged by legacy factory sites and environmentally racist practices of eco-fascism, industrial growth, and developmentalism (Jampel, 2018), may not see their identities as markers of pride. As Jasbir Puar writes in her preface to Right to Maim, \u201cDisability empowerment and pride are part of rights discourses even as expressions of maiming, debility and disabling are central to economies and vocabularies of violence and exploitation.\u201d\u00a0 Helen Meekosha (2011) parallels this indictment in Decolonizing Disability, noting that \u201cthe production of impaired peoples continues as a result of a multiplicity of phenomena including: war and civil strife, nuclear testing, the growth of the arms trade, the export of pollution to \u2018pollution havens\u2019 and the emergence of sweatshops\u201d.\r\n
\r\n\r\nWhat other examples come up for you?\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nThese examples highlight that many of the main tenets of the disability movements by Western advocates\u2014a rejection of the medical model, identity and pride, human rights\u2014do not carefully weigh in transnational experiences of disability. So as we come to the final parts of this module, we must challenge ourselves by asking: How do we reconcile the colonial experiences of manufactured disability with the (more centred, more colonial, and often times more desired) discourse on human rights and disability pride? Can we hold both without denying the lived experiences of either, namely those in the Global South whose non-White lifeworlds are seldom first on the agenda if they make the list at all? How can we ensure that our disability justice practices are always rooted in a dismantling of the colonial enterprise, without pathologizing and undignifying the very body-minds that have been disabled by it? How do we account and name and weaponize the privileges accrued as power-laden disabled subjects absorbed into regimes of visibility to organize insurrectionary access scripts that embolden dissent rather than deference? How are we centring disability and access realities and knowledges the world over?\r\n
\r\n
- \r\n \t
- Moving beyond identity rubrics<\/li>\r\n \t
- \u201cDisability imaginaries and economies\u201d (Puar, 2017)<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nEarlier, we spoke to positionality. I raise this point again to engage with the biopolitical risk of being that differentiates debilitation from disability. This is important to do now as we, in painful and yet rhizomatic simultaneity, witness the \u201cslow violence\u201d of Global Southern communities as well as the quiet and slow death, capture, and disappearance of our assemblages of capacity, disability, and debility here, \u201cmodulated across historical time, geopolitical space, institutional mandates, and discursive regimes\u201d (Puar, 2017, xiv)\r\n\r\n \r\n
Access Washing<\/h2>\r\nThe co-optation and absorption of access by imperial systems and dictates has wrought about terrains of \u201caccess-washing,\u201d a term that the late disability justice activist Stacey Park Milbern (2019) describes as both the \u201cleveraging \u2018accessibility\u2019 as justification to harm communities of color and poor & working-class communities\u201d and as \u201cantithesis to disability justice.\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nIn their dissertation, Access Washing at the Imperial University: Militarism, Occupation, and Struggles Toward Disability Justice, Jaffee (2020) accents, through transnational crip frameworks, the ways that this practice and logic is deployed systematically by Zioamerican and western hegemony, with their universities acting as their tool and trojan horse, to \u201cconceal imperial and settler-colonial complicities in the U.S. and Israel.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn naming higher education institutions as ecosystems of disability injustice, Jaffee necessarily implicates us too.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nAs access activators, we are implicated in erecting a movement that sprouts from, is invested in, is indebted to the periphery. It is not merely a duty, but a necessity for southern crip narratives and access attunements and cravings to penetrate this hegemonic core (Kelly, 2013) if a desire for fulsome justice is really the lighthouse of our praxis. As Theri A Pickens (2023) writes in the forward of Crip Genealogies, citing the text\u2019s editorial inquiry of aim: \u201c[W]ho is left out of a field that champions itself as the most marginalized?\u201d How do we remedy this with cultural and collective access instead of reaffirming it with access washing (Milbern, 2020)) or access exceptionalism (Chen, Kafer, Kim, Minich, 2023)?\r\n\r\n \r\n
Example:<\/h4>\r\nAccess Exceptionalism, as nominated and defined by Mel Y. Chen. Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich, anticipates and indexes the ways access is weaponized to exert whiteness, \u201csevering disability access from broader social justice.\u201d This happens, these thinkers argue, when access is understood in atomistic or individualized ways, \u201cas something with which to comply\u201d instead of as something that demands us to be non-compliant (against euro-american paradigm, against world orders, against reform, against deathmaking, against coloniality and colonial ablenationalism\u2026,,,) This results opportunistically and intentionally in aggressions against BIPOC crips who are then forced to carry the purported burdens of access failures.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nOur purposes come into a fully and politically sharp view at these junctures and playgrounds of dreaming accesses and accessibilities of alterity\u2014as in a cultural accessibility buttressed and scaffolded by and steeped in anti-empire modalities, feelings, justifications, and futures.\r\n
\r\n\r\nWhat if the milieu we inhabit as access activators becomes radically re(dis)organized? What would access (and our activations of it) look, feel, sound, like if it obviated a rehabilitative regime, which in the words of Sony Coranez Bolton \u201csilences the realities of the colonial, repackaging them as abstract freedoms\u201d? When we demand access, what would it take for us to first and foremost demand access to life?\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\nGroup Ideating Activity<\/h2>\r\nLet\u2019s make a changeable list together of our desired orientations as access activators. We will discuss this together in class, as well as on the discord in\u00a0General<\/a>.\r\n\r\n \r\n
\r\n Here are some suggested starting points:<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- Politicizing the relationships between ourselves, one another, our environments and ecologies, our feelings,<\/li>\r\n \t
- Theory and praxis is to be action-driven, learning from, citing and circulating anti-colonial movements and uprisings the world over<\/li>\r\n \t
- Refuses access surveillance (quantifying access in certain and preferential way)<\/li>\r\n \t
- Understandings ableism\u2019s entwinements and attachments to settler colonialism and settler futures.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Acknowledging our complicity and implications in the settler-colonial regime in Turtle Island and beyond it for Indigenous and colonized subjects everywhere<\/li>\r\n \t
- Coalitional creation between ourselves and crip thinkers, workers, resistance fighters, activists, healers, and doulas in transnational contexts and geographies,,<\/li>\r\n \t
- Attending to histories and ever-changing contexts\/presents\/realities<\/li>\r\n \t
- Learning from and through one another and our differences<\/li>\r\n \t
- What normate tools are inconsistent with the work that we\u2019re doing together? These can be material (A.I) or ideological (saviourism, disposability)?<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\n","rendered":"<\/p>\n
Lecture Recording, Slides and Transcripts<\/h1>\n
Crip Perpheries as Crip Centres – slides with audio (prerecorded before class): https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/17VNdM1jbLoFSg4ljtnYxnTZZbFwnHyaq\/view?usp=drive_web<\/a><\/p>\n
Lecture Recording:<\/p>\n
https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1vgbmtytIFdfnT7BJN7SF1Hmki1GweF3n\/view?usp=drive_open<\/a><\/p>\n
Zoom Transcript (as yet unedited):<\/p>\n
https:\/\/drive.google.com\/drive\/folders\/1Oj9L3z5c-XJTJ1poZ0Tk6CrPtppm6FX4<\/a><\/p>\n
Chat file:<\/p>\n