Finnegan Shannon’s crip time reimaginings Every 60 minutes a clock’s hand travels around its face. One hour follows another, and then another and another. 24 times over to make a day. Our bodies are bound by clocks—by their ceaseless onslaught of seconds, minutes, hours—imposing hegemonic notions of movement through time and space. Rigid schedules without…
Category: Disability
Life Made Possible: Migrant Care, Settler Health, and Colonial Futurities
Rachel Brown’s Unsettled Labors: Migrant Care Work in Palestine/Israel (2024) theorizes migrant, home-based eldercare as a critical yet underexamined component of the economic, cultural, biological, and discursive reproduction of settler colonialism in Israel and Palestine, where almost 70,000 migrant caregivers are currently working (3). After the first Intifada in 1987, the Israeli government began granting visas to migrant workers…
Disability, Empowerment, and Art: On Hospital Aesthetics with Amanda Cachia
Amanda Cachia’s Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism was published by Manchester University Press last September. Cachia is a curator and art historian with a joint appointment as Professor of Practice in Museum Studies at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, where she is also Affiliate Faculty in Disability Studies….
Close Encounters of the Realist Kind: Toward Disability Poetics
What are disability poetics? What does it mean to invoke such a thing? Why should we? These are questions I’ve been asking myself and my students for most of the year, especially in several reviews I’ve written of works by disabled artists. I always seem to circle around an answer without ever reaching one that…
Lies and Goodbyes: Lulu Wang’s The Farewell (2019)
In an early shot from Lulu Wang’s 2019 film The Farewell, the camera focuses on the movie’s elderly protagonist in what is clearly a medical setting. In Wang’s script, the acting directions state that “Nai Nai sits alone in a hospital gown awaiting her X-ray.” There, “she has a coughing fit.” Although a disconnected arm…
Eli Clare’s Notes to Disability Studies: On the Access Practices of “Unfurl”
Eli Clare’s new book, Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming (2025), presents a challenge to disability studies. The most impactful challenges to this field over the past few decades have critiqued its narrow focus on whiteness, the West, and physical disability, with more recent work attempting to understand disability through intersectional and global frameworks as well…
The Crip Poetics of Paradoxical Concession
For the brilliant students of ENG 341 To date online as a disabled gay man means disclosing your limp to someone who likely has more than a soupçon of concern for fitness. At least, it means doing so eventually. One’s profile could cop to using a cane and brace, of course, but mine doesn’t, for…
Infrastructural Freedom Dreaming: On Jina B. Kim’s “Care at The End of The World”
Image Credit: © Jina B. Kim, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke University Press, 2025), reproduced under fair use provision (review). Jina B. Kim begins her new book – as the title, Care at The End of The World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-Of-Color Writing (2025),…
Reinventing Purpose: Meaning-Making in the Face of Pain and Illness
Image Credit: Photo by Sameer Srivastava on Unsplash For many of us, a sense of purpose is a fundamental psychological and existential need. Indeed, decades of health psychology research link a strong sense of purpose in life with less illness and a lower mortality risk (Alimujiang et al.; Shiba et al.; Boyle et al.)….
Fungal Epistemes and Crip Worldmaking
Image Credit: Photograph of fungal mycelium by Rob Hille, used under Creative Commons licence. If we end the story with decay, we abandon all hope––or turn our attention to other sites of promise and ruin, promise and ruin. The Art of Noticing, Anna Tsing Crip theory has often sought out conceptual frameworks that…