With Grief and Joy — Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry, Part II

Photo courtesy of Alecsander Alves.

This second installment of “Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry” opens with a reflection on transformative access and its visioning work. We weave this discussion through not only the eight new pieces found within this issue, but also through a reflection on the practices of access and care that enabled the writing, editing, and publication process itself. We conclude with two artifacts: The first is the “Accessible Knowledge Production Manifesto” that emerged as a collectively authored set of demands generated at a workshop we held in connection to the launch of our first installment of “Crip Pandemic Life.” The second is a link to a resource list, “Continuing Threads and Proliferations; Crip Pandemic Life Archive,” compiled by Corbin Outlaw, which links out to other pandemic projects documenting crip, disabled, chronically-ill, mad, and neurodivergent experiences, particularly highlighting experiences not captured within our tapestry of crip pandemic life.

Review of Talking White Trash: Mediated Representations and Lived Experiences of White-Working Class People by Tasha R. Dunn (Routledge)

Pulpolux !!! Courtesy of _MG_8415 (CC BY-NC 2.0).

In Talking White Trash, Tasha R. Dunn provides a multi-methodological investigation into the representations of white working-class people on screen and the everyday lives of members of the white working-class. Her work provides a nuanced way to understand the reinforcement of stereotypical depictions of this population, as well as how the white working class “talks back” to these representations. The book draws from the current political and cultural moment to assert how white working-class identity is constructed, and advocates for a more complex reading of this population than is often provided in mediated texts.