Introduction: Cripistemologies of Crisis: Emergent Knowledges for the Present

Leading up to the 2019 fire season, three large California power companies initiated a process called “de-energization,” or power shutoffs, in the name of public safety. As one New York Times article reports, “Never before in California history had a utility deliberately cut power to as many as three million people, which PG&E [Pacific Gas and Electric] did Oct. 26 [2019] in an attempt to prevent wildfires.”¹ This drastic approach did not actually prevent the company’s equipment from starting several fires.² Critics of the move, including climate scientist and founder of the Pacific Institute Peter Gleick, further cited the disruptive impact on city infrastructure, and called PG&E out for “shifting risk from its own corporate entity to the public.”³ Those most “at risk” became those residents who rely on power for daily life-sustaining needs—from ventilators that run on electricity to medication that needs refrigeration to air purifiers that make polluted air more breathable. The response from disability justice activists was swift in its condemnation, pointing to the disproportionate risk that the shutoffs posed for older, poor, and disabled people—particularly disabled people of color. Amid such public outcry, PG&E continued to claim that these power shutoffs were “necessary,” “the right thing to do,” and “critical to the safety of its customers,”⁴ telling “California energy regulators that the state [would] likely see blackouts for another 10 years.”⁵ 

For those to whom the loss of power presents imminent precarity, heightened vulnerability, and increased proximity to death, these ongoing blackout strategies essentially fabricate an ongoing state of life-threatening crisis. This crisis is brought on not only, or even primarily, by climate change and corporate negligence. Rather, it is facilitated by a biopolitical calculus that, as disabled writer and activist s.e. smith notes, “pits competing public health interests against each other,” sacrificing one in order to “manage” the other. ⁶ In initiating and continuing de-energization procedures, PG&E weighed the imminent crisis posed by the wildfires against the life-threatening crisis that de-energization created for some. Their actions indicate that the company considered the impact on “vulnerable populations” as less pressing than the potential impact of the wildfires.⁷ 

PG&E’s actions are emblematic of a fundamental way in which corporate capitalist interests are shored up by assumptions about the expendability of disabled and disability-adjacent populations. This anecdote operates according to a racial capitalist matrix, reliant on what we recognize as eugenic logics and crisis logics, which, viewed together, crystallize into a necropolitics of disability.⁸ An intensifying pattern of such rationalized (re)allocations of life-imperiling conditions onto variously disabled populations compels us, in this special issue, to attend to what we call crip knowledges of crisis—why we need them and what is at stake if we disregard them. The decision of PG&E to manage a crisis of fire risks by cutting off power regardless of the life-threatening impact on disabled, ill, and older adults who depend on it realizes a paradigmatically eugenic framing of disability and aging as individualized and medicalized, already bearing the mark of death. Through this frame, disabled and older adults are understood as inherently (i.e., biologically) at risk in ways that position caring for their increased vulnerability as “wasteful” or “unnecessary,” particularly in moments of exceptionalism and crisis management. By eugenic logics, the vulnerability that resides in the bodyminds of certain individuals is imagined to represent a culpability or threat—or even outright criminality—against the public good.⁹ In the above example, such an individualized and moralized vulnerability stands in distinct opposition to the more recognized and sanctioned collective vulnerability to an imminent crisis of wildfires, and the vulnerability for which PG&E has clearer liability, as the company responsible for the failing infrastructure that caused many of the fires. The imagined inherent vulnerability-cum-culpability of disabled and older adults, in turn, allows PG&E to abdicate responsibility for the life-threatening results of their crisis logic driven actions.   

While PG&E offers a “Medical Baseline Program” meant to provide electricity at lower rates as well as extra notifications in advance of shutoffs to “customers who have special energy needs due to qualifying medical conditions,” such alerts were reported to be uneven, at best.¹⁰ Notably, this program places PG&E in the position of adjudicating “qualifying” medical conditions and ties this process to “benefits” of lower rates. In doing so, the program relies on a contentious scientific administrative system mobilized to certify the truths of the body, which Ellen Samuels has termed biocertification.¹¹ Biocertifications such as doctors’ evaluations, diagnoses, and verifications, Samuels cautions, contribute to the bureaucratic abandonment of a whole set of people living with non-biocertified—“undocumented”—disabilities or impairments in ways that intersect with race, gender, citizenship status, and class to heighten the impact on those most marginalized.¹² Moreover, biocertifications respond to a very different type of (identity) crisis caused by the instability of the category of disability itself. Like countless other disability-related programs, the reduced-rate aspect of PG&E’s Medical Baseline Program ties the qualification process to a system incentivized to keep the number of those who qualify low. To be clear, highlighting and critiquing the ranked valuation process that PG&E engages in does not dismiss the very real and devastating impact of the fires themselves. However, unlike peer companies that opted for more targeted power-shut offs, PG&E’s sweeping de-energization, its reported lack of implementation of the promised advance notice of power-shut offs, and its reliance on systems of biocertification reveals a distinct reliance upon a necropolitics of disability that concretizes risk in order to justify its role in the debilitation and imperilment of whole groups of people under the auspices of “crisis” management. 

Versions of this ethical “trolley dilemma” have become even more pervasive in our cultural consciousness in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic: in situations where risk or death seem inevitable, crisis calculations direct decisions about whose risk and/or life matters more. This risk-evaluation practice, which manifests in the biopolitical devaluation of disabled lives, reflects a eugenic ideology, itself a long-standing conversation in critical disability studies that has only become more pressing within the context of COVID. For instance, Esther Ignagni, Eliza Chandler, and Loree Erickson describe how triage practices and the devastation of the virus within congregate care settings are merely an “amplification of this frame of disposability along interlocking markers of marginalization.”¹³ Importantly, they urge against the impulse to respond to this logic by outright rejecting the vulnerability assigned to disabled, chronically ill, and older adults. Refusing the realities of our vulnerabilities actually facilitates eugenic practices by, at best, leaving us “fatigued and overstretched, increasing our vulnerability” and, at worst, creating an “imperative to give up one’s right to healthcare.”¹⁴ Rather, crip interventions into this eugenic logic need to simultaneously map out the structural conditions of produced vulnerability and the harm that risk-logics enact, while also centering the claims of survival with and through such vulnerabilities. Several overlapping elements have enabled PG&E’s actions as well as the disproportionate devastation of COVID-19 on disabled people, communities of color, and frontline workers: the mobilization of risk assessment, the necropolitical marking of vulnerability as inherent in some, and the denial of prioritized care for those marked as vulnerable. 

There are, of course, no shortages of global existential crises and equally global, urgent, and existentially threatening crisis logics. There is also far more to say about crisis-related power shut-offs: the parsing out of risks and responsibilities in the face of environmental degradation, the abandonment of those most impacted, and the privatization of responsibility that the PG&E case reflects. As well, there is more to explore about the ways in which the COVID-19 public health crisis replicates some of these patterns. The PG&E example is, in this sense, both exemplary and banal, serving as a strikingly prescient example of the consequences of crisis logics on disabled, chronically ill, poor folks, and communities of color.

The concept for cripistemologies of crisis emerged from a conference call that we formulated (with essay contributor Angela Carter) for the Critical Disability Studies Caucus sponsored panel of the 2018 American Studies Association Conference. The call sought crip epistemologies responding to the escalating crisis rhetoric that circulated in the early years of the Trump presidency. As this collection has taken shape in the intervening years, the need for crip crisis knowledge has only further crystalized. To meet this demand, the essays included here reflect upon the endemic, ongoing, and cyclical presence of crises while simultaneously asking how to cultivate knowledge for living with and through said forms of crisis. 

This special section illustrates the violence done through the positioning of crisis as a singular and exceptional event that can mobilize seemingly exceptional forms of violence and neglect. The dangerous rhetoric of “unprecedented times” conveniently erases and overlooks those times and those lives that exist as an ongoing precedent to recognized/sanctioned crises. While crisis may be an affectively loaded designation of an exceptional temporality, it hinges upon a misrecognition of a crisis-event as a singular, troubling punctuation in a fantasy of an otherwise orderly and undisturbed warp and weft of daily life. Such fantastical and distinct temporalities of crisis and normalcy are emblematic of, and indeed foundational to, the control and violence inherent in the logic that organizes racial capitalism. Further, this fantasy of a singular punctuated crisis permits and perpetuates victim-blaming orientations, gaslighting, abandonment, and the realization of eugenic logics. Reckoning with the everyday nature of this violence is all the more urgent amidst imaginings of a “post-COVID” world that too easily draw sharp lines around a “pre” and “post” pandemic world in ways that fail to account for the systemic violence that operated before, during, and after COVID-19 in other, perhaps less spectacularized, forms. The essays in this special section, thus, refute and deconstruct the harmful implications of conceptualizing crisis within neat “post” and “pre” temporalities to ask not only what harm such temporalities cause but also to recognize the value of the accumulated knowledge of those surviving within such endemic states. 

As we elaborate more fully in a dedicated section on the essays below, our special section contributors consider the critical insights that theorizing experiences of disability, instability, and trauma offer to collective efforts to complicate understandings of the pace and politics of “crisis.” They present the crucial role that relationality and community play in intervening in the crisis logics outlined above. In “When Silence Said Everything: Reconceptualizing Trauma through Critical Disability Studies,” Angela Carter articulates a crip retheorization of trauma through a close reading of the relationality of trauma’s spacetime enacted by X González in their speech at the 2018 March for Our Lives. Alyson K. Spurgas’s “Solidarity in Falling Apart: Toward a Crip, Collectivist, and Justice-Seeking Theory of Feminine Fracture” counters the largely accepted theories of dissociation through a centering of minoritized and migrant trans women’s experiences to explore the endemic chronic and fractured everydayness of traumatized femme populations and experience. Finally, Jess Whatcott’s “Crip Collectivity Beyond Neoliberalism in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower” invites us into a speculatively-oriented cripistemology of crisis, with a practical guide as a takeaway. The essays offer textured conceptualizations of trauma and survival that fashion more radically just schematics for how we understand crisis in relation to race, gender, populations, and bodyminds that have been constituted by and through trauma and vulnerability. We contend that such reconceptualizations of cultural configurations of crisis both make available and take shape through modeling different possible and meaningful ways for us to listen to disabled, abandoned, traumatized, and dissociatively fractured (as Spurgas describes) voices. By drawing from the range of knowledge that these lives and histories have to offer, we can follow a different, if less stable and singular logic for navigating survival and creating community while in crisis. The cripistemologies of crisis generated by this special section build on critical disability studies theorizing and disability justice organizing in aspirational, generative, fractured, unstable, persistent, and coalitional ways. The essays step outside of established frameworks for meaning-making and press against the disciplinary boundaries of disability and cultural studies scholarship with an intention to recuperate more just possibilities for rethinking ourselves and our world with/in crisis.

Everyday Emergencies: Crip Temporality 

Theorizations of “states of exception,”¹⁵ “crisis ordinariness”¹⁶ and “everyday emergenc[ies]”¹⁷ outline the ways in which states of emergency often become protracted and systemic in ways that create chronic crises. These crises both result from and (re)enable forms of state violence and neglect, in the name of exigency and economic “preservation.” Mobilizations of such exceptionalism realize a necropolitics of disability that marks racialized, disabled, older, and sick bodies/populations as expendable. Furthermore, theorizations of debility, abandonment, and neglect highlight the disproportionate impact that both states of emergency and forms of “slow violence” have on the lives of racialized, classed, and disabled people.¹⁸ The increasing proliferation of disability scholarship is indispensable to making sense of ongoing moments of socio-political crisis, emergency, and exceptionality. Theorizations of crip time¹⁹ and crip spacetime,²⁰ emergent from lived experiences of disability, are particularly vital to the ongoing work of understanding and surviving a chronically debilitating socio-political context. As Ellen Samuels notes in her elaboration of crip time, “Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings.”²¹ Samuels theorizes disability’s unique structuring of time as dynamic, elliptical, and uneven. For her, crip time describes the multitude of ways that disability disrupts normative, progressive time to create new relationships to and forms of temporality that defy disability’s easy conflation with “crisis” time. 

These crip temporalities contrast starkly against the temporalities often assigned to disability, and offer crucial tools to think sociopolitical crisis and crisis logics anew. Feminist disability studies scholar Alison Kafer examines how “disability is seen as the sign of no future.”²² This lack of futurity works from and through the positioning of disability as something of a suspended present, a state of suspended tragedy with no promise or possibility. Further, while disability may also be seen as something that belongs in the past (as in: “shouldn’t we have found a cure for that already?”), disability can also complicate views of pastness more generally. Disabled people are rarely viewed as having a past that matters beyond the imagined tragedy of their disablement.²³ Disabled people’s pasts, with all of the knowledge, experience, and liveliness that they entail, are often denied a voice or value. We see this enacted in ways ranging from the systematic dismissal of experiential knowledge gathered from a lifetime of living with disabilities to the patronizing infantilization that underwrites not only pity and charity mentalities but also the surveillance, incarceration, and killing of people with disabilities. This, of course, does not account for the multitude of intersectional disability histories written out of how we understand “the past.” We hold these assumptions of a lack of pastness alongside denials of futurity to explicitly expose the temporalities read onto disability and deployed through crisis logics: disability as imagined to be stuck within a perpetual present state of deficit and loss. Crip time not only demands a reconceptualization of disability within time, but in opening up the multiple ways of living disability in time, crip time also provides a lens through which to read progressive temporality’s destructive and disciplinary mechanisms and their biopolitical implications.

States of instability and change perpetuate emergencies, in turn, making them into everyday experiences of chronicity and trauma. As Ben Anderson notes in his theorization of the everyday emergency, “a permanent ‘state of emergency’ is but one example of how the ‘everyday’ and ‘emergency’ blur in the midst of a background of perpetual instability and change.”²⁴ It is the systemic nature of structural violence, disorganizing and fragmenting access to resources, from electrical power to healthcare, that enacts a blurring of “everyday” and “emergency” categories of experience. Lauren Berlant’s theorization of “crisis ordinariness” suggests such perpetual and/or cyclical encounters with crisis create new forms of living with and in relationship to vulnerability, precarity, and violence. The essays within our collection chart the forms and modes of living that emerge from such everyday emergency; such “crisis ordinariness.” Putting an analysis of disability and crip time in relationship to these theorizations helps us to better see what is at stake in the mobilization of disability (in political discourse, the media, and policy implementations) within times of crisis and for the crip epistemologies that can intervene in such mobilizations. 

Cripistemologies of Crisis 

Cripistemologies of crisis builds upon Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer’s 2014 theorization of cripistemologies. Notably, they route their theorizations “through a reconsideration of Eve Kosofky Sedgwick’s Epistemologies of the Closet in order to bind cripistemology to crisis” and to pivot “away from certain dominant ways of knowing disability in our moment.”²⁵ Johnson and McRuer take up the discomfort produced by the porous boundaries of disability to mark the need for theorizations that take account of the mechanisms that demarcate and legitimate disability. Much like Sedgwick’s observation that the twentieth century is marked by a crisis of homo/heterosexuality, Johnson and McRuer suggest “that thought and knowledge in twenty-first-century Western culture as a whole is structured—indeed, fractured—by an endemic crisis of ability and disability.”²⁶ This theoretical origin story maps the link between cripistemologies and the mechanisms of classification and biocertification processes central to the crisis logics that we seek to intervene in. 

The essays within this special section may seem to take up very different forms of crisis—more seemingly material in their impact—than the meditations on taxonomic crisis that both Sedgwick and Johnson and McRuer open their interventions with. Yet, we contend that such distinctions between knowledge production, identity, and structural and material conditions foreclose the very analytical insights that cripistemologies offer and those most needed to address the current political and cultural moment marked by such perpetual states of urgency. Indeed, the lived biopolitical implications emergent from such taxonomic crises are the important “why” of such theorizations, in the first place. Johnson and McRuer tie crip theorization within the contemporary moment to a crisis marked by the tensions, productions, and fractures embedded within an ability/disability dialectic. As their theorization (and the interventions offered by the essays found here) makes clear, this dialectic is also embedded within the mobilization of “crisis” responses that make possible exceptionalized actions because crisis logics both depend upon distinctions between the disabled and the able-bodied and take advantage of the “crisis” of such categorical instability. In other words, the resistance of disability, illness, and vulnerability to clear categorizations not only causes crisis but is distinctively useful within and to crisis formations that rely on such definitional flexibility. 

If cripistemology is, as Johnson and McRuer note, bound to crisis, then perhaps the title of “Cripistemologies of Crisis” is a bit redundant. Yet, as crip theorists who live and think through pain, illness, and trauma, redundancy—including the state of no longer being needed or productive—perhaps perfectly reflects the starting point for the collection of essays gathered here. The sick, the pained, and the traumatized often come to signify redundancy, excess, and waste within a geopolitical landscape marked by expansive global capital, state-sanctioned violence, and neoliberal necropolitics. On another, connected register, redundancy can feel constitutive of experiences of illness, trauma, and pain—from the material realities of too much pain, too many sick days, and overlapping, excessive triggers to interactions with systems and structures that dismiss and deny those experiences, particularly for those marked by intersectional axes of disability, race, gender, class, and sexuality. Thus, we call attention to the redundancy embedded within the title as a way to name and mobilize these positions of dismissal, degradation, and excess that mark the points of theorization that our authors speak to and from. In fact, the title for the conference panel where these essays first appeared was, “Beyond Recovery: Cripistemologies of Continuous Crisis,” further emphasizing the recursive and endemic experiences of crisis that characterize disabled, chronically ill, socially abandoned, and post-traumata lives that our authors theorize.

There is also an internal circularity to our collection of essays that reminds us of the value of lingering and multiple meditations. Our introduction and Whatcott’s essay theorize cripistemologies of crisis to indict eugenic logics operating in the present day, that paradoxically produce and seek to purge (certain populations as) fantastically perceived agents of crisis. Spurgas and Carter engage with experiences of ongoing crises and lives shaped by trauma. Indeed, this parallelism compels us to ask: What are cripistemologies of crisis if they do not engage with experiences of trauma; and what is an analysis of trauma that does not consider the biopolitical matrix that continually shifts blame and culpability onto its most vulnerable? 

Cripistemology and Survival (Or, What Do We Do with Our Cripistemology Theorizing?)

Critical disability studies and disability justice writings both come out of histories of exclusion within disability rights struggles and situate relational experiences and knowledges that have been on the margin of disability epistemologies. In a field-shifting special section-conversation in Lateral in 2016 and 2017, Julie Avril Minich, Sami Schalk, and Jina B. Kim articulate the stakes and contours of a critical disability studies methodology. Minich’s essay initiates a conversation that invites us to consider critical disability studies as a methodology that exercises accountability with regard to the field’s “origins in social justice work”—a goal that our special issue seeks to extend through explicit engagement with disability justice work and orientations.²⁷ Minich points to the field’s silences around questions of race and asks us to take seriously the question of the beneficiary of disability studies and writes that the field’s “scrutiny of normative ideologies should occur not for its own sake but with the goal of producing knowledge in support of justice for people with stigmatized bodies and minds” (emphasis in original).²⁸ Attentive to the slipperiness of stable and certifiable disability status, Sami Schalk argues, in her 2017 response to Minich’s piece, “for the inclusion of illness and disease no matter what the current definitions of disability might be.”²⁹ In the same issue, Jina B. Kim describes Minich’s theorization as moving us beyond “the same questions of representation and legibility—what can currently be recognized as disability—but rather to the systemic de-valuation (and oftentimes, subsequent disablement) of non-normative bodies and minds.”³⁰ Kim’s essay articulates a crip-of-color critique that attends to “relations of social, material, and prosthetic support—that is, the various means through which lives are enriched, enabled, and made possible,”  and which “honors vulnerability, disability, and inter/dependency, instead of viewing such conditions as evidence of political failure or weakness.”³¹

Our collective attention to eugenic and crisis logics as a necropolitics of disability necessarily moves in support of justice for people whose experiences may not often be readily identified with disability, or at least not with the dominant image of the visibly disabled or mobility-impaired. Our authors draw from the insights of disability justice as key to simultaneously capturing the harm enacted by crisis logics and the value of knowledge produced by those most impacted by it. These, importantly, come through the experiences of racialized groups; those in chronic and under-recognized pain, or with nebulous diagnoses; groups vulnerable to environmental toxicity and with tenuous access to care and resources; populations routinely subject to traumas of social denigration. The cripistemologies of crisis that our authors offer call upon a crip-of-color methodology to center emergent minoritized epistemologies that inform our critical disability studies and disability justice theorizing and strategizing. Our contributors’ essays, topic, and turn of phrase—cripistemologies of crisis—center nonwhite crip voices and lives and seek to further honor the forms of vulnerability and accountability that enrich and enable alternative forms of the future. 

In her 2018 book, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, disability justice organizer and author Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha positions disability justice dreams and crip knowledge as central to survival and resistance in the face of rising fascism, climate change, environmental toxicity, and state violence. She recalls the mobilization of survival tips garnered from living and moving in a world that actively tries to kill (or let die) queer, trans, black, and brown disabled in the wake of the California fires. Piepzna-Samarasinha writes, “With all our crazy, adaptive-deviced, loving kinship and commitment to each other, we will leave no one behind as we roll, limp, stim, sign and create the decolonial living future.”³² She follows up: “I am dreaming like my life depends on it. Because it does. And so does yours.”³³ The dream of a future led by disability justice knowledge centers the creativity, resilience, and force that thrives within and in spite of ongoing and historical violence and does not obscure the conditions from whence such forms of creativity and resilience emerge. Disability justice knowledge draws attention to states and systems of ongoing crisis and violence because of the movement’s commitment to centering the voices and experiences of those most marginalized and most impacted by state violence. The essays in our collection follow this commitment, bringing cripistemological theorizing of crisis directly into conversation with the dreams and knowledges produced by disability justice and intersectional social justice theorists.³⁴ In short, this special section joins calls within the field for a recognition of disability justice work as central to the future of critical disability studies. 

The fires that Piepzna-Samarasinha describes, of course, are the very same that PG&E cites as the justification for the shut offs of 2019 that further threatened disabled lives and, in turn, made crip knowledge, kinship, and commitment to survival all the more necessary. In response to the PG&E shutoffs, disability justice activist Stacey Milbern similarly describes the skills, community, and resources that the Disability Justice Culture Club and disabled people tapped into to identify needs with available resources. Milbern echoes the specific knowledge of survival born from disability experiences, stating, “disabled people have done a lot of work around living interdependently and knowing how to build support networks so when there is an emergency, we switch into things we do every day and it benefits the community as a whole.”³⁵ This mobilization emerges from a recognition that, “Nobody else is going to save us, so we have to save ourselves.”³⁶ The knowledge of what happens to disabled, poor, and older people of color in crisis—the lived experiences of abandonment, violence, and neglect—are the conditions of emergence for survival knowledge. 

At the same time, do not these very conditions that Piepzna-Samarasinha, Milbern, and others describe—ongoing racialized, classed, xenophobic, and ableist violence—work to destroy the knowledge, skills, and resources needed to survive such assaults? How do we honor the knowledge and survival skills that disability/disabled living may offer when the task of simply trying to stay alive can prevent and frustrate the cultivation and sharing of this knowledge? We have lost far too many leaders of this work, far too soon, to not simultaneously reckon with the reality that such knowledge is conditioned by the precarity of those who produce, shepherd, and archive it. How do we account for the precariousness of both our lives and our knowledges in calls to value and center those most marginalized? And what role does critical disability studies, as a methodology, play in this process?

While these are questions that go beyond the space and scope of this introduction, they are also questions that require the breadth and reach of knowledge developed across interdisciplinary fields, activist spaces like those created by disability justice workers, and artist imaginaries. As we bind together cripistemologies, disability justice insights, and a crip-of-color critique, we are also expressing a need for theoretical work and praxis both within and outside of the academy to arrive at more just approaches to states of crisis. There are importantly different genealogies of this theorizing within and outside of the academy that we do not want to glide over in bringing these bodies of work together. Yet, given the stakes of such precarious and vital knowledge for our collective survival, we see the urgency of this “bringing together” as an important means by which to begin to meaningfully address such difficult questions as the ones we name above. Committed to questions of intellectual accountability, we and the authors in the special section—and the work that they engage with—suggest that crip theorizing on/of crisis offers a crucial companion for a larger project of producing, shepherding, and archiving (crip) knowledge across its multiple and overlapping paths. With this special section, we gather diverse traumatized, fracturing, empathetic knowledges into the rubric of cripistemologies of crisis to recognize these crip ways of thinkfeeling, being, and relating as a necessary form of theorizing. 

Contributions to Crisis Knowing: Crip Selves, Experiences, and Futures

In elaborating on the intervention of critical disability methodology and crip-of-color critique in teaching and knowledge production, Jina B. Kim draws out a “refusal to view the university as the only legitimate site of knowledge production. [Women of color] feminist and disabled intellectuals have long written and theorized outside the boundaries of institutional approval, and their words have survived nonetheless.”³⁷ Audre Lorde opens The Cancer Journals (1980) saying that she “believes our feelings need voice in order to be recognized, respected, and of use.”³⁸ The essays in our collection offer cripistemologies of crisis that listen to variously voiced feelings and experiences, and recognize and respectfully gather them to be of use toward survival and collective care. As well, the authors center activists, survivors, and visionaries of color as key theorists, enacting the collective and relational aspects of the project that Lorde lays out. Angela Carter’s essay reads X González’s speech as a site of critical disability knowledge production, turning to the youth activist and trauma survivor as a theorist—as a “legitimate site of knowledge production.” Through the lens of survivors of gendered and sexual violence, Alyson Spurgas’s essay attends to the experiential, daily lived experience of trauma as a gendered as well as raced and classed experience, and Jess Whatcott’s reading of Butler’s Parable of the Sower follows within the critical disability methodological turn toward Octavia Butler’s texts as key sources toward imagining crip and crip-of-color futures. 

Carter carefully reconceptualizes trauma through critical disability studies, advocating for a political/relational approach to trauma that allows us to see how it is socially constructed “even as it is held deep within our bodyminds.” Carter cautions that, misrecognized, ontological and ongoing experiences of crisis and “ordinary” trauma are rarely valorized as trauma and are instead coded in racializing, gendering, pathologizing, and criminalizing ways. Countering a hermeneutic of victim blaming such as the one we describe in our opening example, Carter’s analysis valorizes and invites us into trauma’s unstable spacetimes. Carter contends that “definitions of trauma must be untethered from the ‘event(s)’ that may initiate it,” which is associated with the tendency to rank and “certify” traumas. Carter’s close reading of survivor-activist X González’s speech models how to more fully engage with counter-hegemonic and counter-rehabilitative experiences as a way of being with trauma. Radically conceived invitations to move with—not against—trauma’s spacetimes can, as Carter shows, be a source of coalition and community, reminding us of our deep interconnectedness, our interdependence. Interweaving personal reactions to González’s speech with this theoretical intervention, Carter also models a process of thinkfeeling that underscores the very political/relational model of trauma she lays out by using the lines tethering her own spacetime of trauma and those González offers in the speech as a refraction point for crip theorizing.

Through a similar series of provocations and questions, Alyson Spurgas’s contribution “illuminates the full spectrum of feminized trauma experiences” in ways that enact the theoretical leverage made possible by the very untethering of trauma from its singular “event” that Carter proposes. Spurgas suggests that a categorical refusal to listen to the experiences and knowledges of othered, vulnerable populations is covered over by hegemonic assumptions about trauma’s ties to dissociation and unnarratability. Exposing this fundamental rhetorical violence in trauma discourse, Spurgas argues that a willful, political silencing has too long been misrecognized for a loss of language and looks toward the capacity for solidarity that can emerge from attending to voices of trauma, un-silenced. Her exploration of trauma as constitutive of femininity, along with her attention to continuous and mundane forms of trauma, considers the experiences of migrant trans women, articulating a coalitional counternarrative to dominant understandings of trauma. In doing so, Spurgas provides a theory of feminine fracturing capable of accounting for the forms of slow, chronic, ongoing violence experienced by multiply marginalized femmes and, thus, forwards a cripistemological intervention into the very symptomology that concretizes trauma—both within mental health care and the popular imaginary—within a white, middle-class subjectivity. Spurgas’s and Carter’s interventions make possible and foster the forms of recognizing and living (together) with (rather than the impossible mandate to recover from) trauma’s ongoing and systemic impact on multiply marginalized communities. 

Closing out our special section, Whatcott engages with Octavia Butler’s crip Black feminist speculative world-making, which, Whatcott makes clear, is indissociable from Butler’s “diagnoses [of] the disabling conditions of precarity under neoliberalism.” Building on the recognition of Butler’s work as central to crip theorizing and Black disability studies specifically, Whatcott’s analysis lays bare the paradoxical logics of eugenic ideologies that drive these “disabling contradictions of neoliberal governance,” as they term them, and which we draw out here as a manifestation of racial capitalism. Within and beyond these conditions in Butler’s Parable of the Sower, the protagonist Olamina leads a collective that, Whatcott argues, offers survival kits and practices that real collective networks—among readers and scholars of Butler, and arguably beyond—follow as maps for emerging and even thriving amid a world in crisis. Taking up the call to collectivity by way of relational trauma experiences and responses that both Carter and Spurgas outline, and which Parable’s Olamina also lives, Whatcott makes clear that “the anticipation of the failure of the status quo,” as Butler’s text details, needs to be central to cripistemological work.

Each of the essays, in their own way, takes up this question of how we listen—and to whom—in our quest for accountable crip knowledge production. It is not enough to attend to minoritized experiential knowledges without a situated interrogation of whose experiences we center in our crip theorizing, and of the violent conditions of racial capitalism within which these experiences take shape. Carter, Spurgas, and Whatcott all stake a claim in raising, and then answering, such questions. As Carter and Spurgas’s essays carefully lay out, there is an ontological and continuous “tense” of trauma that shapes the experience of (feminized) communities of color and that requires attention to the specificities of trauma’s temporal and spatial relationalities. And Whatcott’s essay illustrates a speculative future of what (via Butler) we might accomplish if we not only listen but follow the lead of those most marginalized by state violences.    

In engaging ways of being and knowing in the world that emerge from lives lived in and through trauma and crisis, our collection of essays values the paradigmatic importance of the critical, strategic, and caring epistemologies that variously disabled and racialized people produce in living with and through impairment and precarity. While marking and calling out the endemic structural violence that engenders such conditions in the first place, Carter, Spurgas, and Whatcott chart how lived experiences of debility, instability, and trauma can equip us to navigate states of local and global crisis in an emergent and socially fortifying modality. The cripistemologies of crisis that unfold across the essays offer indispensable lenses through which to rethink—and care for—our ongoing necropolitical, racial capitalist present, offering an epistemological toolkit to theorize and survive the lived impacts of such naturalized quotidian violence.

In Conclusion

Given the centrality of temporalities to cripistemologies of crisis, we want to acknowledge the time and space of our own thinking: marking the spacetime of our knowledge production in relation to lived crisis. We wrote the first full draft of this introduction in the midst of the first-wave of COVID-19, and wrapped up the edits just under a year later, amid another corporate-risk management-driven electrical outage with deadly consequences in Texas. The ongoing pandemic has compelled us to explore cripistemologies within not only a protracted, global state of crisis but to also mark the individual related instantiations of said crisis on our local lives. During this time, cities across the world have moved in and out of states of emergency as cases ebbed and flowed and new epicenters of the pandemic emerged. The media was flooded with competing narratives of the virus’ seriousness, fueled in no small part by state responses articulating greater concern about economic impact rather than the health and well-being of people—particularly of low-wage essential workers, often disproportionately people of color. Within the United States, the large number of gig workers as well as the lack of state healthcare, widespread testing, or social welfare has only further exposed the fault lines of social, political, and economic systems that are already known to so many.³⁹ 

We have also observed these unfoldings from two different continents—Theodora in Washington DC and Aly in Prague—which made explicit the different temporalities of the global emergency and its relationship to state responses and neglect. For instance, the state of emergency and travel restrictions declared by both the US and the Czech Republic in March 2020 created its own form of risk-calculation as Aly weighed the heightened risk of the virus (particularly following the funneling of all incoming international flights to selected airports)⁴⁰ against the uncertainty of what remaining in the Czech Republic indefinitely might mean for visa requirements and work demands. A decision to stay, conditioned by heightened vulnerability to the virus, also underscored the privilege embedded within such a decision: from the ability to work remotely to an eventual temporary residency status (an opportunity created by the prolonged state of emergency) through partnership with an EU citizen.⁴¹

Further, the Czech Republic made international headlines in the first few months of the pandemic for its early adoption of masks and its relatively mild first wave. A collective national response to social distancing and movement restrictions meant that as the US saw climbing virus rates in the summer and debated reopening plans, the Czech Republic celebrated a reopening of minimal risk. During this time, the threat of the virus for Aly remained largely located in a different time and place: within a past first wave, a future resurgence, and within the US (as a risk to friends and loved ones). Yet, this shifted quickly when, in the fall, the Czech Republic overtook the United States in per-capita infection rates and became a prescient example of the dangers of unguarded and celebratory reopening. As the one-year mark of the border closures between Europe and the US approaches, the Czech Republic remains in a protracted lockdown, with new infection rates persistently high and further restrictions loom amidst new, more virulent variants. These changing restrictions again propelled rapid travel adjustments as Aly returned to the US to access the vaccine.⁴² 

Meanwhile, in DC, the experience has been one of compressed and suspended temporalities for Theodora, holed up in a tiny den in her shared apartment, whose privileged ability to work remotely (with all of the attendant precarity and exhaustions) as an adjunct professor has been counterbalanced with her partner’s job as an essential worker continuing to go in to work at the Starbucks closest to the White House, rocked amid the pandemic year’s surges of protest, uprisings, and finally insurrection. Time, during the fall semester, was suspended for Theodora as a high-risk family member became critically ill with COVID, spending six uncertain weeks in intensive care followed by six more weeks in a rehabilitation facility in Baltimore, more than an hour’s drive away. Managing communication, care, and support for her sister and brother-in-law while teaching online and (not) processing the trauma of critical illness in one’s inner circle has nevertheless been from a position of great relative privilege, not least in the timing of the family member’s illness between COVID peaks such that he could access needed care and supplies at a time of pandemic “lull,” and after an initial peak in which much was learned through trial, error, and tragedy. Following his return home, Theodora’s crisis orientation shifted to concern for her partner’s safety amid threats of right-wing violence near the White House. Following the January 6 insurrection, her partner, whose job supplies her with health care benefits, has been primarily serving members of the national guard who have since taken up residence in the downtown hotels, creating new relational frames of reference to yet another form of crisis management.

These refractions and reflections from across space and time have only further underscored the need for the cripistemologies of crisis that the authors in our special section take up, as well as the need for continued, contextually specific, and localized knowledges of the lived experiences of crisis that we hope this conversation further invites and sparks. Arguments reiterating the relative “safety” of younger folks without underlying medical conditions echo across not only the two locales we occupy but much of the world media, implicitly positioning racialized essential workers, those with disabilities, chronic illnesses, and older adults as inherently vulnerable and, thus, inevitable casualties. In many ways mirroring the PG&E rhetoric around emergency measures, the global response to the coronavirus re-naturalizes vulnerability and risk within some of the most vulnerable. Calls to stay at home, wash your hands frequently, and self-quarantine also leave little options for people without homes, those living in provisional housing, or those without regular access to soap and water, as well as underpaid essential workers for whom such safety measures are denied, and whose establishments’ bathrooms frequently serve underhoused people. The early pandemic stockpiling of goods and supplies similarly impacted those who cannot readily access excess funds, including those on fixed, unstable, or grossly insufficient incomes; including adjuncts without savings accounts, and whose credit cards already hover at the credit limit, if they have them. We now see this phenomenon of uneven access and care replaying on both a national and an international scale with vaccine rollouts. The emergency declarations across the globe further enable the crisis logics and attendant policy responses similar to those explored in our introduction, but have also inevitably produced new formations and combinations of uneven state support—such as stimulus checks, debt relief, and loan programs—and neglect that will inevitably add to the contours of ongoing crisis and emergency. The depiction of the coronavirus as a “Chinese” or “Wuhan” virus also means that the enactments of debilitation, abandonment, and precarity combine with racism and xenophobia to create further forms of violence and exclusion, more starkly bifurcating those who are targeted for emergency state support and those who are left to die.

While this unfolding crisis calls for dedicated critical analysis (which has already begun), as we have written this introduction in the context of multiple and shifting emergency measures, we cannot help but hope that readers find the issues taken up here as relevant to the current global crisis as they are to the specific contexts our authors take up.⁴³ The re-theorization of the temporalities of trauma and its relationship to racialized, classed, and gendered violence undoubtedly lends itself to the ongoing processes of making sense of the chronic state of stress that is differentially impacting us all. Cripping our understandings of crisis through a centering of trauma further grounds cripistemologies of crisis to the bodyminds of those most impacted by the violence that we and our authors engage with. Following the insights of our authors, then, we suggest that cripistemologies of crisis offer ways to thinkfeel through more relational and fractured responses to the unfolding moment that at once anticipate the failures of the status quo.

The possibilities that such cripistemologies of crisis open, of course, are mixed with a desperate urgency to guard against the harm of crisis logics that this knowledge seeks to remake.⁴⁴ We have seen collective crip responses to COVID-19: the mobilization of care, resource sharing, and the fierce calls to center communities of color, disabled, chronically ill, and older adults in emergency planning and vaccine prioritization. From within these same groups, crip knowledges of surviving prolonged isolation, navigating with immunocompromised conditions, facilitating alternative and remote access to meetings, events, and activities, practicing social distancing, and creatively problem-solving seemingly impossible situations have, indeed, been the skills the world needs to survive this crisis and those that follow. The question remains, of course, to what extent these knowledges are recognized as part of future-building work, and to what extent the crisis logics that dismiss and devalue disabled lives will dismiss and devalue crip knowledge. One of the failures we might anticipate, then, is the ways in which crisis logics will operate through an extraction and ultimate dismissal of such knowledges. Crip practices of upending our understandings of emergency— interrupting, slowing down, and creating space to listen within the silencing agenda of crisis logics—offers a vital pathway to safeguarding and honoring the crip knowledges of survival that our authors follow. In other words, cripistemologies of crisis are necessary to resist the almost inevitable devaluation of crip knowledge by locating its value within the bounded spacetime of hegemonic crisis logics. Only by exposing and remaking our understandings of crisis can we fully nurture the survival of our communities’ knowledges, legacies, and lives. 

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Angela Carter, Alyson Spurgas, and Jess Whatcott for persevering with this project and making it happen. The authors would also like to thank the Critical Disability Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association and all of the conference panelists whose work helped give birth to this special section: Stevi Costa, Ally Day, Elizabeth Freeman, Meghann O’Leary, Rose Miyatsu, and Margaret Price. We would also like to thank Misha Appeltova for her crucial insights in the final stages of editing the introduction.