ID: On a blue sky pink cloud background, there is a purple microphone icon with a heart on it in the upper left corner and the event title in white text to the right: Crip Mentoring, Access Advocacy, & the Job Market. Underneath are oval headshots of the panelists (left to right): Sara M. Acevedo, Vyshali Manivannan, Crystal Lie, Rua M. Williams. Under the headshots is the event description in black text. The bottom of the event flyer is lined with a row of colorful little houses and buildings. It also features the DISCO logo on the left, a rainbow infinity sign in the center, and the Digital Accessible Futures Lab logo on the right.

Panelists

Sara M. Acevedo, Assistant Professor in Disability Studies at Miami University

She/her

Sara M. Acevedo is an autistic Mestiza, critical educator, and disability studies scholar-activist born and raised in Colombia. Her formal training is in historical linguistics, action anthropology, and disability studies. Dr. Acevedo is an Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at Miami University in Ohio and acts as a liaison with the MLA's Disability Coalition Network. She also serves on the editorial boards of Disability and the Global South: The International Journal and Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture. Dr. Acevedo employs research as praxis along with activist ethnographic methods and draws from a variety of critical traditions, including plural feminisms, liberatory pedagogy, geographies of disability, critical autism studies, and others. Overall, her work is rooted in anti-racist, anti-ableist, decolonial, anti-capitalist, and disability justice praxis. Her research focuses on grassroots disabled leadership, horizontal organizing, the politics of self-direction and self-governance, and the creation of liberated communities and autonomous spaces by and for neurodivergent people living at the intersection of other minoritized identities.

Crystal Yin Lie, Assistant Professor at California State University Long Beach 

she/her/hers 

Crystal Yin Lie received her PhD in English Language & Literature with a graduate certificate in Science, Technology, & Society from the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersections of disability studies, contemporary literature, and visual culture. She is working toward a book project on women’s life writing on dementia and the memory of historical trauma. She currently teaches courses in Health Humanities, Literature & Medicine, and Comics & Graphic Narratives.

Vyshali Manivannan, Lecturer of Writing Studies and Director of the Pleasantville Writing-Enhanced Courses Program, Dept. of Writing & Cultural Studies at Pace University - Pleasantville

She/her/hers

Vyshali Manivannan is an interdisciplinary creative-critical scholar who has written extensively about the experience of non-apparent chronic pain and about the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. Her scholarship has appeared in publications such as the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, Digital Health, Fibreculture, and Enculturation, and her creative work has been featured in literary journals like Fourth Genre, The Paris Review, Consequence, and Black Clock. She serves as a Writing Studies Lecturer at Pace University and is a Ph.D. candidate in Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. She also holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from Columbia University and a B.A. in English from Dartmouth College.

Rua M. Williams, Assistant Professor Purdue University

They/Them

Rua M. Williams is an Assistant Professor in the User Experience Design program at Purdue Univeristy. They study interactions between technology design, computing research practices, and Disability Justice. Common approaches to technology and service design for marginalized people tend to naturalize existing inequities, exacerbating injustice even while they attempt to ameliorate it. Dr. Williams deploys Feminist and Anti-Racist approaches to Technoscience, Critical disability Studies, and Science and Technology Studies in the design and evaluation of technological systems to simultaneously illustrate injustice in technology as well as marginalized users’ own practices of resistance through those same technologies.

Description

Learn from emerging scholars about navigating interdisciplinary work as a new faculty member, how to think through disability disclosure and pandemic burnout, as well as advice about access advocacy and crip mentoring.

Registration Private

Accessibility

CART will be provided. Reach out to ericcman@umich.edu with any questions about accommodations.

ID: Dr. Sara M. Acevedo

ID: Crystal Yin Lie

ID: Vyshali Manivannan

ID: Rua M. Williams