Event Description

This roundtable conversation considers what it means to write, make, and do (or not!) on crip time. Universities and other institutions typically represent disability through the logics of cost-burden models, which position disability as antithetical to collegiality, punctuality, responsibility, and, often, life. How might we work against, crip, and ultimately dismantle these systems? How might bed rest, deferrals, stims, stutters, and other embodyminded insights help us generate tactics for survival? How might we think about digital activism and disabled collectivity online in ways that provide us respite rather than distress? How might we collectively reimagine the temporalities of labor, care, and composing?

Panelists

Nirmala Erevelles

Professor, Social and Cultural Studies in Education 

The University of Alabama

Pronouns; she/her/hers

Nirmala Erevelles is Professor of Social and Cultural Studies in Education at the University of Alabama.  Her teaching and research interests lie in the areas of disability studies, critical race theory, transnational feminism, sociology of education, and postcolonial studies. Erevelles uses a materialist intersectional analysis to foreground the dialectical relationships between disability and race, class, gender, and sexuality and its brutal implications for (disabled) students in U. S. public schools and (disabled) citizens in transnational contexts.

Alt Text:  Photograph of a middle-aged South Asian woman with light brown skin, dark wavy hair with reddish highlights and glasses with pink frames half-smiling into the camera, 

Anna LaQuawn Hinton

Assistant Professor of Black Literary and Cultural Studies and Disability Studies

University of North Texas

Pronouns: She/her/hers

Anna LaQawn Hinton is an Assistant professor of Disability Studies and Black Literature & Culture in the English Department at the University of North Texas. She is also Public Relations Director for the College Language Association (CLA), an organization founded in 1937 by a group of Black scholars and educators of English and world languages, and a member of the Committee for Persons with Disabilities for the City of Denton (Texas). She has published about disability in regard to constructions of Black motherhood, masculinity in hip-hop, spaces of incarceration, reproductive justice in literature, and African and Afro-Diasporic spiritual practice as technology. She is a disabled-queer-momma Black feminist, who “Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk.(and striving to) Loves herself. Regardless.”*

ALT text: A fat, medium-deep brown skinned Black woman with shoulder length loc wearing an orange shirt.

Crystal Yin Lie

Assistant Professor of Comparative World Literature

California State University, Long Beach

Pronouns: she/her

Crystal Yin Lie is an Assistant Professor of Comparative World Literature at California State University, Long Beach, where she teaches courses on literature & medicine, health humanities, and comics & graphic narratives. She earned her BA from UCLA and PhD in English Language & Literature with a certificate in Science, Technology, and Society from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her main areas of research span disability studies and contemporary literature and life writing, particularly narratives of dementia and the memory of historical trauma. She also writes about graphic narratives and has forthcoming publications on comics and disability in the contexts of Black Lives Matter; chronic illness representation; and the lives of sideshow performers. Outside of academia she is an avid climber, live music enthusiast, and parent to two giant Bernedoodles.

ALT text: An Asian woman in her mid-thirties with shoulder-length black hair wearing a stripped shirt against a background of bookshelves. 

Vyshali Manivannan

Clinical Assistant Professor and Director of the Pleasantville Writing-Enhanced Courses Program, Dept. of Writing and Cultural Studies at Pace University - Pleasantville

Pronouns: She/her

Vyshali Manivannan is an Eelam Tamil American writer, educator, and creative-critical scholar with chronic pain and fatigue. Her work focuses on discourses around chronic pain and fatigue, intergenerational trauma stemming from the Tamil genocide and somatization, Euro-Western ocularcentrism, and developing a non-Western pained poetics. Her work has appeared in journals like Spark, Fourth Genre, The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, and Digital Health, and she recently co-edited two special issues on "Carework and Writing During COVID" for the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication, Information, and Media from Rutgers University and an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from Columbia University. 

Alt Text: A brown-skinned woman with short black hair and green wire-frame glasses smiles widely at the camera. She is wearing red lipstick, brass earrings, and a blue-and-orange patterned jumpsuit.