Race, Disability, Unstable Epistemologies

Mel Y. Chen, Gender Women’s Studies

To what degree what is dismissively or apologetically called “brain fog,” or other cognitive states of difference, must be excluded from the presumed activity of cripistemology, given its active suppression particularly within academic spaces, including disability studies. In turning to cripping partiality, it attends to the concomitant importance of addressing questions of racialization and decolonization.

Alisa Bierria, Center for Race Gender

How might we describe the practice of choice-making when some agents’ intentions are structurally distorted, and they are forced to act agentically in conditions of violence and precarity? This talk will critique the principle of efficacy as a criterion for agency. Using disability theoretical insights, I consider the practice of intending and acting in the context racialized violence and erasure, and I propose a mapping (rather than a measuring) model of agency that incorporates the experience of struggle.