60. COVID and Cripistemology: Disability and Knowledge During a Pandemic
Rebecca Monteleone, University of Toledo; Helena Moura Fietz, Rice University; Emily Lim Rogers, Brown University
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol, Portuguese/Portugués
In this panel, we invite presentations that grapple with the ontological and epistemological implications of the COVID-19 pandemic as both a mass disabling event and one that laid bare the entrenched systemic invalidation of disabled lives across the globe. In particular, we are interested in interrogating the following questions: what transformations must occur in order to “live together,” in uncertain times? How might we leverage the unique cripistemologies (Johnson and McRuer, 2014) of disabled people, particularly those who are multiply-marginalized, to imagine radically anti-ableist futures, even when (especially when) those futures contain global threats to humanity and resource scarcity?
Potential topics could include:
Examples of “crip technoscience” (Hamraie and Fritsch 2019)–disabled/crip innovation, expertise, and creativity–in the pandemic era;
The reconsideration of disability as a social, political, and personal category in light of disablement in the pandemic;
Crip-led mutual aid and community initiatives;
Reconfigurations of networks and distributions of care labor;
The disproportionate impact of the virus on disabled people made invisible through their institutionalization in nursing homes, group homes, and prisons;
The invalidation or erasure of disabled expertise and knowledge throughout the pandemic;
Deprioritization of disabled people in all levels of public health and emergency planning;
Discourses around “allowable” deaths and pre-existing conditions;
The disproportionate impact of the pandemic on multiply-marginalized disabled people, especially disabled people in the Global South;
Imaginaries of post-pandemic futures, recuperation, and “returns to normal” in light of long COVID.
We explicitly invite papers from different localities, methodologies, and formats.
