Moving Forward

With the rise of activist reclamation terms such as "crip," would the disabled community be offended if an able-bodied person incorporated that terminology into their everyday language and used it to address them? Or would they be content with the fact that their reclamation is being noticed and regarded? Also, from the perspective of an able-bodied person, what are tangible ways in which I could be more intentional about respecting the disabled community without arrogance or condescension?

In my classroom, I make it very clear that I'm not there to be a "word police" - students get very concerned about their use of "lame" or "crazy," which I think is good awareness but ultimately, I'm less committed to word usage than I am to what the person using it is intending to do with that word. I don't have problems with ablebodied people using crip, though my expectation is that the person knows what claiming crip means and what kind of history, politics, and culture they are identifying with. Identity is often thrown around as if it were a label you put on or take off, but for me, it's also about a set of ethical responsibilities to be educated about an identity you are claiming for yourself. I have many disabled friends who hate the word "crip" for its associations with "cripple" as a slur and its gang association with the "Crips" - again, rather than a one-size-fit-all model, I'd always defer to the person I'm speaking with and identify them how they want to be identified. It's a simple kind of humility that dignifies how someone else wants to see themselves.

Do you think there will be other areas of cripistemology developed in order to tackle the ableism within other areas of academia? Do you think that it is important to have these other areas of academia center around cripistemology separate from others or do you eventually want them to come together to embrace cripistemology?

These are urgent and provocative questions that I grapple with as a junior scholar all the time. Given the state of academia, it is uncertain whether fields like Disability Studies have futures at all as more and more scholars are pushed out of the academy because of the lack of jobs and the corporatization of Higher Ed. I think though that the provocations by disabled scholars have begin to pervade other fields and have begin to catalyze a series of conversations about accessibility more broadly and the ableism of academic culture. The rise of fields like Mad Studies gesture to a real desire for an academy that really does include disabled people rather than keeps them out. I'm worried though about the "inclusion" of disability that's actually more marketing than real investments in disabled people - when disability becomes "marketable" like "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion," it becomes all too convenient for institutions to claim they care and then profit from that virtue signaling rather than really invest in disabled scholars and disabled scholarship.