In this conversation, Clayton is joined by Dr. Mimi Khúc and Dr. Margaret Price to discuss their new books dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss and Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life, both from Duke University Press. The three have a wide-ranging conversation about capitalist mandates for wellness, appropriations of accessibility and cultures of care in the university, the ways race and racism refract experiences of disability and unwellness, and how academe structures the very power imbalances that make crip spacetime and claiming unwellness precarious and often harmful. 

⁠Interview Transcript⁠

De/Instutionalize is a series from Un/Livable Cultures focusing on the ways in which academic cultures are made livable and unlivable and how these institutions can participate in regimes of oppression and subjugation.

Mimi Khúc is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is the creator of Open in Emergency and the Asian American Tarot. Check out dear elia book tour dates and information.

Margaret Price is Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University, author of Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, and co-founder of the Transformative Access Project.

Clayton Jarrard works at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives at the nexus of research, policy implementation, and community efforts, and he is an incoming student at NYU's Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement program.

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Sources

Disrupting White Mindfulness: Race and Racism in the Wellbeing Industry by Cathy-Mae Karelse

“Writing While Adjunct: A Contingent Pedagogy of Unwellness” by Mimi Khúc in Crip Authorship: Disability as Method edited by Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez

Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity by Simi Linton