Coming soon: "Cultural Madness"

“Cultural Madness: Notes on an 

Anthropology of Psychosocial Disability”

Featuring Karen Nakamura

Thursday, Oct 22nd, 3:45-5:00 pm 

310 Media & Public Affairs Building

The George Washington University

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Nakamura is a cultural and visual anthropologist who researches disability movements in contemporary Japan. Her first project was on sign language, identity, and deaf social movements and resulted in a monograph and edited volume. After that, her second project was on schizophrenia and community-based recovery in Japan and this resulted in a book, its translation, and two films. She is currently finishing a third project which explores the intersections of disability, gender, and sexuality and will result in a book titled: Trans/Japan. After that, she is working on a project on prosthetic, replacement, and augmentation technologies in contemporary Japan and the USA.

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The event is wheelchair accessible. We welcome deaf & hearing 

impaired participants. Please contact dtmitchel@gwu.edu for ASL access

Sponsored by:

the English Department and Disability Student Services

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MATCH is Back: Planning Meeting 2015/16

This past week, M.W. Bychowski and Samuel Yates met to assess the accomplishments of the previous year and to plan events for Fall 2015 - Spring 2016.

Previously, monthly reading groups have proven a successful way to collect together scholars interested in topics related to crip and queer theory. We remembered the Low Theory discussion where MATCH affirmed through J. Jack Halberstam's Queer Art of Failure that philosophically rich cultural studies does not require participants to been fluent in a wide range of jargon or have the whole bibliography of theoretical texts under their belt. In that spirit, we planned that the MATCH meeting for October 2015 would be a return to the basics of Crip/Queer Studies by reading together a chapter from Robert McRuer's seminal book, Crip Theory.

Moving forward, one program that has been batted around in the past is finally coming to light. In order to improve academic praxis as well as theory, MATCH will be running seasonal American Sign Language (ASL) and Braille 101 Workshops in the Fall and Spring respectively. The purpose of these workshops is not to profess or learn mastery of these critically important languages but to increase exposure and familiarity. The exact form and schedule of these workshops are still to be determined but should begin in some form by the end of the Fall 2015 semester. We look forward to igniting interest in crip and queer studies at the George Washington University and beyond!

The G.W.U. Crip/Queer Studies Presents: "Why I am a Bioconservative"

A Talk by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson 

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On Sept. 17th, 2015, Rosemarie Garland Thomson spoke on "Why I am a Bioconservative" to a packed lecture hall at the George Washington University. The event was coordinated by the GWU English Department as part of its Crip/Queer Studies programing. David Mitchell introduced the speaker, praising her as a foundational figure in Disability Studies, authoring such influential texts as Freakery, Staring: How We Look, and Extraordinary Bodies. In an hour and a half, Thomson spoke on the important but often unspoken alliance between religious conservatism and non-religious disability activists around "Pro-Life" issues, specifically the abortion of fetuses to be born with physical or mental impairments, euthanasia, and the assisted suicide of the disabled.

By opposing not only the use but the cultural indoctrination of eugenics, disability activists find themselves joining forces with religious conservatives. Thomson contends that while religious and non-religious "bioconservatives" may disagree in first principles, these groups join together in their conclusions. For instance, "dignity" is a key issue within bioconservatives of either ilk. In this context, dignity designates a life worth living and deserving of "moral personhood" (rights and duties) as well as a "quality of life" (well being in medical care, politics, and employment). Religious and non-religious groups may disagree in the source and authority that bestows dignity: humanity or God. Nonetheless, persons of different belief systems can help preserve the dignity of those marked as undesirable: those who are "too expensive" in relation to their social worth.

Thomson stressed the important cultural work of bioconservatism that promote a culture of life. In particular, ritual practices such as the washing of bodies are acts of care common among religious and non-religious communities. Washing in hospitals, elderly care facilities, families by caregivers, as well as the sacramental blessing of children, the sick, and the dead are all examples of rituals that recognize the dignity of the bodies they encounter. Such rituals recognize the dignity of embodied experiences, Thomson argued. Through repetition, rituals directly create the conditions for a quality of life while affirming moral personhood. If washing were more openly a communal practice where the reception of care is a sign of dignity rather than shame, fewer people would be instilled with the belief that they would rather be dead than unable to clean themselves. 

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Exerpted from Transliterature Online: 

A Center for the Study of Transgender and Disability Studies

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CFP: Composing Disability: Crip Ecologies

Deadline for Abstracts: 

October 31, 2015

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Reposted from GW English News

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REVISED DEADLINE:

The new abstract deadline for GW's Crip Ecologies conference is October 31.

George Washington University’s biennial Composing Disability Conference returns in Spring 2016 with the theme of "Crip Ecologies." The event will be held April 7-8, 2016; featured speakers include Sunaura Taylorand Riva Lehrer, with others to be announced soon. Crip Ecologies is sponsored by the Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion, the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, Disability Support Services, the Department of English, the University Writing Program, the GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (GWMEMSI) and the GW Digital Humanities Institute (GWDHI).

We invite proposals for papers and panels for this event. 250-word abstracts for papers and 500-word abstracts for complete panels should be sent by October 15, 2015 to cripecologies@gmail.com

Deadline for Abstracts: October 31, 2015

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Crip Ecologies: This symposium seeks to bring together scholars, artists, advocates, and activists working across the fields of ecocriticism, disability, and queer studies. Our goal is to think through the queer interchanges of environments and bodies in more radical ways. As vulnerable embodied beings that interact with our environments, we experience ourselves and others through a defining porosity: we are not only affected by the places we inhabit, but we also leave our imprint on these locations as well. Marginalized subjects, including disabled people, often experience their lives in greater proximity to environmental threats such as toxicity, climate change, generational exposures to unsafe living conditions due to poverty, militarization, body exhausting labors as in the case of migrant workers, etc. Further, we seek to investigate how non-normative bodies/minds can reframe what it has historically meant to be an environmentalist or "nature lover?” Crip Ecologies will draw out these wanted, unwanted, and even unknowable intimacies with our environments as materials for new trans-historical, cross-cultural, and crip/queer research about human, non-human, organic, and inorganic relationships that mark our experiences in the world.

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Possible topics include:

Composing Crip Ecologies
Crip Ecologies and Militarization/War
Crip Ecologies and Art
Crip Ecologies and Localism
Crip Ecologies and Environmental Justice
Crip Ecologies and Food Justice
Crip Ecologies and Farming
Crip Ecologies and Racial Borderlands
Crip Ecologies, Time, and Places
Crip Ecologies and the University
Toxicity, Embodiment, and Uneven Development
Queercrip Bodies in the Global South
Disaster Capitalism, the Environment, Disability
Entanglement Theory
Media Studies and Digital Interfaces
Crosscultural and Transhistorical Worldings
Race, Class, and Environmental Justice
Accessibility and Ecological Backlash
Politics of Racial/Crip/Queer/Trans Spaces
Intersectional Bodies and Policing in Security States
Class and Toxic Exposures under Neoliberalism
Rhetorics of Inclusion/Biopolitics of Exclusion
Non-productive Bodies and Alternative Practices of Everyday Life
Expendable Bodies and Economies of Neglect (Necropolitics)
Crip Mental Health Ecologies

For more information about the Composing Disability series at GW, visit this page on the Disability Support Services website and explore the Composing Disability tumblr site. You can also follow Composing Disability on Twitter (@ComposingDis) or join the community on Facebook.

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Coming Soon: Why I Am a Bioconservative

Why I Am A Bioconservative

Featuring Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Thursday, Sept 17th. 3:45-5:00 pm 

310 Media and Public Affairs Building

The George Washington University

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This lecture has two interrelated purposes. First, it broadly suggests ways that principles, logics, guidelines, and rules of religious bioethics can serve effectively in situations and for populations outside of the particular religious tradition that generates them. Second, it offers the term bioconservative to describe my own ethical position as a disability bioethicist. To do this, I lay out a position between the concepts of conservation and liberal social politics to bridge religious and nonreligious belief communities. Because the term conservative is associated with the politics of the right, I bring forward a rationale for what is accomplished by invoking the term conservative and conservation for a disability equality and human rights-based perspective in bioethics. In the service of these larger aims, and most specifically, this talk draws from religious bioethics to explicate dignity as it pertains to quality-of-life judgments used in biomedical decision-making for life ending medical treatments. This is a written talk with PowerPoint.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Disability Studies Initiative at Emory University. Her her fields of study are disability studies, American literature and culture, bioethics, and women’s studies. Her work develops the field of critical disability studies in the health humanities, broadly understood, to bring forward disability access, equity, and identity to communities inside and outside of the academy. She is the author of Staring: How We Look and several other books. Her current book project is Habitable Worlds: Disability, Technology, and Eugenics.

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The event is wheelchair accessible. We welcome deaf & hearing 

impaired participants. Please contact dtmitchel@gwu.edu for ASL access

Sponsored by:

the English Department Rosenblum Funds 

and Disability Students Services 

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About Crip/Queer Studies at GWU

"The primary idea was to address 

an emerging interest in intersectionality studies – the ways in which we all occupy 

multiple identities"

David Mitchell

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Reblogged from www.ThingsTransform.com
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The value that Crip/Queer studies at the George Washington University has in the wider academic community was perhaps most clearly evidenced for me as I was preparing to leave GWU after completing a Masters Degree. At that time, I was fortunate and privileged enough to be accepted into substantial Ph.D programs, any of which I would have been immensely gracious to attend. It is this bounty of offers that drew my attention back to GWU. In some of the correspondence I received inviting me to join the university, it was mentioned that they wanted someone like me, doing what I do. They had no one else. Thinking this over, I found that they may very well be right. 

Indeed, what we do here at GWU is in many respects unique, or at least rare - too rare. Universities offer a bounty of gifts that no student can repay, but GWU offers a unique combination of resources and mentorship that cannot be found anywhere else - what we call our Crip/Queer Studies. In the end, I chose to go to GWU for my Ph.D because I am a unique scholar, with a unique project, and the unique programs at GWU, especially in Crip/Queer and Medieval Studies, creates a unique convergence of opportunities that I want to grow in and further throughout my career.

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What characterizes myself, my project, and Crip/Queer studies is not only an attention to the uniqueness of particular persons but the movement that turns from individual to collective struggles. It is not unheard of to have centers for Disability Studies and LGBT Resources, but often the premise of these programs is the policing of borders around identity categories. There are critically important issues and violences that stick to our bodies with the glue of identity and this should never be underestimated. However, identity can too often work by turning away from the shared experiences of those who are not recognized as sharing an identity. Too often, for instance, transgender is left out of the considerations of LGBT activist groups because the issue of gender is often handled separately from the issue of sexuality (which has become the focus of the organization). 

Likewise, to use the same example, transgender is rarely considered a part of the disability rights movement, despite the shared experiences with social mechanisms of diagnosis, treatment with drugs or surgery, and a history of alienation, stigma and incarceration. In academia, in part propelled by the work of the scholars here, the words Crip and Queer signify not merely a more elastic collection of experiences but a methodology that critiques identity as itself a part of the mechanisms of social control. Rather than close off the conversation, Crip/Queer studies embraces the collective struggle of the Trans, the Crip and the Queer with countless other marginalized modes of living.

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As a transgender woman completing her Ph.D with a dissertation on transgender in the middle ages, GWU's Crip/Queer studies area offers the unique resources and support systems that make my scholarship possible. Any time you enter into careers where your community and your area of work are underrepresented or unrepresented, there are bound to be countless roadblocks as people find it difficult to even imagine the possibility of your existence within the field. The choice to come out as transgender and transition occurred to the sound of countless doors closing - relationships I would never have, conversations I would never hear, jobs I would never get. 

The unlikeliness of finding work only compounded when I made the decision to pursue the study of transgender in the middle ages, a time and area of research, many too readily assume, in which discussions of transgender has no place. One of the first investments GWU's Crip/Queer Studies offered me was to open the door to give me entrance into a shared academic space. It does more than imagining the possibility of a more inclusive and diverse social project, it makes continued investments in students, faculty, staff, and programming to make those possibilities into a reality.

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In particular, it is worth noting a few features of GWU's Crip/Queer studies area that make it a fantastic resource. First, the quality and diversity of the faculty in the Crip/Queer area of study makes GWU a powerhouse that supercharges intellectual energies not only here, in the US, but transnationally. Students of Prof. Robert McRuer and Prof. David Mitchell travel abroad to places like the Czech Republic and Germany to experience the living material cultures of crip and queer subjectivities past and present. They also attract scholars from around the world to visit to give scholars at GWU perspectives on issues of race, religion, gender, sexuality, and disability that are otherwise difficult to get in and around DC. 

This influx of academic resources are none the more evident than in the Disability Studies conference hosted at GWU every couple years, where the University becomes a magnet for the critical work of leading scholars from around the world. The coursework provided by the Crip/Queer faculty and graduate students widen the discussion of medieval, early-modern, american, and british, post-colonial literatures to include often elided topics. As a result, the unique scholarship being produced from the undergrad level, to the Ph.D, to the faculty are demonstrating in quantifiable and unquantifiable ways the invaluable products of hosting a Crip/Queer studies group at the University.

Fall 2014 Crip/Queer Programming

"She opened doors that were not only closed, I didn't even know they were doors"

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Reblogged from www.ThingsTransform.com
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Private Bodies, Public Encounters

Disability Studies is not anything new to the George Washington University, nor especially to its English Literature Department. The history of events such as the Composing Disability Conference, special guest speakers, and publications testify that GWU has been a home for Disability scholarship and activism to grow. Indeed, the host of parties ready to jump on board projects to Crip the University make evident the network that has already developed, e.g. the GW Creative Writing Program, Disability Support Services, Women's Studies, Philosophy, The University Writing Program, the Digital Humanities Institute, the Vice Provost's Office for Diversity and Inclusion, and Africana Studies.

With the Private Bodies, Public Encounters series of guest talks, movie screenings, and book readings throughout October (Disability History month), the University is signaling that "Disability has Come of Age at GWU." Pushed forward by a bulwark of faculty, the congress of departments and institutions are staking a claim for the future of disability studies in Washington DC. Following a socially engaged tactic central to crip activism, the coalition brought in speakers from near and far to skillfully deploy "Private Bodies" to shift the focus from individual persons or organizations to "Public Encounters." Each event stressed the ecology of embodied experience that connects rather than forecloses the lives of disabled bodies and intersecting contexts such as race, gender, and class.

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Good Kings, Bad Kings

Reclaiming access to bodies and shared experiences was a focal topic for discussion in the first event in Private Bodies, Public Encounters, with Susan Nussbaum's public reading of Good Kings, Bad Kings on October 6th, 2014. The over 60 persons in attendance on this first night were drawn in by various university seminars, posters, and a several story tall electronic billboard over Gallery Place. Once in the room, sign-language interpreters, micro-phone runners, and an interviewer helped facilitate the conversation between Nussbaum and a wide variety of guests. Indeed, for those who could not physically be in attendance, the event was video recorded as well as published via livetweeting. 

Followers online could check in via Twitter as Nussbaum unpacked how the writing of Good Kings, Bad Kings was aimed at crossing barriers of silence and representation. "S Nussbaum reading from "Good Kings Bad Kings," stresses importance of writing fictional  #disabled  characters  who speak in first-person" writes @JonathanHsy ,  "... trusts her readers to recognize BS when they see it! Reader experiences vary wildly; u need to struggle 2b clear but 'not pander.'" Audience members responded to Nussbaum's project aimed at affirming the lives that already exist within exploitative systems of incarceration and medical management, and then challenging these structures by creating creative access between life stories, contexts, and alternative worlds. Mitchell praised this multiplicity and boundary crossing as integral to the success of Good Kings, Bad Kings, noting the "wide diversty of #disabled experiences; we have very few books abt MULT disabled ppl; 1 character can't stand for all" (@JonathanHsy). In many ways, Nussbaum's generosity did not end in writing or reading the text, making herself available for book-singing, pictures and personal conversation after the event

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Sins Invalid

Excitement generated on the first night spilled over into the screening and discussion of Sins Invalid with Leroy Moore Jr. Working through technological challenges and problems of accessibility, the film brought audience members into the theater studios where an array of performers shared their lives and experiences of disability. Stories ranged from an intimate look into  private bodies and sexual encounters to a dramatic dance ending in a flying wheelchair in front of a blood-red cross representing the passion and violence of public encounters. The film used sights, sounds, and bodily contact to give viewers entrance points into lives that are often segregated or covered up.

Framing the screening, Moore Jr. discussed how the project of creating bridges required ideological as well as technical crossings. One goes from "Disability Rights" (the architectural and legal work towards equality and access) to "Disability Justice" (the cultural work towards diversifying presentation and community) by "coming face to face with your 'isms" argued Moore Jr (@Transliterature). This endeavor in intersectionality helped to generate collective projects such as Sins Invalid on stage and on screen, as well as Moore Jr.'s personal project Kriphop, the embodied performance of hip-hop and disability that changes one's experience to both (@Transliterature). Sharing some of his verse with the audience, Moore Jr. concluded by talking about the critical work of re-presentation that artistic ventures such as these accomplish offering alternative scripts for race, gender and disabled sexuality.

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Self Preservation: the Art of Riva Lehrer

Closing out the month, professors and filmmakers Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell screened "Self Preservation: The Art of Riva Lehrer" and discussed the crip politics of aesthetics. Working in conjunction with the George Washington University Textile Museum, Snyder and Mitchell opened the event by showcasing a lab-coat constructed by Carrie Sandahl to draw critical attention to the medical industry's invasive surveillance and management of persons with disabilities. Demonstrating the inextricability of the lives of objects and bodies, the textile materialized the film's argument on Lehrer's work: liminal disabled lives can find preservation through art.

The film brought together interviews with Riva Lehrer and several of her subjects, friends, and fellow activists to unpack the politics of persistence in her work. While portraits are often said to tell a story across the space of the canvas, the film read back into the paintings how the temporal experience of producing the works affect the lives of those connected with the subjects and topics portrayed. "We can be heroes forever and ever, we can be heroes just for one day," cooed David Bowie as the film's soundtrack underlined the liminality of disabled lives. Like Nussbaum's writing and Moore Jr.'s performance, Riva Lehrer's paintings transform private bodies into matters of public encounter that carry the demand social change beyond the physical and ideological barriers that restrict the personal lives they connect. As Snyder and Mitchell's film and discussion afterwards argued, however, this work does not only move in one direction. The preservation of art can also have direct impact on the lives that produce it, giving the emotional, financial, and social support that sustain persons marked by disability  and affirm them as lives worth living.