disability

they hope that their child’s hearing age will eventually “catch up” with the child’s chronological age—an achievement that depends on the mothers’ “hard work” (in Hindi, mehanat).

We were drunk on the freedom of not feeling like a burden, a feeling that was a constant companion in our lives outside of camp.

Dividing the senses into discrete categories is both an act of care and a form of violence, a way of both creating and inhibiting the wholeness of people’s lifeworlds.

Cochlear implants provoke difficult questions about the boundaries between ability and disability, passing and becoming, and deaf and hearing.

Disability is a natural aspect of the human condition. As people live longer, as we fight more wars, as medical care continues to improve—more and more people who might have died in an earlier era will live. Perhaps with a disability. We should accept it. Plan for it. Build our society around it.

I propose the theory of activist affordances in order to name and recognize the tiny, everyday artful battles of disabled people for more livable worlds that otherwise remain unaccounted for.

If this life often feels like the apocalyptic science fiction novels I read as a teen and twentysomething come true, what is also true is that we—disabled people—are the heroes, surviving it and helping everyone else know how to survive it.

What would a world radically shaped by disabled knowledge, culture, love, and connection be like?

We need a disability scholarship that moves beyond the question of how the built environment disables people, as the mantra of the social model goes, to how humans themselves injure and disable the environment through their crippling and destructive activities of building and unbuilding—activities that exacerbate the precarity of already disabled