Crip Letters: Storying Slowness and Re/Writing Academic Work

Document Type

Letter to the Editor

Publication Date

9-1-2023

Department

Department of Humanities

Abstract

Composed in a series of letters, this essay explores the interdependent knowledge and survival work of crip communities. The authors discuss their experiences of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME or ME/CFS) in a practice of Akemi Nishida’s “bed activism,” which challenges ableist demands for productivity from spaces of rest and care. Hsu and Nish ask what we lose—in intellectual and cultural growth and in actual lives—when academic spaces continue to devalue physical and cognitive difference. The resulting conversation considers illness as both an inevitability of lived experience and something exacerbated and ignored by academic spaces. It then explores how crip communities expand definitions of knowledge and knowledge-making—offering wisdom that is not only valuable for a more inclusive profession but also necessary for a world increasingly sickened by extractive economies.

Publication Title

College Composition and Communication

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