Crip Authorship

2024 Daniel E. Griffiths Research Award Winner

An expansive volume presenting crip approaches to writing, research, and publishing.

Crip Authorship: Disability as Method is an expansive volume presenting the multidisciplinary methods brought into being by disability studies and activism. Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez have convened leading scholars, artists, and activists to explore the ways disability shapes authorship, transforming cultural production, aesthetics, and media.

Starting from the premise that disability is plural and authorship spans composition, affect, and publishing, this collection of thirty-five compact essays asks how knowledge about disability is produced and shared in disability studies. Disability alters, generates, and dismantles method. Crip authorship takes place within and beyond the commodity version of authorship, in books, on social media, and in creative works that will never be published.

The chapters draw on the expertise of international researchers and activists in the humanities, social sciences, education, arts, and design. Across five sections—Writing, Research, Genre/Form, Publishing, Media—contributors consider disability as method for creative work: practices of writing and other forms of composition; research methods and collaboration; crip aesthetics; media formats and hacks; and the capital, access, legal standing, and care networks required to publish. Designed to be accessible and engaging for students, Crip Authorship also provides theoretically sophisticated arguments in a condensed form that will make the text a key resource for disability studies scholars.

Essays include Mel Y Chen on the temporality of writing with chronic illness; Remi Yergeau on perseveration; La Marr Jurelle Bruce on mad Black writing; Alison Kafer on the reliance of the manifesto genre on disability; Jaipreet Virdi on public scholarship for disability justice; Ellen Samuels on the importance of disability and illness to autotheory; Xuan Thuy Nguyen on decolonial research methods for disability studies; Emily Lim Rogers on virtual ethnography; Cameron Awkward-Rich on depression and trans reading methods; Robert McRuer on crip theory in translation; Kelsie Acton on plain language writing; and Georgina Kleege on description as an access and aesthetic technique.

Mara Mills is Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Mills is cofounder of the NYU Center for Disability Studies and coeditor of Crip Authorship: Disability as Method.Sanchez Rebecca :

Rebecca Sanchez is Professor of English and director of the disability studies program at Fordham University. She is the author of Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature and (with Mara Mills) co-editor of the republication of Pauline Leader’s And No Birds Sing.Mara Mills (Editor)
Mara Mills is Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Mills is cofounder of the NYU Center for Disability Studies and coeditor of Crip Authorship: Disability as Method.

Rebecca Sanchez (Editor)
Rebecca Sanchez is Professor of English and director of the disability studies program at Fordham University. She is the author of Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature and (with Mara Mills) co-editor of the republication of Pauline Leader’s And No Birds Sing.

Karla Strand:
This illuminating collection of essays focuses on the variety and value of crip creation, methodology, writing and research. With contributions from Mel Y Chen, Jaipreet Virdi, Emily Lim Rogers, Ellen Samuels and many more, it is urgent and original.

This field-changing collection is theoretically sophisticated and politically charged! This book crucially shows how disability is not only an identity formation, but also a method to revise how we write, critique, and enact change. The collection most importantly engages disability as it relates to race, the non-West, colonialism, sexuality, gender identity, and class, offering an exciting and much needed model for our field. This text redefines how we theorize, imagine, and produce disability.

This is a fantastic, urgent, singular, and kaleidoscopic book. Crip Authorship uses disability to explode the very idea of method: this is a book about research, but also about writing, thinking, publishing, and inhabiting. Crip Authorship is essential reading for any scholar who does anything with disability in their work; it is even more essential reading for those who don’t. This is a field-changing collection.

Crip Authorship moves directly into the most urgent debates in critical disability studies, focusing on questions of methodology, race, queerness, cross-disability solidarity, and what it means to make or publish crip work. An extraordinary array of authors, both emerging and well-known, contribute original pieces and provoke thrilling new conversations. This remarkable volume will be of interest to readers across many fields and methodological orientations. Crip Authorship argues for, and also demonstrates, the powerful interdisciplinarity of crip scholarship and its potential to work toward greater justice.