Reviewed by A. C. Riffer
This comprehensive volume presents disability-informed approaches to writing, research, and publishing. Crip Authorship: Disability as Method is an expansive work that showcases the diverse methods developed through disability studies and activism. Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez have brought together leading scholars, artists, and activists to investigate how disability influences authorship, reshaping cultural production, aesthetics, and media. The collection of thirty-five concise essays examines how knowledge about disability is generated and disseminated within disability studies, acknowledging that disability encompasses a range of experiences, and that authorship extends across composition, affect, and publishing.
Disability both transforms and challenges traditional methods. Crip authorship is not confined to conventional forms of authorship, such as books, social media, or published creative works. The chapters draw on the expertise of international researchers and activists across various disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, education, arts, and design. Divided into five sections–Writing, Research, Genre/Form, Publishing, and Media–contributors explore disability as a method for creative work, encompassing writing practices, research methods, crip aesthetics, media formats, and the logistical, access, legal, and care networks necessary for publishing.
While designed to be accessible and engaging for students, Crip Authorship also offers theoretically sophisticated arguments in a concise format, positioning the text as a vital resource for disability studies scholars. Essays within the volume cover a wide range of topics, including the temporality of writing with chronic illness, perseveration, mad Black writing, the reliance of the manifesto genre on disability, public scholarship for disability justice, the significance of disability and illness to autotheory, decolonial research methods for disability studies, virtual ethnography, depression and trans reading methods, crip theory in translation, plain language writing, and description as an access and aesthetic technique.
Title: Crip Authorship: Disability as Method
Editors: Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez
Publisher: New York University Press
Year: 2023
Read A. C. Riffer’s review of There’s No Place: Tales of Home by Storytellers Who Have Experienced Homelessness in this issue of Wordgathering.
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About the Reviewer
A. C. Riffer is a hopeless romantic and enigmatic. In their spare time they are a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago.