WHO TAUGHT ME 

The organizing principle of my work is that knowing, making, and right action are always-entangled tools for conjuring justice. This way of thinking has many genealogies. Here is an incomplete list of the ones that shaped me:

Solidarities
1. Multi-generational, inter-household, gender norm-defying, disability-centric familial formations; parenting as distributed responsibility; cousinhood as a defining (but possibly non-biological) ethical relation; mutual care and solidarity; rituals of escalating hospitality; everyone is an herbalist and every food is medicine; every conversation is comprised of jokes told and translated in multiple languages simultaneously.

2. Decolonial SWANA people helped me understand, amongst other things, the layered impact of imperial conquest, displacement trauma, the Cold War, nuclear waste, the sturgeon, the sea, the mountains, the eryngium, rice, colorism, oil extraction, and liberal models of race on my body.

3. Hacking and tinkering, designing otherwise, a family of designers, collaboratives of MacGyvers taught me that I can maybe try to make that.

4. The hard work of building relationships based in accountability and generosity has taught me that every relationship, whether personal or professional, is designed on its own terms, hopefully through mutual respect. Iterative relationship design is our work in the world. The real and metaphorical seeds that are planted and replanted and saved and shared. The lessons they teach about time and distance. Familial stories of intuition and dreams shaping generation-changing trajectories–intuition as diasporic, refugee survival praxis in the face of displacement and dispossession.

5. Policy debate, and everyone who coached, taught, judged, or partnered with me, and everyone I had the honor of coaching taught me that it can feel good to pay attention. A community that is totally imperfect at accountability and nevertheless driving into it with full force. The trust it takes to argue constantly and share resources while arguing about fairness and accountability. The lab structure as a space of camaraderie and co-mentorship.

6. The moon, its temporalities, its consistency, its lessons about legibility and illegibility. My grandfather taught me about planting by the moon. The springtime–its consistency and many celebrations.

7.  Anson Koch-Rein taught me to eat on a consistent basis. A most life-giving gift.

8. Ken MacLeish and Laura Stark have shown me the lessons of scaling collaboration based on friendship and interdisciplinary research.

Epistemologies
1. Feminists--especially disabled feminists,  feminists of color, and Global South feminists-- taught me that knowledge can be world-changing.

2. Transformative Justice activists and practitioners, including Miriame Kaba, Mia Birdsong, Leah Lakshmi Piepszna-Samarasinha, and Mia Mingus, for lessons on how to keep showing up for each other.

5. Murphy, especially their work in Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty and the Economization of Life. And Seizing the Means of Reproduction, which helped me make sense of the overlaps between scientific and design protocols. Also the ways they model accountability while receiving the Society for Social Studies of Science Fleck Prize in 2019.

6. Sara Safransky and Tasha Rijke-Epstein teach me about scholarly mutual aid. And cities!

7. Shannon Mattern has taught me about complexity and experimental form as ways of being in the world.

8. Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge and The Order of Things shaped how I was thinking about “access-knowledge” in Building Access. Karen Barad’s concept of onto-epistemology helped me to map out the very noodle-y diagrams in my head and give them some words to live in.

9. Deboleena Roy introduced me to feminist technoscience through her mentorship and her graduate courses on “Making Difference” (on race, gender, disability, and science) and Synthetic Biology (a model for art-science-making-doing collaborations). Her project of “asking different questions” shapes everything I do.

Praxis
1. Sara Hendren and Graham Pullin introduced me to  critical design.

2. Critical Design Lab has taught me that carving out spaces for weird work is possible. The idea for a lab came from the lab structure at summer debate camp, and from humanities labs like Jentery Sayers’s MLab and the Humanities Action Lab. It built on experiences working with Deboleena Roy’s pedagogical model of critical theory + pipetting + science-art collaborations. The Critical Design Lab has emerged through the collective efforts of our members.

3.  Kevin Gotkin taught me how to make a podcast and is a constant source of exciting crip design iteration.

4. Alice Wong showed me that archiving disability stories is an anti-eugenic practice.

5. David Serlin taught me how to write a book proposal and edit a special issue.

6. Stacey Park Milbern got me thinking about applications of disability justice in space, home, and city.

7. Moya Bailey introduced me to disability justice and taught me about #hashtagactivism.

8. Alison Kafer taught me about politicizing disability and access activism.

9. Mara Mills models generosity and accountability in her work and scholar-activism. She also taught me how to edit a special issue.

10. I learned a lot about writing from Eric Hayot’s Elements of Academic Style.

11. Louise Hickman and Shannon Finnegan’s Captioning on Captioning film very clearly demonstrated for me why you need to provide access copies to captioners ahead of an event.

12. Laura Mauldin told me about why “certified Deaf interpreters” are important.

Misfit
1. My first exposures to disability access were familial and spatial: homes and technologies adapted by family members who were engineers or designers as they became disabled. The ingenuity and artistry that shaped their designs. My own participation in the evolution of these spaces. The skills I learned for adapting my own worlds. 

2. Disability culture taught me the pleasures of crip joy, abundance, generosity, knowledge-sharing, resource redistribution, the willingness to tinker, the willingness to say no, taking care and giving care. Autistic culture taught me that it is okay if all of this makes me exhausted; there are other ways of doing things.
Chronically ill people, folks with chemical injuries, and food-allergic people taught me to measure energy, allocate energy for calling ahead, ask for help, wear a mask, pack my own food, and limit travel.

3. Folks with ADHD and the resources of Kerry Ann Rockquemore’s National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity helped me learn how to plan my time effectively.

4. Alice Sheppard taught me that access is an aesthetic.

5. Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, her normate and misfit. Her generosity and consistency. Her introduction to the field of disability studies. She also taught me to write a job letter.

6. Barbara Penner’s observation (in Bathroom) that accessibility guidelines emerged in the Jim Crow era inspired the “All Americans” chapter of Building Access.

7. Bess Williamson shared primary sources that were important for both of our projects, when we were young graduate students working on a very similar topic. She continues to be a model of collaboration and generosity. She introduced me to ANSI A117.1 and Timothy Nugent. Her work on disabled tinkerers and on the history of curb cuts shaped my thinking about crip technoscience.

8. Joy Weeber let me into her home, taught me about access activism, and let me look at Ron’s stuff under the stairs.

9. Nirmala Erevelles, Tanya Titchkosky, Margaret Price, Jay Dolmage, Remi Yergeau, Carrie Sandahl, Robert McRuer, Elizabeth Ellcessor, Mia Mingus, Stacey Park Milbern, and others taught me about critical access. 

10. Corbett O’Toole’s discussion of the Bancroft Library archive’s collections on the disability rights movement shaped my thinking about crip technoscience.

11. Ed Steinfeld, Ronald Mace, and Elaine Ostroff taught me about epistemic activism.

Accountability 
1. Activist responses to the Iraq war, Students and Workers in Solidarity, Occupy, the Nashville Feminist Collective, the Nashville Disability Justice Collective, the Nashville Mutual Aid Collective, Nashville Mask4Mask and other spaces centered in organizing, strategy, and facilitation as care work taught me that no is a complete sentence and that it is okay to take a break.

2. Trees taught me that there are better ways of doing things. Share the fruit.

3. Lichens taught me that I can exist without you, but it’s better when we collaborate.

4. My uncle shares lessons on taking care of the soils that have fed my family for generations. He is the last one left to do this care work and access to the land is threatened every day. I do my diasporic best to retain the memory of his practices in the soils and trees that I care for, as well. Starhawk and Charles Williams at Earth Activist Training taught me about permaculture. Starhawk and Pandora Thomas taught me about social permaculture and alternatives to white dudebro versions of this movement. But permaculture is nevertheless fraught, often appropriative of Indigenous knowledge. Indigenous leaders’ critiques of permaculture (read more in “Whitewashed Hope“) are essential to pointing out the flawed approach of regenerative agriculture to the concept of planetary survival.

5. My students remind me several times a week that I need to be more clear in giving directions, and I really appreciate the opportunity to continue practicing asking for what is needed.

 

How do we note, cite, thank, and otherwise show evidence of our influences? I asked this question here, in a way, and this page is an imperfect form that emerged to do this work.