Disabled people, especially people of color and those living in nursing homes or other congregate housing, have been at greatest risk of infection and death from COVID-19. The NYU Center for Disability Studies (CDS) has been documenting the experiences of disabled and chronically ill people during the pandemic. The team has built a publicly-accessible archive to preserve memories, stories, artworks, and other materials in a range of accessible formats. They have preserved conversations on social media, records of digital public meetings, and photographs of street art and actions that are otherwise ephemeral.
This collaborative work will culminate in an upcoming edited volume, How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (NYU Press, est. 2024), which provides models of disability justice for post-COVID living. In addition to this volume, members of CDS have recently edited another collaborative volume that presents crip approaches to writing, research, and publishing. Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (2023) convenes leading scholars, artists, and activists to explore how disability shapes authorship, transforming cultural production, aesthetics, and media.
In this panel, Mara Mills, co-founder and co-director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies, will reflect on the value of collaborative and public humanities work while discussing their two recent volumes. Emily Lim Rogers, a contributor for both volumes, will share her insights on “virtual ethnography” as a disability method.
Mara Mills is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and founding co-director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies. She is also a founding editorial board member of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. She is recently co-editor of Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality (Oxford 2020), Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (NYU 2023), and a forthcoming special issue of Osiris on "Disability and the History of Science" (2024). Upcoming publications include the NSF-funded edited collection How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (NYU Press), a coauthored book with Jonathan Sterne on time stretching, and an NEH-funded collaborative research project with Michele Friedner on "The Global Cochlear Implant."
Emily Lim Rogers is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She has published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly and in the volume Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (NYU Press, 2023), among others. Her current book project is about the politics of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS), patient activism, and biomedical knowledge in the US.