Disability Justice Lessons for Our Collective Survival: A Discussion about Crip Kinship With Shayda Kafai, part of the (Dis)courses: Interdisciplinary Disability Dialogues Spring 2022 Series

Shayda Kafai will engage in a conversation about her new book, Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice & Art Activism of Sins Invalid. Sins Invalid is a performance project that centers a Disability Justice framework. Crip Kinship investigates the revolutionary survival teachings that Disabled Queer of Color communities offer to all our bodyminds.

Shayda Kafai (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Ethnic and Women’s Studies department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. As a queer, disabled, Mad femme of colour, she commits to practising the many ways we can reclaim our bodyminds from systems of oppression. To support this work as an educator-scholar, Shayda applies disability justice and collective care practices in the spaces she cultivates. Shayda’s writing and speaking presentations focus on intersectional body politics, particularly on how bodies are constructed and how they hold the capacity for rebellion. From discussions of madness and disability to femme politics and crip art, Shayda works to reframe our most disempowered bodyminds as vehicles of change-making. In honour of self-care and her communities, Shayda is also an artmaker and co-founder of CripFemmeCrafts with her wife, Amy. They make art that empowers all our bodyminds, particularly centring the magic and joy-making that comes from the wisdom and beauty of disabled, Fat bodyminds of colour.

Hosted by the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach at the Burton Blatt Institute and Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, the series “(Dis)courses: Interdisciplinary Disability Dialogues” returns this semester with four exciting conversations—with luminaries who are engaged variously with many forms of innovative and intersectional Disability cultural work.

Each of our four online events will include American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation, live captioning, image descriptions, and an opportunity for registered Zoom webinar participants to engage with the featured presenter and discussant. All four events will also be recorded and made publicly available, online. Post-production, each of the videos will include ASL interpretation and edited/polished captions, an accompanying transcript, and a summary of online resources of interest and relevance—all accessible, free, and open to the public.

The Spring 2022 (Dis)courses Series is sponsored by the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach (OIPO) at the Burton Blatt Institute (BBI) at Syracuse University and Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, with very special thanks to the Syracuse University Libraries, and with additional support from the Center on Disability and Inclusion, the Central New York Humanities Corridor Health Humanities Working Group (Medicine, Disease, Disability, and Culture), the Consortium for Culture and Medicine, Cultural Foundations of Education, Dept. of Biology, Dept. of English, Dept. of History, Dept. of Women’s and Gender Studies, the Disability Cultural Center, Disability Studies, The Graduate School, Hendricks Chapel, Information Technology Services, the Intergroup Dialogue Program, La Casita Cultural Center, the LGBTQ Resource Center, LGBTQ Studies, the Renée Crown University Honors Program, the School of Education, and the Syracuse University Humanities Center.

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