Project Description:
This grant was a summer stipend, funded by the Wyoming Institute for Humanities Research, to support non-funded NEH Summer Stipend applicants. Michelle Jarman was one of two UW faculty members nominated to apply. WIHR ultimately funded $6000 of summer salary for 2018 to support research and writing on her book project, currently titled, "Relations of Dis/Repair: Reading Racial (In)justice through Crip Minds."
Project abstract:
In my framing of relations of dis/repair, this project connects the insights of disability studiesthat challenge efforts of fixing, repair, or normalizationto relational orientations of justice. Working within traditions of ethnic studies and feminist theory, I am invested in intersectional frameworks; however, while these approaches are crucial to understanding interlocking forces of individual marginalization, relational approaches expand the boundaries of analysis. This project looks to African American literature, for example, to consider intersectional representations of psychiatric disability, but also looks at figurations of relationships that provide a roadmap through dis/repairnot through restoration of body or mind, but through unlearning racism, ableism, and other forms of privilege.
By evoking the term "crip minds," this research draws from Margaret Prices work in defining mental disability broadlyto include cognitive, neurological, psychological, and affective differences. This wide range of cognitive diversity has been connected historically through socio-cultural attributions of mental inferiority. This project begins by acknowledging the racialized and gendered histories that have linked mental inferiority to non-white populations, women, and gender non-normative individuals. Ethnic studies, gender and queer studies scholars have powerfully critiqued and challenged such attributions, but often, work grounded in these areas reasserts the human value of marginalized groups by resisting mental disability, rather than actively critiquing the stigma attributed to and injustice enacted upon mentally disabled people. I use the term crip minds to foreground the focus on disabilities associated with the mind, while also acknowledging the embodied and cultural nature of this range of diagnoses. The term crip is used in disability studies as a radical term that calls attention to ableist assumptionsa term that asserts meaning making from the position of disability, and that supports an unruly engagement with normative expectations. Crip orientations open up new possibilities for thinking about diverse minds and in providing a theoretical lens to analyzed contemporary literary representations of cognitive difference.
Unserved or Under-served Populations:
Racial or Ethnic Minorities, Disadvantaged Circumstances, Specific Groups
Primary Target Audience Geographic Descriptor:
State, National, International
