Cripistemologies of Disability Arts and Culture: Reflections on the Cripping the Arts Symposium

[Introduction:] "In 2014, in the introduction to their special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer introduced the field of disability studies to the concept of cripistemologies. As described by Johnson and McRuer, although there are many different ways of knowing disability that circulate throughout our culture, epistemologies of disability generated outside of disability experience, community, and activism are the most legible and lucrative within a neoliberal culture, and therefore most readily taken up (2014, p. 128). Disability studies, disability activism, and disability arts and culture as imbricated movements led by and for disabled people that advance a disability politic, centre meanings of disability that are generated through Deaf, disabled, and mad people’s experiences and knowledge. These ways of knowing disability are succinctly expressed through the term “cripistemology,” which refers to knowing, and not knowing, disability through disability experiences as these are understood by and for disability communities (2014, p. 127)."