Schalk, S., Torres, W., Annamma, S., Bùi Davis, L.-M., Hinton, A., Kim, J. B., Khúc, M., Lau, T. C. W., Nishida, A., & Virdi, J. (2025, October 15). The state of critical race disability studies: A white paper report from the Disabled Scholars of Color Collective. Disability Visibility Project. https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2025/10/15/graphic-with-a-white-background-with-text-that-reads-the-state-of-critical-race-disability-studies-a-white-paper-report-from-the-disabled-scholars-of-color-collective/ (disabilityvisibilityproject.com)
The Disability Visibility Project was founded and directed by Alice Wong. Learn more on their website.
Introduction: Who We Are and How We Came Together
The Disabled Scholars of Color Collective (DSCC) is a group of disabled scholars of color working in the field of disability studies and beyond. The Collective was created in the context of a gathering of disabled scholars of color in San Francisco, California over Labor Day weekend 2025. This gathering was originally envisioned and proposed by Alice Wong to Dr. Sami Schalk to assess the state of race in the field of disability studies as both research topic and identity. The gathering aimed to bring together disabled scholars of color working in disability studies in an accessible, pleasure-forward space to (re)build community within critical race disability studies as a sub-field. The work was funded by Disability Visibility Project with New Disabled South as the fiscal sponsor. Dr. Sami Schalk served as the central planner and host with the support of graduate student project assistant, Washieka Torres. This white paper is the product of the gathering, intended to share our perspectives on the state of critical race disability studies and to provide a vision for the future of the field that can inform our future work as a collective and the work of critical race disability studies more broadly.
Dr. Schalk’s central aim in planning the gathering was to create an accessible and pleasurable experience for thinking together so that critical race disability studies and disability justice were not just the topics of conversation but also shaped the process of the gathering as well. This included having a very spacious and flexible agenda. Our gathering began on Friday evening with dinner and participants were given the option to fly in the day before to allow for rest and recovery from travel. On Saturday and Sunday, we met at 10am for two hours, then took a two-hour break with lunch provided in the suite, followed by a two-hour afternoon working session, then another two-hour break before dinner. This schedule encouraged rest, choice, and pleasure. We started the first dinner by sharing our disability studies origin stories. Saturday morning, we discussed our personal experiences in the field followed by an afternoon discussion of a literature review of work in critical race disability studies prepared in advance by Washieka. On Sunday, we began envisioning and crafting this white paper.
While we had specific discussion period times, conversations also occurred at meals, in the suite on breaks, at the pool, in individual rooms, over group text, within a shared Google document and so on. The meals, care and pleasure built into this gathering helped us (some of whom had never met in person) build comfort, trust, familiarity, respect, and connection that improved our more formal discussions and co-working. The community building element of the gathering therefore created a fruitful foundation for the more formal work of our time together. Our community building was also strongly supported by our shared identities as disabled scholars of color and our shared politics in disability justice and Black, Asian, and Third World feminisms, especially regarding collective care, radical mothering/parenting, and creating a just ecosystem of labor. These commitments, which shape our personal and collective goals for our research, teaching, writing, and advocacy/activism in the world, connected and bonded us as much as our identity positions, if not more so.
During our Sunday discussions, we decided to name ourselves the Disabled Scholars of Color Collective (DSoCC). We formalized our mission as follows:
The Disabled Scholars of Color Collective is a group of disabled scholars of color working and dreaming in the field of disability studies and beyond. Our commitments are to one another, our students, and our disabled and racialized communities more than any institution or field. We reject a field that is built on and perpetuates extractive relationships, erasure, capitalism, ableism, racism, and other interlocking systems of oppression. Instead, we dream of a future that is based on the ethics of generosity and care, a commitment to transformative pedagogy, and a belief in the value of radical and fugitive knowledges within and outside of the academic industrial complex.
By “scholar” we mean people both inside and outside of the academy who use research and lived experience to create and share new knowledge and understandings of the world. While many of us have formal affiliations with academic institutions, such affiliations are neither privileged nor preferred within our Collective’s work and community building. We use the term “disabled” to refer to a politicized identity not based on medical diagnosis, similarly to how Carrie Sandahl and Robert McRuer define the term “crip.” When we refer to “ableism,” we are drawing from the work of TL Lewis and other disability justice activists who understand ableism to be inextricably tied to all other systems of oppression, including capitalism and colonialism. In what follows, we summarize the conversations from our gathering into three sections: personal narratives and experiences, research in the field, and recommendations for future work.
Personal Experiences as Disabled Scholars of Color in Disability Studies
In discussions about our experiences as disabled scholars of color working in the field of disability studies, we found several common themes as well as a few outliers that we wish to highlight here. First, our work, like our identities, politics, and the oppressions we face, is intersectional. Consequently, many of us find ourselves oscillating among several disciplines and fields. While our published research and teaching may appear to bring seemingly disparate fields together, the labor of trying to get different disciplines to speak to one another involves an often frustrating and exhausting process of maneuvering strategically among different spaces. We engage in a kind of disciplinary-level code-switching, translating methods and approaches in Disability Studies into the idiom of other disciplines while also trying to get Disability Studies to integrate the needed interventions of outside, often racialized fields. As disabled scholars of color, we all feel that this is a required aspect of our work. As such, we are often doing double or triple the work of peers who were solely in one department or field, as we have to master the language and literature of multiple fields, attend a wider of array of conferences, mentor more students (both within and outside of our institutions) and so on. Consistently in our experiences disabled scholars of color have had to search out fields that were open to parts of our work, while finding that these same fields and colleagues within them were erasing or even being openly hostile to other parts of our work. Also consistent was how disabled scholars of color experienced and described the continued overwhelming whiteness of the field of disability studies that has either tokenized or erased us. It was difficult for most of us to name one field where the work of highlighting the experiences of disabled scholars of color, and addressing racism, ableism, and other interlocking oppressions was fully welcomed. Instead, there were specific spaces, scholars, and moments of welcome for us and our work such as individual mentors, affinity groups within larger academic organizations/conferences, and invitations to be on plenaries and keynotes that helped bring attention to our work.
Another common theme across disabled scholars of color was the ways increasing visibility through our scholar-activism put us at additional risk for harassment. That is, the more well-known disabled scholars of color became, the more intimidation and hate they experienced. Scholars described being targeted by the right wing for our scholarship focusing on racism, ableism, and other interlocking oppressions in various cultural locations. Much of this was coordinated, such as being targeted by right-wing groups (e.g., Campus Reform), which subjected disabled scholars of color to months or even years of harassment, while others were random people who sent indirect threats. Importantly, often when this happened, the institutional response was not to support us but instead to leave us unprotected or, in some cases, attempt to dissuade us from doing such public and politicized work, sometimes even suggesting that the nature of our work invites such harassment. As a result, we have had to create our own networks of protection to make up for institutional absence of support.
Additionally, labor justice is something we see as a central part of our collective’s work and concerns. We assert that academic spaces need us to survive and thrive but resent our presence. Many of us work within spaces that suffer from the diminishing value placed on the humanities, which is often exacerbated by stale approaches to teaching and research. Disabled scholars of color attract students into classrooms, new talent to departments, and exciting cross-disciplinary collaborations. We experience increased demands of our labor yet decreased institutional support or outright hostility. As a group, we have shared experiences of not receiving adequate funding for our research, being asked to undertake additional, often uncompensated, administrative labor, microagressions, and not being protected from harassment and attacks. They want what we offer but have no desire to invest in the infrastructure needed to sustain our intellectual and pedagogical production. These institutions exploit our love and political commitment. This is particularly evident in the increasing adjunctification of our institutions and the consequent push out of disabled scholars of color from protected and long-term contract positions either by direct elimination of such positions or indirectly by creating hostile or unsustainable working conditions.
The increasing creation of disability studies programs and classes in universities has been accompanied by an increasing need for disability studies scholars. However, instead of this increase in offering disability studies programs and classes meaning more tenure lines, what we witnessed was the adjunctification in these programs and classes that were often staffed by disabled scholars of color and other multiply marginalized disabled scholars. Regardless of how full the enrollment of classes and programs were, how positive teaching evaluations were, or how many students requested more disability studies classes and programs, institutions generally refuse to add more tenure lines instead inviting other faculty to teach Disability Studies courses with limited prior knowledge or understanding of Disability Studies or Disability Justice, positioning our knowledge as peripheral to university’s core mission. This is how the university co-opts disability studies when it provides the institution positive revenue and reputation, but ignores the disability justice politics that would require sustainable investment in this work. Furthermore, many disabled scholars of color also work as community organizers and consider their activist commitments central to their disability politics and practices. However, those of us who straddle these worlds are often met with a set of contradictory assumptions: some university actors may not consider activist work as rigorous or as part of legitimate scholarly practice, and some community members may mistakenly perceive us as having unlimited access to the university’s largesse or even being complicit in the university’s agenda. In this way, we battle misrecognition on multiple fronts.
Finally, the last common experience we discussed was loss of access and accommodations for us as disabled scholars of color as well as for our students, staff and colleagues. During the time of COVID lockdown, many universities and colleges rolled out extensive access infrastructures to an unprecedented degree such as virtual and hybrid classrooms, events, and meetings as well as free mandated vaccines, testing, and masks/masking. Suddenly, people with disabilities could participate in education in a way that was previously unimaginable. Suddenly, the kinds of accommodations we had been asking to have for years were now widely available. However, with the official declaration of the pandemic’s “end,” institutions by and large dismantled these infrastructures, demonstrating what many of us already knew: that they are committed to revenue over people. Now we have the bitter knowledge that universities could provide access—they just don’t want to and will not unless legal action is taken. Following the work of people like Margaret Price and Mia Mingus, we are interested in moving beyond a personal and individualized model of access (i.e., accommodations such as extended time) and toward a more structural critique of the ableism embedded in institutions themselves (universities, arts and culture organizations, even grassroots organizations). This approach emphasizes disability as a lens, a mode of critique, and a path towards justice, in addition to an individual identity. We also recognize the importance of strategic ambivalence towards institutions during a time of extreme political repression: holding in tandem the knowledge that all institutions are complicit in oppression and willing to sell out the most vulnerable of its members and that these spaces also can hold some of the things we need: jobs, resources, and spaces where transformative learning can happen.
Perspectives on Research in the Field as Disabled Scholars of Color
In addition to discussing our personal experiences as disabled scholars of color in disability studies, we also discussed the trends we are seeing in research in the field. The field of disability studies has become more legitimated within academia and higher education and there are both gifts and challenges to this incorporation into the academy. Gifts of the institutionalization of disability studies include increased visibility/recognition of our field, more jobs and funding for our work, and the ability to bring what we refer to as fugitive knowledge into spaces we as disabled scholars of color especially may not otherwise have access to such as medical, nursing, and pre-medical school programs. Challenges of the institutionalization of disability studies include the co-optation and misuse of terms and concepts like disability justice, our work being lost within or pitted against medical humanities, health humanities, medical anthropology and similar fields, increased gatekeeping of knowledge, tacit acceptance of institutional ableism in the name of individual survival, and a move away from the disability politics that have long been central and foundational to the field. Further, as most disability studies scholars are not in disability studies departments/programs or are joint appointed with a more traditional department, such scholars may be forced to view disability studies as secondary to their scholarship as their work toward tenure. Furthermore, in the wake of recent attacks on diversity, equity, inclusion and related initiatives, we are increasingly pressured to censor or code our work in order to prevent defunding, harassment, or dismissal. These challenges in particular shape some of the issues and concerns we discussed regarding trends we have observed in research in disability studies today.
Our discussion of the state of research in the field of disability studies, particularly as it pertains to race, drew not only on Washieka Torres’s literature review of articles published in five of the leading disability studies journals in the past five years and disability studies books published in the last ten years, but also our individual experiences as reviewers for journals and presses, as advisors and outside readers for graduate students, and as tenure letter writers. We noted that outside of special issues on race, there are still only a moderate amount of critical race disability studies articles being published in the leading journals and whiteness seems to continually go unnamed in work focused exclusively on white experiences or representations of disability. Although there has been an increase in transnational disability studies which has drawn attention to the ways disability is understood and experienced outside of the global north, not all transnational disability studies publications necessarily address race directly nor take a critical race approach to the work. That said, there has been a substantial increase in the number of critical race disability studies books published in the last ten years, which is exciting and heartening for the growth of our sub-field. Another trend we noted is that we still see many scholars doing research on disabled people as objects of study as opposed to taking what we consider a critical disability studies methodological approach which understands disability/ableism as social and discursive system which can have material impact and resonance even without the presence of disabled people. In terms of citational politics, we often see three things: first, articles which almost exclusively cite early disability studies work from the 1990s and early 2000s, but nothing more recent even when there are directly relevant publications to cite as well; second, articles and student work that almost exclusively cites activist, artistic and other mainstream disability justice writing even when there are relevant academic research publications to cite as well; third, thin or passing citation of critical race disability studies work, such as mentioning the existence of such work in passing without close engagement or placing citations in a footnote only. We are concerned that despite the growth, institutionalization, and visibility of disability studies, the engagement with critical race disability studies scholarship remains limited and superficial.
As a result of some of these concerning trends, we as a collective want to find new and innovative ways to make our work more visible and accessible while still resisting the individualistic, academic “superstar” model of self-promotion and marketing that has become common in academia. Furthermore, we want to expand the ways we disseminate fugitive knowledge to get critical race disability studies and disability studies more generally into more academic and non-academic spaces, particularly through open access publishing, audiobook publishing, and plain/accessible language translations of work. We aim as a collective to also explore fugitive knowledge production and dissemination with one another and our students by experimenting with practices like co-writing, care work, collaborative research, and learning/working spaces that center pleasure and generosity. Along similar lines, we have a collection of additional recommendations and dreams for the future of critical race disability studies.
Conclusion: Dreams for the Future of the Disabled Scholars of Color Collective and Critical Race Disability Studies
To conclude this white paper report on the conversations we had during our first Disabled Scholars of Color Collective gathering, we would like to offer the following dreams for future initiatives and efforts that would support the growth and sustainability of critical race disability studies. We present this list not in any particular order of priority as one, many of these are interconnected and two, our work will occur only under the right conditions. None of us are willing to sacrifice our wellbeing for our fields or institutions.
- Survey of Critical Race Disability Studies (CRDS) Scholars: We aim to conduct a survey of critical race disability studies scholars (whether or not affiliated with an academic institution) in order to one, build a list of CRDS scholars who may want to participate in future initiatives and two, learn more about the labor conditions and research/career challenges such scholars face.
- Articulation of CRSC Values and Commitments: We want to work collaboratively toward creating a document that articulates what critical race disability studies is and its values and commitments, including approaches to and best practices for research, publishing, tenure reviews and pedagogy in CRDS.
- Future DSoCC Gatherings: We hope to host future Disabled Scholar of Color Collective gatherings where we can build community, think and work together. In particular, we would like to expand future gatherings to include more scholars, especially new scholars, unaffiliated scholars, and graduate students seeking mentoring, community and support.
- CRDS Scholar Mutual Aid Network: We dream of building a CRDS scholar mutual aid network that offers a flexible range of supports across varying strata of the academy. This work would begin with identifying needs, goals, and existing models of scholarly mutual aid networks–such as the Decolonial German Studies mutual aid network. We would ideally grow a CRDS Mutual Aid Network to include:
- A means of addressing immediate needs ranging from professional and scholarly supports to practical supports such as transportation, childcare, etc.
- A reader/reviewer network to ensure qualified review for CRDS manuscripts, articles, and tenure and promotion cases, as well as qualified editorial support for CRDS scholars. This could extend to arts and community-engaged projects or hybrid projects.
- A peer mentoring network to both cultivate new generations of disabled scholars, artists, and activists of color as well as to share information about the often unspoken rules of academia and how to navigate them. Such a network must be cultivated and financially underwritten because of the scarcity of existing mentors and mentoring pipelines. Mentoring would include pre-professional supports, resource- and skill-sharing, connections, sharing of lived experience, advising on institutional navigation, etc.
- Support for and guidance on navigating public harassment and/or institutional violence directed toward disabled scholars of color, including scripts for approaching institutional communications and public relations departments, legal resources, and an FAQ about what to expect and do when targeted and how to assess the credibility of threats.
- CRDS Public Engagement Work: In line with our investment in fugitive knowledge, we hope to expand and strengthen efforts by critical race disability studiers scholars to engage with the general public about our work including making CRDS resources and research freely available across various forms of media, such as open access publishing, a podcast series, social media initiatives, and collaboration with public library systems.
- Formal Partnerships with Non-Academic Institutions: In order for disabled scholars of color to reduce the power academic institutions have over our work and careers, we hope to develop formal and informal partnerships between the Disabled Scholars of Color Collective and non-academic institutions and organizations which may be able to provide financial, structural, or other forms of support.
The above projects and initiatives are ones we hope to engage in ourselves with appropriate time and support, but we also encourage others in the field to take on similar tasks or join us to make these dreams possible. Those who may be interested in joining some of these future efforts should submit their contact info to this form to be contacted with updates. We will continue to plan, work, and gather as capacity and resources allow, always dreaming of futures where disability justice is the norm.
Works Cited
Accessible Campus Action Alliance. “Beyond “High-Risk”: Statement on Disability and Campus Re-Openings.” https://sites.google.com/view/accesscampusalliance. Accessed October 8 2025.
Beer, Andreas and Gesa Mackenthun. Fugitive Knowledge: The Loss and Preservation of Knowledge in Cultural Contact Zones. Waxmann, 2015.
Kim, Jina B. “Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique: Thinking with Minich’s ‘Enabling Whom?’.” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, vol. 6, 2017.
McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory : Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York University Press, 2006.
Mingus, Mia. “Access Intimacy, Interdependence, and Disability Justice.” Leaving Evidence, vol. June 12 2018, 2017. Https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/access-intimacy-interdependence-and-disability-justice.
—. “Access Intimacy: The Missing Link.” Leaving Evidence, vol. 2025, 2011. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/.
Minich, Julie Avril. “Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now.” Lateral, vol. 5, no. 1, 2016, http://csalateral.org/wp/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-critical-disability-studies-now-minich.
Price, Margaret. Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life. Duke University Press, 2024.
—. Mad at School : Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. University of Michigan Press, 2011. Corporealities.
Sandahl, Carrie. “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer?: Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 9, no. 1-2, 2003, pp. 25–56.
Schalk, Sami. “Critical Disability Studies as Methodology.” Lateral, vol. 6, no. 1, 2017, https://doi.org/10.25158/L6.1.13.
Footnotes
1 See McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory : Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York University Press, 2006, Sandahl, Carrie. “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer?: Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 9, no. 1-2, 2003, pp. 25–56.
2 See, for example, how DisCrit has been positioned against mainstream special education in the Special Issue of Exceptionality: A Special Education Journal which included an article titled “Welcome to the Destruction of Special Education in the Name of Ideology.”
3 For instance, several of us first connected as graduate students at the People of Color Caucus meeting at the Society for Disability Studies annual conference.
4 Adjunctification refers to the decrease of tenure and tenure track positions in favor of hiring short-term adjunct instructors and contingent faculty who are typically paid less and work on renewable, not guaranteed year-to-year contracts, sometimes without benefits.
5 See, for example, Accessible Campus Action Alliance. “Beyond “High-Risk”: Statement on Disability and Campus Re-Openings.” https://sites.google.com/view/accesscampusalliance. Accessed October 8 2025.
6 See Mingus, Mia. “Access Intimacy, Interdependence, and Disability Justice.” Leaving Evidence, vol. June 12 2018, 2017. leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/access-intimacy-interdependence-and-disability-justice, —. “Access Intimacy: The Missing Link.” Leaving Evidence, vol. 2025, 2011. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/, Price, Margaret. Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life. Duke University Press, 2024, —. Mad at School : Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. University of Michigan Press, 2011. Corporealities.
7 See Beer, Andreas and Gesa Mackenthun. Fugitive Knowledge: The Loss and Preservation of Knowledge in Cultural Contact Zones. Waxmann, 2015.
8 The journals were: Disability Studies Quarterly, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Disability & Society, Review of Disability Studies, and Sexuality and Disability.
9 For more on this, see the conversation between Julie Avril Minich, Jina B. Kim and Sami Schalk in Lateral. Kim, Jina B. “Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique: Thinking with Minich’s ‘Enabling Whom?’.” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, vol. 6, 2017, Minich, Julie Avril. “Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now.” Lateral, vol. 5, no. 1, 2016, http://csalateral.org/wp/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-critical-disability-studies-now-minich, Schalk, Sami. “Critical Disability Studies as Methodology.” Ibid.vol. 6, 2017, https://doi.org/10.25158/L6.1.13.
