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Is There a Crip in this Class?
Christina Lee (she/her), Independent Researcher
christinayajinlee@gmail.com 

Christina Lee recently completed her PhD in English and Medical Humanities at King’s College London. Her thesis was titled ‘The Care of the Dis-ease Self: A Foucauldian Reading of Buddhist Meditation Memoirs as Narratives of Healing’. Her research looks at experiences of illness and disability, embodiment, and intersectionality.

To reference this paper: Lee, C. (2023). Is there a crip in this class? In Goodley, D., Halsey, R., Scully, J., Singh, S., Titchkosky, T. and Wong, M.E. (Editors). The Disability Matters Scholarship Collection. 91̽��: University of 91̽��. 

Is There a Crip in this Class?

Medical humanities is an emergent interdisciplinary field that combines arts, humanities, social sciences, and scientific approaches to explore issues of health and illness. Medical humanities was developed by physicians and medical educators in the 1970s in response to the commercialisation and technologisation of biomedical education. Drawing on diverse practices such as narratives and creative arts, medical humanities aims to rehumanise medical practice and improve patient-doctor relationships (Cole et al., 2015, p. 2). In the last decade, the field took a “critical” turn. Drawing on diverse disciplines including queer theory and disability studies, critical medical humanities expanded its focus away from medical education to explore illness and wellbeing beyond the clinical context. Nevertheless, disability remains an “absent presence” in medical humanities – a problem, subject of inquiry, or metaphor, but rarely a “scholarly authority” (Goodley, 2023). In this article, I reflect on how disability studies’ place in medical humanities has changed since the critical turn and consider what its presence in the field means for the future.

I begin with the question: Is there a crip in this class?

In his classic essay “Is There a Text in this class?”, literary theorist Stanley Fish (1980) presents an anecdote about a colleague’s exchange with a student who asked if there is a text in his class. The colleague responded with the title of the set text, the Norton Anthology of Literature. However, the student had previously taken a class from Fish, who had taught that meaning is not fixed in the words of a literary text itself but emerges through the reader’s act of reading. She was in fact asking after the instructor’s interpretative approach to the text as opposed to information about the course itself. Like the student’s question, “Is there a crip in this class?” may be understood in two ways.

On first reading, “Is there a crip in this class?” is a question about disability inclusion and representation in medical humanities. Crip is derived from the derogatory term “cripple” and was used as a slang for “easy” (Lewis, 2015, p. 46). Just like the word “queer”, crip is reclaimed by disabled people as a means of empowerment. During the 1970s disability rights movement, crip was used by disabled people and disability scholars to reframe disability as a subversive social and political identity. Disability studies emerged as a field that interrogates how disability emerges not from an individual’s impairment but from social and cultural barriers that oppress the person. Contemporary critical disability studies scholars further theorise disability beyond the social model and position disability as necessarily entangled with systems of race, gender, and class.

While early work in medical humanities tended to use disability studies and patient narratives in medical education to teach medical students about disability, critical medical humanities uses disability studies to challenge representations of disability in medicine and medical humanities itself. Medical humanities has traditionally privileged individual narratives by white middle-class cisgendered writers in the Global North. This has led to the underrepresentation of black, ethnic minority, queer, trans disabled people in health research. Following work by critical disability studies scholars like Alison Kafer and Eunjung Kim (2017) on how notions of health are always underpinned by racist and ableist structures, interdisciplinary critical medical humanities projects like the Black Health and the Humanities project (2020) have collaborated with black activists and artists to amplify marginalised voices and spotlight how racist healthcare environments shape black people’s physical and mental health.

“Is there a crip in this class?” is also a question about critical approaches to disability in medical humanities. Critical disability studies scholars argue that disability studies is not simply the study of disabled people but a methodology for scrutinising “the social norms and conditions that define and stigmatise particular attributes as impairments” (Minich, 2016, para. 5). Crip theory, which combines disability studies with queer theory, examines how queerness and disability unsettle gender and bodily norms. As a verb, to "crip" is to expose the ways in which social practices and systems exclude and marginalise disabled people. In medical humanities, crip theory has been invaluable in analyses of how people with conditions like organ transplantation and diabetes reclaim control of their bodies by refusing linear narratives of cure and fatphobia (Wasson, 2021; Sabada, 2022).

For some, using ideas like crip that originated from disability activism in medical humanities is problematic because it effectively transforms tools for resistance into instruments that justify and expand medicine’s control over disabled people. Cripping her own illness narratives syllabus, Sayantani DasGupta (2016) expressed her discomforts as a nondisabled medical educator teaching disability studies within the confines of the ableist structures of academic and medical institutions. Critical disability studies can also at times limit medical humanities’ engagement with patients, physicians, and health organisations. The language of crip theory may alienate disabled and chronically ill people who do not identify as crip. Critical theory can do little to alleviate patients’ physical pain or improve the material conditions that lead physicians to experience care burnout.

As well as a methodology, critical disability studies is also a framework for critical disability praxis (Nishida, 2019). Critical disability studies is about practising disability with disability communities and transforming the ways we teach and produce knowledge. The growing presence of disability studies scholars, disabled activists, and scholars who crip in the medical humanities is an encouraging sign that we are moving in the right direction. However, we have some way to go to make medical humanities a safe and accessible space for disabled people. As noted in the recent report on the challenges and barriers to progress in medical humanities, neurodivergent, chronically ill and disabled students and researchers remain excluded from traditional academic networking practices (McLusky 2023). It is therefore vital that we move beyond theorising and actively practise disability in the clinic, classroom, and the community.

So, would the crips in the class please stay seated.

References

Black Health and the Humanities Project (2020) Available at:  (Accessed: 12 November 2023).

Cole, Thomas R., Nathan S. Carlin, and Ronald A. Carson (2015), Medical Humanities: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

DasGupta, Sayantani (2016) ‘The Politics of the Pedagogy: Cripping, Queering and Unhoming Health Humanities’, in Rita Charon (ed.) The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 137-154.

Fish, Stanley (1980) ‘Is There a Text in This Class?’, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard: Harvard University Press, pp. 303-321.

Goodley, Dan (2023) ‘Disability and depathologisation are not metaphors’, The Polyphony, 5^th May. Available at:  (Accessed: 12 November 2023).

Kafer, Alison, and Eunjung Kim (2017) ‘Disability and the Edges of Intersectionality’, in Clare Barker and Stuart Murray (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability, edited by (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 123-138.

Lewis, Victoria Ann (2015) ‘Crip’, in Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, David Serlin (eds.) Keywords for Disability Studies. New York: New York University Press, pp. 46-48.

McLusky, Sarah (2022) ‘Overcoming Barriers to Progress in Medical Humanities Research’, Institute for Medical Humanities Durham. Available at:  (Accessed: 12 November 2023).

Minich, Julie Avril (2016) ‘Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now’, Lateral 5(1). doi: 

Nishida, Akemi (2019) ‘Critical Disability Praxis, in Katie Ellis, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Mike Kent and Rachel Robertson (eds.) Manifestos for the Future of Critical Disability Studies Volume 1. New York: Routledge, pp. 239-247.

Sabada, SK (2022) ‘Troubling Cure and Cripping Futurity: Queering Narratives of Diabetes’, in Bianca Frazer and Heather Walker (eds.) (Un)doing Diabetes: Representation, Disability, Culture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 319-336.

Wasson, Sara (2021) ‘Waiting, Strange: Transplant Recipient Experience, Medical Time and Queer/crip Temporalities’, Medical Humanities, 47, pp. 447-455. doi: http://doi:10.1136/medhum-2021-012141 

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How my area of research, theory and scholarship is transformed by an engagement with critical disability studies?
Stuart Murray  (he/him)
University of Leeds
S.F.Murray@leeds.ac.uk 

Stuart Murray is Professor of Contemporary Literatures and Film in the School of English at the University of Leeds. He has worked in Critical Disability Studies for over 20 years, written/edited multiple books and articles on disability representation, and was among the very first University academics to teach courses on disability, literature, film and cultural theory. He is a big friend of Disability Matters and offered superb advice when we were putting this programme proposal to Wellcome. 

To reference this paper: Murray, S. (2023). How my area of research, theory and scholarship is transformed by an engagement with critical disability studies? In Goodley, D., Halsey, R., Scully, J., Singh, S., Titchkosky, T. and Wong, M.E. (Editors). The Disability Matters Scholarship Collection. 91̽��: University of 91̽��. 

How is my area of research, theory and scholarship transformed by an engagement with critical disability studies?

This is the question posed to those of us contributing to the December 11 session. When I first saw it, it intrigued and challenged me, because in many ways I feel that my research and scholarship is in Critical Disability Studies, and has been for 20 years. Thinking further however, I liked the idea of this in itself being provocative. ‘Critical Disability Studies’ is no single, unified field and therefore the idea that one element or aspect of it might provoke another actually makes sense. In fact, it’s probably something that’s really important to say

In fact, I think the main reason I was approached to participate in this conversation is because of my background in Literary/Film Studies and, more recently, Medical Humanities, and so I want to address these as I also keep the above challenge in mind. Plus, I want to be genuinely provocative.

Disability Studies has transformed English Studies in the same way that it has added an essential perspective to scholarship in so many disciplines. It has rewritten critical literary scholarship by demanding it consider the saturation of literature with images, metaphors and narratives of supposedly ‘deviant’ bodies and minds, and has showcased the talent of disabled writers. Consequently, there is no field of English Studies that doesn’t have a developing body of critical work that sees writing in terms of the latest disability theory. 

But: it’s important to remember that the source of this development of critical thinking had its origins in English Studies. The ‘critical’ in this manifestation of Critical Disability Studies emerged in the work of scholars such as Lennard J Davis, Rosemarie-Garland Thomson, David Mitchell, Sharon Snyder, Michael Davidson and Tobin Siebers, all of whom have backgrounds in English. Equally, the massively important development of crip theory in the first decade of the 20^th century owes much to the work of Robert McRuer, again based in an English department.

So, the move to make here is not only to recognise how transformational Disability Studies has been to English but (in the spirit of provocation) to ask whether Critical Disability Studies does enough to acknowledge its heritage, more precisely its debt to English. I would want to argue that English is at least as foundational to Critical Disability Studies as Sociology and that this is often forgotten when thinking of its contemporary forms.

My main provocation however, comes through thinking about Disability Studies’ relationship with Medical Humanities, the subject of my latest book Medical Humanities and Disability Studies: In/Disciplines, recently published by Bloomsbury. 

As a discipline, Medical Humanities is largely successful because it functions as a network of connected approaches across and through multiple subjects; it self-consciously aspires to greater sophistication and has moved from deterministic models of instruction and listening, to critical modes of entanglement and discipline crossing. Disability Studies builds sophistication into highly complex theoretical frames that host critical projects of advocacy and interrogations of social, economic and political symtems. It is wary of structures that discriminate and committed to the project of championing disabled presence and forms of knowing the world. It is interrogative of structures and the rethinking of space and time, committed to activity and organised change, and more fully names a recognisable and critical world than Medical Humanities. 

Because of worries about its history (which disability scholarship has rightly critiqued), Medical Humanities pushes to be more than a humanist critical friend to clinical/academic conceptions of health. It has successfully argued for this, especially at levels of theory, but arguably it does so through the addition of perspectives; even at its most critically complex, it worries that it lacks the coherence and ethical framework that it sees in scholarship on disability. 

At the same time, Medical Humanities’ aim for greater critical inclusivity pushes back against many of the uninterrogated assertions made by Disability Studies, particularly assumptions inherent in its affirmative modes of counter narratives. In part, this problem arises because Disability Studies, in its systemic disciplinary formations, isn’t always good at being inclusive. A commitment to provocative engagement can assume that counter narratives to ableism are de facto good simply by existing in opposition and I often feel that the tendency of critical disability scholars to claim the moral high ground through an assertion of wide-ranging inclusion to be something that needs investigation and revision, because it all too often simplifies complexities of disability lives. I find more tolerance in Medical Humanities approaches to critical methods, possibly because the subject acknowledges that it doesn’t have the same kind of foundational core subject (the disabled person, for example) as other disciplines. It knows that it needs to know more.

In much disability theory, assumptions are made about what disabled people are or what they want and even if these come within a language of inclusion that suggests variety, they can be remarkably inflexible. Personally, I find that Disability Studies often champions a certain kind of disabled life while ignoring others (I have never felt it as a useful frame to think about my own disability – epilepsy – for example). Critically, the subject is poor in talking about (for example) chronic pain and engaging with the loss felt by many disabled people, or the complex ways they might articulate a need for dependency. It also champions certain critical methods while assuming superiority over others. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve heard at conferences that ‘it has to be considered whether Medical Humanities might be ableist’ (paraphrasing a throwaway remark); or that Medical Humanities ‘needs cripping’. But isn’t an uninterrogated sense of entitlement and self-worth, and an assumed self-importance as a point of reference (evident in some of these viewpoints) itself a sign of ableism? Where might that leave us?

At the moment, I find that much Critical Disability Studies lacks self-reflexivity and doubt; consequently it doesn’t seem to me to be a humble discipline. I find the provisional positioning central to much Medical Humanities work, or the commitment to contradiction and messiness championed by English, to offer better critical tools precisely because they are more flexible. If we want better research on disability (and we all do) will scholars in Critical Disability Studies contemplate how much it needs to change to achieve this?

References

Michael Davidson, Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008)

Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body (London: Verso, 1995)

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How we Look (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2009)

Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York UP, 2006)

David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000)

Stuart Murray, Medical Humanities and Disability Studies: In/Disciplines (London: Bloomsbury, 2023)

Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008)

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How my area of research, theory and scholarship is transformed by an engagement with critical disability studies?
Sana Rizvi
Liverpool John Moores University
S.Rizvi@ljmu.ac.uk

Dr Sana Rizvi is a Senior Lecturer in Education and Early Childhood Studies at Liverpool John Moores University. She is passionate about teaching on the subjects of racial inequalities in education, critical perspectives on disability studies and inclusive education, and on qualitative methodologies. She has presented her research at several international and national conferences, and has also published research in the field of research methods, racial inequality and disability studies.

To reference this paper: Rizvi, S. (2023). How my area of research, theory and scholarship is transformed by an engagement with critical disability studies? In Goodley, D., Halsey, R., Scully, J., Singh, S., Titchkosky, T. and Wong, M.E. (Editors). The Disability Matters Scholarship Collection. 91̽��: University of 91̽��. 

How is my area of research, theory and scholarship transformed by an engagement with critical disability studies?

In 2006, Helen Meekosha published a paper titled, ‘What the Hell are You? An Intercategorical Analysis of Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Disability in the Australian Body Politic’. In this paper she highlights the lack of intercategorical analysis between race, ethnicity, gender, immigration trajectories and other social markers in disability scholarship. Meekosha (2006) contextualises this with the Australian colonisation of, and the ongoing violence towards Aboriginal communities, and how ableist legislation, legal frameworks and institutional structures seek to exclude disabled Aboriginal communities, immigrants, and other ethnic minorities on an everyday basis. I came across this paper during my postgraduate studies when I was exploring the South Asian mothering of disabled children in the UK, at which time I was coming across very reductive and essentialising scholarship that, at best, would frame their experiences as being down to cultural or language barriers. Reading Meekosha felt like a breath of fresh air, and an invitation to write about the exclusions of certain minoritised groups from disability scholarship. Meekosha’s writing on Global South/North dynamics, and how that further removes rights, entitlements and citizenship from minorities, pushed me to consider how communities I was researching with are framed and discussed within dominant scholarship. 

Later, as an educator, I was teaching critical perspectives on inclusion to postgraduate students. As a woman of colour scholar from the Global South, I found that much of the scholarship in the module reading list and the teaching resources was apolitical, lacking accountability of the ongoing colonial violence towards racialised communities. As a critical scholar, this was deeply unsettling - a clear exclusion remained at work within disability studies despite Meekosha’s call for an intercategorical analysis. I felt that much could still be learnt from engaging with justice studies, critical race studies, migration studies, and international politics in order to understand how different oppressive structures work to silence liminal subjects. I then came across Deborah Stienstra’s (2015) paper, titled ‘For Michael Charlie: Including girls and boys with disabilities in the global South/North’. Stienstra explored decolonising inclusion discourse, highlighting how capitalist and colonial forms of state surveillance impact Global South communities living in the Global North. Unpacking Stienstra’s paper enabled me to ask difficult questions of students in traditional white spaces about the role of white saviourism, western NGOs, and more importantly, the taken-for-granted expertise that is seemingly assigned unthinkingly to western discourse on inclusion and disability, meanwhile ignoring the context of ongoing Global North military interventions and violence perpetrated upon Global South communities. I came out of these classrooms feeling invigorated and challenged because these spaces opened new possibilities of de-territorialising disability scholarship (Mbembe 2016). 

Over the years I have become bolder in blurring the imposed boundaries between disability studies and other disciplines. My current research specifically explores how racialised children and young people are constructed as unruly subjects in neo-liberal states, and subsequently punished for their unruliness. This work draws on Falguni Sheth’s (2009) Unruly Framework to highlight how racialised children are not only excluded from their educational settings, but also excluded from mainstream inclusion/exclusion discourse. The state orchestrates this exclusion by formally categorising their tangible and intangible markers as unruly symbols (Sheth, 2009). These markers can manifest as ‘Black hairstyles’ or the hijab which ‘do not conform’ to official dress codes, background, religion (e.g. being Muslim or Rastafarian), disability, citizenship status or any other symbol which pathologises and positions them as requiring social control (Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly, 2018). A case in point, 13-year-old Tashaun Aird was expelled from Hackney New School in London in July 2017 for carrying out a prank which damaged a teacher's coat. Tashaun’s family were initially told that his exclusion was temporary and conditional to exhibiting better behaviour. However, the school reversed its judgement and permanently excluded him, transferring him to a PRU and then onto an alternative provision. This unlawful action left Tashaun extremely vulnerable in an environment which not only threatened his education but also his physical and emotional wellbeing - and ultimately his life. Tashaun was assaulted whilst he was attending the PRU, and later after being transferred to an alternative provision he expressed anxieties about threats he was receiving from a group of boys. Tragically, he was fatally stabbed three months later by a local gang who had mistakenly thought Tashaun was part of a rival faction. Staggeringly, educational and social care agencies had apparently considered that a certain level of threat was to be expected in such educational settings, despite Tashaun’s family repeatedly raising concerns. Tashaun’s exclusion irrevocably defined him as unruly, and as such, not worthy of the state’s protection. Added to the fact that he was ‘Black’, ‘male’, and of ‘lower socioeconomic status’, the state also categorised Tashaun’s interest in ‘Afrobeat’ and ‘drill’ music as unruly symbols which were indelibly associated with criminal gangs. Consequently, he was immediately marked out as unruly, threatening and deserving of disciplinary action, despite having only committed a rather innocuous prank. Arguably, even his temporary exclusion itself represented an unruly symbol to other educational settings, indicating how boys like Tashaun should be treated (Rizvi, 2023).

My theoretical engagement with Sheth’s work has reminded me why, as researchers, we must be political in our research; we must sit with uncomfortable truths, and we must be witnesses to the ongoing exclusion and silencing of racialised communities in local and international contexts. As someone who continues to teach and research within critical disability studies - still traditionally a white space - being political is not only liberating but also holds me accountable to those whom I research with.

References

Mbembe, A. (2016). Decolonizing the university: New directions. Arts and Humanities Education, 15(1), 29–45.

Meekosha, H., 2006. What the hell are you? An intercategorical analysis of race, ethnicity, gender and disability in the Australian body politic. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 8(2-3), pp.161-176.

Joseph-Salisbury, R. and Connelly, L., 2018. ‘If your hair is relaxed, white people are relaxed. If your hair is nappy, they’re not happy’: Black hair as a site of ‘post-racial’social control in English schools. Social Sciences, 7(11), p.219.

Rizvi, S., 2023. ‘Unruly’ Ethnic Minorities: Exclusion Through Policy Constructions. In International Perspectives on Exclusionary Pressures in Education: How Inclusion becomes Exclusion (pp. 259-277). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Sheth, F.A., 2009. Toward a political philosophy of race. Albany, NY: Suny Press.

Stienstra, D., 2017. For Michael Charlie: Including girls and boys with disabilities in the global South/North.