UnLivable Cultures Unlivable Cultures

In this conversation, Clayton is joined by Dr. Mimi Khúc and Dr. Margaret Price to discuss their new books dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss and Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life, both from Duke University Press. The three have a wide-ranging conversation about capitalist mandates for wellness, appropriations of accessibility and cultures of care in the university, the ways race and racism refract experiences of disability and unwellness, and how academe structures the very power imbalances that make crip spacetime and claiming unwellness precarious and often harmful. 

⁠Interview Transcript⁠

De/Instutionalize is a series from Un/Livable Cultures focusing on the ways in which academic cultures are made livable and unlivable and how these institutions can participate in regimes of oppression and subjugation.

Mimi Khúc is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is the creator of Open in Emergency and the Asian American Tarot. Check out dear elia book tour dates and information.

Margaret Price is Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University, author of Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, and co-founder of the Transformative Access Project.

Clayton Jarrard works at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives at the nexus of research, policy implementation, and community efforts, and he is an incoming student at NYU's Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement program.

If you like Un/Livable Cultures, share with your friends, consider supporting the podcast on Patreon or leaving us a review! And follow our Twitter @UnlivablePod for updates.

Sources

Disrupting White Mindfulness: Race and Racism in the Wellbeing Industry by Cathy-Mae Karelse

“Writing While Adjunct: A Contingent Pedagogy of Unwellness” by Mimi Khúc in Crip Authorship: Disability as Method edited by Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez

Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity by Simi Linton

Interview Transcript Link

In this episode, Clayton is joined by members of the Access in the Making (AIM) Lab at Concordia University, Prakash Krishnan, Emery Vanderburgh, and Nicholas Goberdhan to discuss the work of the AIM Lab. The AIM Lab is an anti-colonial, anti-ableist, feminist research lab working on issues of access, disability, environment and care through creative experimentation. We talk about why there is a need for work like that of the AIM Lab to intervene in academic and institutional ableism and how the AIM Lab upholds the tenets of anti-colonialism, anti-ableism, and feminism in their research and practice. 

You can follow the AIM Lab on Twitter/X at @accessmaking and find out more on their website at accesinthemaking.ca.

If you like ⁠Un/Livable Cultures⁠, share with your friends, consider supporting the podcast on ⁠Patreon⁠, or leaving us a review! And follow our Twitter ⁠@UnlivablePod⁠ for updates.

Sources

Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds by Arseli Dokumaci

Disability Visibility edited by Alice Wong

Reading for Palestine (AIM Project)

Air, River, Sea, Soil: A History of Exploited Land (AIM Project)

Mobilizing Disability Survival Skills for the Urgencies of the Anthropocene (AIM Project)

Audio Description in the Making (AIM Project)

The It's Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby exhibit for the Brooklyn Museum of Art drew crowds and critiques. The multitude of harsh reviews suggest Gadsby should have stayed in their lane of comedy and stand up. But what does such criticism reveal about the art world itself?

Sources

It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby by Brooklyn Museum

Trailer | It's Pablo-matic: Pablo Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby by Brooklyn Museum

Hannah Gadsby’s Disastrous ‘Pablo-matic’ Show at the Brooklyn Museum Has Some ‘Pablo-ms’ of Its Own by Alex Greenberger

Hannah Gadsby’s Picasso Show Was Meant to Ignite Debate. And It Did. by Robin Pogrebin

A guide to the dozens of exhibitions worldwide marking the 50th anniversary of Picasso's death by José de Silva

Musée Picasso Paris Gives Fashion Designer Paul Smith Carte Blanche to Reinstall Its Permanent Collection to Dazzling Effect by Sarah Belmont

This is an experiment’: is Hannah Gadsby’s Picasso exhibition really that bad? by Lauren Mechling

Hannah Gadsby’s ‘Pablo-matic’ Is Not the Feminist Achievement It Wants to Be by Kady Ruth Ashcraft

The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam

How is suicide an issue of justice? How should our care for people experiencing suicidality  connect with the Land and Water in which people live? What does it mean to care for the life of Land and Water as well as the lives of people? Special guest Dr. Jeffrey Ansloos joins us for a conversation about how colonialism features in the creation of unlivable conditions, threatening the well-being of Indigenous and First Nations communities in particular.

Jeffrey Ansloos is an Associate Professor of Indigenous Health and Social Policy at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Prof. Ansloos is a community health, social policy, community psychology, and Indigenous studies scholar, with a global reputation for his research on Indigenous health justice and social and environmental dimensions of mental health, suicide, and houselessness. You can follow him on Twitter/X at @jeffreyansloos and find out more on his university profile.

If you like ⁠Un/Livable Cultures⁠, share with your friends, consider supporting the podcast on ⁠Patreon⁠, or leaving us a review! And follow our Twitter ⁠@UnlivablePod⁠ for updates.

Sources

“A question of justice: Critically researching suicide with Indigenous studies of affect, biosociality, and land-based relations” by Jeffrey Ansloos and Shanna Peltier

“Hydrocolonial Affects: Suicide and the Somatechnics of Long-term Drinking Water Advisories in First Nations in Canada” by Jeffrey Ansloos

“Is Suicide a Water Justice Issue? Investigating Long-Term Drinking Water Advisories and Suicide in First Nations in Canada” by Jeffrey Ansloos and Annelies Cooper

“Grieving geographies, mourning waters: Life, death, and environmental gendered racialized struggles in Mexico” by Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera

Negative Ecologies: Fossil Fuels and the Discovery of the Environment by David Bond

Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds by Arseli Dokumaci

Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology by Matthew Radcliffe

It’s obvious that some lives are valued over others, and some commodities are valued more than life. How have these determinations been made? In this episode, we talk about how medical care prioritizes some patients over others—even to the extent of taking some people’s personal ventilators to give to others who were considered to have a greater life expectancy or quality of life—how supply chain issues exacerbated this problem during the pandemic, and what a system may look like that prioritizes people over profit.  


If you like ⁠Un/Livable Cultures⁠, share with your friends, consider supporting the podcast on ⁠Patreon⁠, or leaving us a review! And follow our Twitter ⁠@UnlivablePod⁠ for updates.


Sources

Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant

Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure by Eli Clare

State policies may send people with disabilities to the back of the line for ventilators

How the Supply Chain Upheaval Became a Life-or-Death Threat

Eric Garner’s Death Will Not Lead to Federal Charges for N.Y.P.D. Officer

Eric Garner died during a 2014 police encounter. An officer involved might lose his job.

This is a big election year in the US, and legislative sessions across the country are beginning. It’s important to understand how we got here and recognize the patterns of anti-LGBTQ legislators and decision-makers to be strategic in our fight for livable worlds.

Since 2022, we have recorded multiple episodes to discuss LGBTQ+ issues in America, but we kept running into a problem: By the time the episodes were ready for release, there was newer information relevant to discuss. And so we recorded a new conversation. Then another. To disrupt this cycle, this episode is a mash-up of three select recordings we had about the state of LGBTQ+ issues and politics in the US. Hear how--over this almost 2 year period--different problems came to the fore, how our views evolved, and how our feelings changed. 

If you like Un/Livable Cultures, share with your friends, consider supporting the podcast on Patreon, or leaving us a review! And follow our Twitter @UnlivablePod for updates.

Selected Sources

Gender Underground: A Trans History of Do-It-Yourself by Jules Gill-Peterson

Right to Maim by Jasbir Puar

The whiteness of ‘coming out’: culture and identity in the disclosure narrative by Asiel Adan Sanchez

Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Gill-Peterson

Behind the Backlash Against Bud Light

Target says backlash against LGBTQ+ Pride merchandise hurt sales

Cruz Watch: The Senator Calls for an Investigation Into Bud Light for Some Reason

Who’s getting hurt most by soaring LGBTQ book bans? Librarians say kids. Harvard Gazette

Challenges to library books continue at record pace in 2023, American Library Association reports

Human Rights Campaign Working to Defeat 340 Anti-LGBTQ+ Bills at State Level Already, 150 of Which Target Transgender People – Highest Number on Record

New York Times Open Letter

Andrzejewski, J., Pampati, S., Steiner, R. J., Boyce, L., & Johns, M. M. (2021). Perspectives of Transgender Youth on Parental Support: Qualitative Findings From the Resilience and Transgender Youth Study. Health Education & Behavior, 48(1), 74–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/1090198120965504

Chen, D. C., Abrams, M., Clark, L., Ehrensaft, D., Tishelman, A. C., Chan, Y., Hidalgo, M. A. (2021). Psychosocial characteristics of transgender youth seeking gender-affirming medical treatment: Baseline findings from the TYC study. Journal of Adolescent Health, 68(6), 1104-1111.

Rafferty, J. (2018). Ensuring Comprehensive Care and Support for Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children and Adolescents. Pediatrics (Evanston), 142(4). https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2018-2162

Sobara, J. C., Chinara, L. N., Thompson, S., & Palmert, M. R. (2020). Mental health and timing of gender affirming care. Pediatrics, 146(4).