Towards a crip methodology for critical disability studies

Abstract

Cripistemology, as a concept, invokes Haraway's situated knowledges by drawing important linkages between its status within critical disability studies and its counterparts in queer theory, critical race theory and feminist theory. Scholars in critical disability studies will be hardly surprised that a non- disabled scientist has conflated personal experience with scientific standards in order to posit what Robert McRuer might call a compulsory able-bodied version of objective reality. A focus on method includes asking who is served or empowered by such knowledge, and how such knowledge can help to constitute a proactive, rather than merely reactive, community of disability studies scholars and activists. Audio and visual descriptions, or tactile and verbal descriptions, both promote access and produce socially –– and technologically – mediated and intersubjective forms of knowledge. The multiple scales involved in the forms of access-making indicate that a crip methodology can be instrumental in developing a transdisciplinary map of multiple perspectives as well as multiple forms of mediation.