Calls to decolonize disability studies have abounded since the early 2010s. Yet, in scholarly publications and academic programs oriented toward disability studies, and in institutions where disability studies is taught and researched, scholarship on and from the geographical peripheries of the field frequently remains at the margins, as a single article in a special issue, a chapter in a book, or an “additional” reading on a syllabus. As scholars from and of the Global South, through this special issue, we (the editors) hope to bring these developments into productive conversations that re-orient the place of the peripheral within the discipline.

To bridge this gap between disability studies work “here” and “there,” we propose this special issue in the field’s flagship North American journal comprised entirely of work in/with/about the Global South. We call for critical theoretical, historical, literary, sociological, and political engagements with alternate corporealities, solidarities, and dis/identifications in and of these geographies. Put simply, we aim to develop a special issue that makes “peripheral crip critique” impossible to footnote and ignore. At a time of immense political, material, and epistemological violence in this complex geography, we seek, with this special issue, to remind disability studies of the complexities of the “rest’s” interactions with the West and to think about whose stories and theories, in number and in knowledge, will shape or foreclose crip futures to come.

We are particularly excited about critical annotated bibliographies of alternative disability studies canons; syllabi for global/regional disability studies; co-written or conversational pieces, especially if transnational or intraregional; letters (of love or complaint) to the field or to scholars; original short stories or fables; political pieces like manifestos, pamphlets, or zines; organizing guides; or responses or reviews of existing canonical texts in Euro- and American-centric disability studies.