How might disability studies center scholarship from geographies often marked as the Third World, Majority World, or Global South as the epistemological metropole of the field? What would it mean to engage with these geographies in ways that offer grammars that talk to and talk back to the dominant geographical paradigm of the field? This special issue invites contributions exclusively from scholars, activists, and artists working with/about/in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Oceania, and the Caribbean, particularly from those invested in collaboratively developing a “peripheral crip critique,” one which centers the geographies and materialities that have been marginalized in critical disability studies and crip theory.

Our provocation towards a “peripheral crip critique” emerges from a recognition that even the myriad calls to “decolonize” disability studies have been met with wide support but little follow-through in North American academia. 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. Meanwhile, scholarship on disability outside of global North contexts continues to grow, although along dissimilar trajectories than Global North disability studies scholarship, due to both resource discrepancies and epistemological segregation. Attempts to bridge this gap have produced poignant discourse on empire, neo-colonialism, and diaspora, but these geographies retain the Global North as their epistemological center. This special issue, then, aims to move past the hyphenations of Something-American or the impulsive conjunction of “U.S. and the world,” instead offering grammars of “crip critique” and disability justice that instead begin and end with the (rest of the) World.

Drawing from the ways that Postcolonial Studies, Third World/Transnational Feminisms, Indigenous Disability Studies, and Queer of Color Critique pushed the envelope of scholarship and organizing from which they emerged, we aim to unsettle and re-locate disability studies, particularly crip of color critique, to engage meaningfully with theories and histories rooted in the fluid and political geographies alternatingly called the Majority World, Third World, or the Global South. In our attempt to draw this map, we borrow from several lineages of scholarship that have attended to how it is named. The notion of “periphery” borrows from scholars of dependency theory, while the concept of the Third World and Global South as sites of political potential takes from Walter Rodney and Vijay Prashad. In our use of the Majority World, we follow photographer Shahidul Alam’s coinage of the phrase in line with Ranjit Singh, Rigoberto Lara Guzman and Sareeta Amrute’s note that “the term “majority world” defines community in terms of what it has, rather than what it lacks” (Amrute et al. 2022). Most of the global disabled population is located in this geography (Goodley et al. 2019), and so, in developing a “peripheral crip critique,” we center theories and theorists from these places as canonical in their own right. 

Moving beyond the confessional, autoethnographic, apologetic, practical, and plaintive registers offered to scholars of/in/from these geographies, we look for conversations, theories, stories, and accounts of disability and cripness that already exist in these places and demand attention. We seek pieces that build on crip of color and transnational disability scholars like Jina Kim, Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, Nirmala Erevelles, Mel Chen, Jasbir Puar, Julie Avril Minich, Julie Livingston, Aparna Nair, and others while also challenging the field to look further away to examine disability’s entanglements with imperialism, nationalism, regionalism, and globalization.

We invite contributions that articulate the centrality of non-Western non-normative bodies, the structures that shape them, their material conditions, the epistemologies and theories they offer to extant disability studies and crip theory. This, of course, is already a fraught project. Unequal resources shape unequal access to scholarship and to identification with a boundaried “field” of disability studies. Writing from the South has to often be “understandable” to Western audiences thereby limiting its radical alterity. Concepts do not translate neatly across regional borders and languages. We encourage pieces that debate and respond to this assumed incommensurability.

• What work does “disability studies” or “crip theory” do or not do in these contexts?

• What vocabularies and grammars of embodied non-normativity circulate in and across these geographies? What modes of power shape these circulations, and what might disability studies learn from them? 

• How have we come to imagine from our respective “Souths” as particular locations, and what are the affordances/constraints of this work of imagining from a crip perspective?  

• How can we attend to some of the differences between Southern locations so as not to flatten them?

•  How might we attend to material and epistemological violence and debilitation across these geographies when the “North” no longer acts as intermediary? 

• What do the specific configurations of colonialism, settler-colonialism, postcolonialism, the nation state, and neo-imperialism do to our understandings of debilitation and dis/ability? 

• What is the role of the scholar, the translator, and the activist in and between the Global South? Are there still attachments to disability identity and policy, and what might a “peripheral crip critique” offer to understand or respond to these attachments?

• How can our institutional or individual locations (whether in the Global South or in the Global North or between the two) shape these stories in distinct and contradictory ways? How might we speak to each other and build a dialogue that makes room for collaboration alongside/through disparity?

Recognizing that such questions need to be addressed from a variety of epistemologies and that certain ways of communication have been marginalized by normative Western academia, in addition to traditional academic essays, we invite submissions across forms. 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.

Submissions are now closed.

• Amrute, Sareeta, Ranjit Singh, and Rigoberto Lara Guzman. 2022. “Outside the Lexicon of Subjugation: An Interview with Shahidul Alam, the Bangladeshi Photographer and Activist Who Coined the Term “Majority World.”” Medium. September 19, 2022.

• Berne, Patricia, Aurora Levins Morales, David Langstaff, and Sins Invalid. "Ten principles of disability justice." WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly 46, no. 1 (2018): 227-230.

• Kim, Jina B. "Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique." Lateral 6, no. 1 (2017).

• Schalk, Sami. "Coming to claim crip: Disidentification with/in disability studies." Disability Studies Quarterly 33, no. 2 (2013).