This paper emphasizes the importance of mêtis—adaptable and responsive rhetorical action—in achieving responsible, sustainable, and access-based community action for social justice. It specifically connects this concept to disability and access, arguing that centering disability and the embodied material experiences of disabled people are central to sustainable, effective, and ethical civic engagement practices for all. By drawing on the author’s experience working with the Latino Leadership Institute (LLI) in Orlando, Florida, this paper details the challenges encountered and the responsive decisions made, emphasizing how integrating disability-centered methodologies foster inclusivity and accessibility. Ultimately, this paper argues that a mêtis approach informed by disability perspectives allows for effective and ethical civic engagement that prioritizes access and empowers marginalized communities.

Drawing on their embodied experiences as queer disabled graduate students directing a student-founded, student-led community literacy program, this article foregrounds queercrip embodied experiences to reinterpret normative notions of failure in community literacy programs. Using our own experiences as queer disabled graduate students directing the community literacy program, queer and disability theory, and community literacy studies scholarship, the authors unpack their own stories of failure and argue, through queercrip readings of that failure, that failure should be seen as generative, as relational, and as bound by institutional perspective.

This essay was composed on the historic territories of the Akokisa/Orcoquisa and Karankawa peoples. In 2016, a Bloomberg poll revealed that what bothered voters most about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was his mocking of disabled journalist Serge Kovaleski during a campaign rally in South Carolina. The previous November, Trump had ridiculed Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, a condition that affects the joints. Footage of the act soon dominated the news cycle, and the Clinton campaign stressed the cruelty of Trump’s caricature to distinguish between the two candidates. Trump’s campaign had already been characterized by racism, sexism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia, but it was his ableism that—ostensibly—threatened to derail his run. Memes circulated on social media advanced sentiments like, “As long as I live I’ll never understand how it didn’t end here. #ImpeachTrump” (Lloyd, 2017).

For many, the results of the 2016 election brought a shock and much-needed wake-up call, as residents of the U.S.(and other nations across the world) faced a reality that can be easy to forget and ignore: White supremacy still reigns, both in the U.S. and abroad. While the results of the election appeared to surprise residents and poll analysts alike, for many marginalized communities, the election of a President with a history of racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia was merely another reminder of the discrimination embedded in our daily realities; a reminder that as marginalized people living in the United States, our fight for survival and agency is far from over.

This article offers a case study of the development and implementation of a free activist and leadership course for members of the community planning on running for elected office. The article describes how the course was developed, including an explanation of the partnership between the Latino Leadership Institute (LLI) and the University of Central Florida’s United Faculty of Florida (UCF-UFF), which resulted in the creation of an Orlando LLI chapter. The Electoral Activism and Leadership Academy (EALA), as the course was called, was motivated by two disability methodologies: first, a “madness narrative methodology” (Fields), wherein “representations are fragmented and nonrational,” even “resisting objectivity, linearity, and rational progression,” and secondly, a “nothing about us without us” methodology (Fields), which advocates the need for open discussions about action with populations who would be affected by such action. These methodologies helped reduce anxiety around the subject, offering a space for instructors and participants to participate as and when they could, share their stories, and get advice. This paper demonstrates that when oppressive cultural and political climates fragment bodies and identities of marginalized people, that fragmentation becomes the catalyst for opportunities of resistance. These fragmentations ultimately are representative of the cracks in oppressive systems, giving rise to the urgent need for the inclusivity of underrepresented or neglected perspectives, voices, and bodies to achieve everyday rhetorical resistance.

For five years of graduate school, I avoided studying disability because I thought it would require confronting the idea that I have a disability. I was first introduced to disability studies during my master’s coursework. I mustered the courage to take the course on disability because deep down, I knew that this thing I was calling a “vision problem” or what the doctors told me is a degenerative retinal disease called retinitis pigmentosa, might actually be a “disability.” I left the course feeling stimulated but no less intimidated by the idea of looking at myself in the mirror and thinking “disabled.” I resolved that my interest in disability studies was purely personal—it would allow me to learn about my own experiences, but I would do it privately, and I would publicly study something more obviously related to my profession as a writing instructor.

“All visualizations of disability are mediations that shape the world in which people who have or do not have disabilities inhabit and negotiate together. The point is that all representations have social and political consequences. Understanding how images create or dispel disability as a system of exclusions and prejudices is a move toward the process of dismantling the institutional, attitudinal, legislative, economic, and architectural barriers that keep people with disabilities from full participation in society” —Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography (75)

As the field of disability studies expands, a question that is cropping up in theoretical discussions more and more often is whether or not Fatness falls into the category of disability. Theorist April Herndon gives a compelling argument for the inclusion of Fat within disability studies, making an especially interesting connection between the idea of “elective disability” in the Deaf community (associated with a refusal to undergo procedures for cochlear implants or similar surgeries) and the idea that Fat people actively “choose” to be Fat by foregoing medical treatment. Herndon states, “[B]oth Fat and Deaf people are often considered morally blameworthy when they choose not to adopt recommended treatment. Similarly, both fatness and deafness are routinely recognized as medical conditions but seldom as the counter-hegemonic identities of Fat and Deaf, especially within the contexts of law and medicine” (128). The connection Herndon is making is that, rather than recognizing Fat and Deaf as identities that many people embrace, both are seen as defects that could and should be fixed. Thus, Herndon is making a clear connection between Fat studies and disability studies—that of medicalization, perceived choice, and normalization.

An accessible society,” crip theorist Robert McRuer argues, “is not one simply with ramps and Braille signs on ‘public’ buildings, but one in which our ways of relating to, and depending on, each other have been reconfigured” (94). Using McRuer’s definition as a starting point, in this article I seek to work toward creating a more accessible society of teacher-scholars by exploring interdependency as an ethic for intellectual work. Toward this end, I will first argue that creating such a public requires a reconceptualization of the term “pedagogy,” one that moves beyond the boundaries of the classroom such that learning emerges as a dynamic process of recognition and interrelation. I will then review the concepts of independence, dependence, and interdependence as they have been taken up in disability studies and conclude by using these meanings to map out how interrelations on multiple levels make our intellectual work possible.

As Editor of Reflections, I am pleased to introduce this special issue focused on Disability Studies. I have had the pleasure of working with Allison Hitt and Bre Garrett, the Special Editors to this issue, these past few months. Their commitment to this special issue shows through in the dedication and hard work they’ve exhibited throughout this process. Although my area is not disability studies, as a personal essay scholar and teacher, I was particularly impressed with the narrative styles of many of the contributors and the courage they had in speaking openly. As I’ve said many times about my editorship with this journal, we must not just talk about our areas of interest, but walk it as well. These special editors and contributors do just that.

"[W]e might say that disability refers to the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of bodily, mental, or behavioral functioning aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically." — Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability "Rhetoric needs disability studies as a reminder to pay critical and careful attention to the body. Disability studies needs rhetoric to better understand and negotiate the ways that discourse represents and impacts the experience of disability." —Jay Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric

This essay examines the issue of learning disabilities among the incarcerated population. Studies show that approximately eleven percent of U.S. prison inmates self-report a learning disability, a rate nearly four times greater than that of the general U.S. population. The paper 1) addresses the obstacles in meeting this population’s needs, and 2) argues for the importance of quality educational programming that includes services to those with learning disabilities both to improve rehabilitation for incarcerated individuals while imprisoned and to decrease recidivism upon release.