We take up disruption in this article to consider what sustained attention to disruption and its relationship to agency can bring to scholars and educators. We do so by revealing the ideological commitments, relationships, and labor that make disruption possible and valuable. We also look to Indigenous studies and new materialism to explore matter and ethical responsibilities at the interstices of rhetorical practice and work. From this, we propose a theory of disruptive agency that seeks to understand how disruptions emerge and how they can be rhetorically engaged for progressive change.

Composed in a series of letters, this essay explores the interdependent knowledge and survival work of crip communities. The authors discuss their experiences of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME or ME/CFS) in a practice of Akemi Nishida’s “bed activism,” which challenges ableist demands for productivity from spaces of rest and care. Hsu and Nish ask what we lose—in intellectual and cultural growth and in actual lives—when academic spaces continue to devalue physical and cognitive difference. The resulting conversation considers illness as both an inevitability of lived experience and something exacerbated and ignored by academic spaces. It then explores how crip communities expand definitions of knowledge and knowledgemaking—offering wisdom that is not only valuable for a more inclusive profession but also necessary for a world increasingly sickened by extractive economies.