Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing

How can feminist-of-color disability politics help us navigate contemporary crises of care and decimated social safety nets? Join Sami Schalk and Jina B. Kim for a discussion of Jina’s new book, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke UP, 2025), which examines the imaginative work of disabled, queer, and feminist of color literary visionaries writing after major U.S. welfare reform. Together, Schalk and Kim will foreground the necessity of a disability approach to challenging U.S. infrastructural violence and manufactured scarcity, and highlight the imaginative blueprints for survival left by radical writers of color such as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Octavia Butler.

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Event is free and open to the public but requires registration.
ASL and live captions will be provided.
Please email accessibility needs as they relate to this
event to msf440@nyu.edu.

Use coupon code E25JBKIM to save 30% when you order Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing from dukeupress.edu.

Speaker Bios:

Jina B. Kim is a scholar of feminist disability studies and queer of color critique. She is an associate professor of English and the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. Her new book, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing, demonstrates how and why we need radical disability politics and aesthetics for navigating contemporary crises of care. Jina’s work has appeared in Signs, Social Text, GLQ, American Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Disability Studies Quarterly, and The Asian American Literary Review.

Dr. Sami Schalk is a professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Bodyminds Reimagined (2018) and Black Disability Politics(2022), both available open access from Duke University Press. Dr. Schalk’s research focuses on disability, race and gender in contemporary American literature and culture. In addition to her academic work, Dr. Schalk writes for mainstream outlets and makes art as a form of pleasure activism. Her current research project focuses on the creation and impact of pleasure spaces for multiply marginalized people.