September 2025
Authors’ Roundtable: ‘How To Be Disabled In A Pandemic’, 09/03 at 4S 2025 Seattle
September 3, 2025 @ 10:40 am – 12:30 pm
Chair, Harris Kornstein, Assistant Professor, University of Arizona
Presenter, Marika Cifor, PhD, The University of Washington
Presenter, Nadia Naomi Mbonde, Doctoral Candidate, NYU
Presenter, Mara Mills, Professor, New York University
Presenter, Emily Lim Rogers, Assistant Professor, Duke University
Presenter, Bella Ruhl, Doctoral Student, New York University
Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing
September 11, 2025 @ 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
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. Moderated by Mara Mills.
BOOK EVENT: THE DOCUMENTARY AUDIT
September 19, 2025 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
How does listening in documentary become a proxy for justice—and what other kinds of listening might be possible?
In The Documentary Audit: Listening and the Limits of Accountability (Columbia University Press, 2025), Pooja Rangan examines how documentary listening—through habits she calls neutral, entitled, and juridical—can reinforce structures of profiling, exclusion, and carceral capture, even when framed as progressive or ethical.
October 2025
Counter-cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance, a book talk with Leon Hilton
October 16, 2025 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
The Department of Performance Studies is excited to welcome back PS Alum Leon Hilton (Ph.D. ’16) to give a talk on his most recent book publication, Counter-cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance (University of Minnesota Press). This talk draws together methods and critical apertures from performance theory and disability studies to describe hidden practices, silent countermeasures, and overlooked insurgent strategies for reconfiguring the world so that it might nurture, rather than annihilate, the persistence and flourishing of autistic and other neurodivergent ways of being. It maps out unseen pathways for thinking, watching, and responding to the life called up and made visible through the apertures for thought afforded by the concept of neurodivergence.
November 2025
RESCHEDULED! Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice Book Talk with Rachel Kolb and Rebecca Sanchez (Rescheduled)
November 13, 2025 @ 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice (Ecco, 2025) is Rachel Kolb’s debut book about growing up deaf and mainstreamed in the years after the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed. Part memoir, part social commentary, Kolb reflects on the possibilities and stakes of communicating in different languages and sensory forms, from spoken and written English to American Sign Language.