Hello!
The Writing Institute at the University of Pittsburgh is delighted to share information about our first event of the spring 2026 Creating a Culture of Access series: "Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing," with Dr. Jina Kim. Poster attached.
The event will take place via Zoom from 2-3:30pm EST. Registration via this link. A Zoom link will be sent out 24 hours prior to the event.
Description:
A feminist disabled re-imagining of care in a time of apocalypse, Jina B. Kim’s new book Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke University Press, 2025) examines the literary legacies of queer-of-color writer activists dreaming another way forward. In so doing, she demonstrates the necessity of disability politics in navigating contemporary U.S. crises of care. In this book talk, Kim will examine disability life-writing and poetry that navigates the turbulent healthcare landscape of the 2010s, from the debates preceding the passage of the Affordable Care Act to the Trump administration’s many chaotic attempts to diminish public healthcare. Looking to recent works by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Aurora Levins Morales, both queer-of-color activists in the Disability Justice movement, she demonstrates how these radical writers navigate the oppressive bureaucracies of the medical-industrial complex while simultaneously dreaming of other configurations of care.
What does care look like in the context of abandonment, apocalypse, and social isolation, when the state wants people to subsist on less and less? How do we reclaim, define, and practice care outside existing models offered by the state and medicine, in which care all too often exists on a continuum with control and abuse? She argues that Levins Morales and Piepzna-Samarasinha offer wild disability justice blueprints for health and care in an ongoing era of state deprivation, in which care does not suggest restoration of the status quo—the re-acquisition of a mythical norm—but the serious and sustained tending of a life-world that centers disabled queers-of-color, makes room for sickness and grief, and prioritizes joy.
For more information about the Creating a Culture of Access series, including dates, times and participants for upcoming events, visit this website.
Any questions can be directed to me at this jem496. I hope you will be able to join us!
And for those potentially facing the upcoming storm, stay warm and safe!
Warmly,
Jessie
Dr. Jessie Male (rhymes with sale)
Teaching Assistant Professor of Disability Studies
jem496
she/her/hers
Office: 628F CL