Has anyone memed “Don’t let the bastards get you down” ? I need it for….professional reasons (printing it and putting it on my altar as an affirmation ) #Cripsky #Disability #NEISVoid #DisabledSky

So very here for this article #DisabilitySky #CripSky

Q: AI translation is heralded as great cause it can help with inclusivity but ofc it's far from good, takes job of translators, ÷ feeds the hype. On live interpreting events, some argue against but others say it's better than nothing. How does the community feel about this?
#DisabilitySky #CripSky

Alicia Spencer-Hall Chapter 5 Stopping the Clock(s): Precarious Times in the AcademyKeywords: bereavement, crip time, Douceline of Digne, precarity, medieval hagi-ography, temporalityI don’t remember what time it was when I got the news. It was a bad time, though, I remember that sure enough. I was elbow-deep in writing a chapter for an edited collection, steeling myself for one final push to bring my scholarly baby into the world.1The deadline was tight—it’s always tight—but I could make it, if I could just keep going. I was tired and I hurt; I had slogged away for long hours this past week or so of writing. I had shifted time usually reserved for self- care—for having breaks, eating lunch, taking exercise—into the work column of my schedule. The irony of the situation was not lost on me. I was writing a chap-ter on chronic pain and illness in the Middle Ages, underscoring the political ur-gency of recognizing ourselves, as members of the crip community, in historical

Probably the most personal thing I've ever written, about living in crip time, about precarity, and how crip scholars grinding in precarity are further marginalized by academia's timezones (and rhetoric of timeliness)

#MedievalSky #CripSky #DisabilitySky

www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

S5 Ep80: Disability, Disclosure, and Authenticity in Higher Education

Be sure to check out @emilyladau.bsky.social on the August 19th #podcast ep “Disability, Disclosure, and Authenticity in Higher Education” from HigherEdJobs!

#HigherEd #CripSky #DisabilitySky #Disabilities #Workforce #JobMarket #Employment #DisSky #Accessibility

open.spotify.com/episode/04Ey...

Front cover of Leah Pope Parker's "Light of the Everlasting Life: Disability and Crip Eschatology in Old English Literature", with a saint with a golden halo nestled within a beautiful gilded border on a pale manuscript background

From disability metaphors to narratives structured around bodies presented as aberrant, early medieval English thoughtworlds conveyed the promise of resurrection and the hope of salvation through crip and disabled bodies. Light of the Everlasting Life argues that early medieval Christian eschatology, as manifested in Old English literary texts, was a crip eschatology: a theology of the afterlife that relied upon disabled bodies and concepts related to disability in order to convey promises of resurrection and salvation. In addition to demonstrating how literature manifested theological approaches to the afterlife, Leah Pope Parker articulates the ways of thinking about bodies and disability that were available to ordinary early medieval people, many of whom experienced their bodies in ways that resonate with what we call disability today, but who rarely appear in the historical record. By analyzing Old English texts, including Alfredian translations, Ælfric’s saints’ lives, and poetry from the Exeter and Vercelli Books, Parker introduces novel ways of characterizing disability’s effects in literature. “Spiritual prosthesis” reveals rhetorical, narrative, and theological reliance upon disability to convey the promise of a Christian afterlife. “Systems of aberrance” emerge as a result, in which bodies marked as deviant—including disabled, monstrous, heroic, saintly, and dead bodies—form a network of embodiments that reinforce the narratives they inhabit and that of Christian salvation history. Locating crip eschatology in early medieval literature, Light of the Everlasting Life rewrites standard histories of disability, of the body, and of medieval Christian eschatology.

Cannot wait to read @parkerchronicle.bsky.social's new book, "Light of the Everlasting Life: Disability and Crip Eschatology in Old English Literature"

👉 Open Access here press.umich.edu/Books/L/Ligh...

#MedievalSky #CripSky

A wheelchair user in the distance propelling down a dirt path, bright green trees border both sides and blue sky is just visible through branches in the top left.

A view between tree branches and brambles, showing two bodies of water. More trees are visible by the water and in the distance, above them the sky is blue and almost cloudless.

We had to leave all our community, friends + the area we loved behind - but it was worth it to live somewhere like this.

Here I can get around, I can use the bathroom, I don't have to worry about falling. And I even get to be in nature again 🫶

#disabled #CripSky #WheelchairUser #ChronicPain

I run on caffeine chaos and a wheelchair

#wheelchair #disabledsky #cripsky

A rainbow colored pillbox with hearts and rainbows and the text my weekly pill organizer looks like I'm summoning something dark and powerful

#spoonie #medlife #PillBoxPosting #cripsky

Making Space

Connecting disabled jobseekers with accessible and remote jobs!! 👇👇👇

‼️‼️‼️‼️ ♿️ ♾️

#disabledsky #cripsky #chronicallyill #madsky #neurodiversesky

(Ha, they all sound like Russian patronyms)

The cover image for Disability and Sanctity in the Middle Ages is a fragmentary wooden corpus of Christ on a blue-grey background—see the editors’ intro for discussion of this artwork!

Come for the crip ancestors (including disabled saints!), stay for the generative juxtaposition of medieval Christianity and Buddhism. #medievalsky #disability #cripsky

A white man wearing a bright light blue cap with a Charmander on it, dark rimmed glasses, a pale yellow hoodie and green sunflower lanyard. He has brown facial hair. To the left of him, stretching out to the top of the photo, is a concrete path surrounded by grass and trees.

me: *wonders why I'm constantly injured, flaring, or in so much pain*

also me: *decides to self propel backwards up a hill because I'm bored whilst waiting for @better-than-botw.bsky.social to return from somewhere inaccessible* 💀

#cripsky #disabled

A composite photograph of Travis Chi Wing Lau seated on a white claw foot tub in the middle of a bathroom with wood floors and walls painted with vertical stripes of light blue, mustard yellow, and brown. In the background, there is a toilet, a white sink, a small rug, and a mirror, which shows a reflection of Travis that is another portrait in which he is seated in the same position but turning to look at the camera over his left shoulder.

Came across this great photo in Disability Intimacy & immediately thought of the 4 of Cups! This piece of art has improved my day, as has reading about the cripcentric collaborative creative process that made it.

darren lee (dee) miller, ‘Travis in Pearls’ (2022)

#CripSky #TarotSky

Hubby nipped out to the shop what feels like forever ago, and I unexpectedly REALLY need to pee.

Sure wish I lived in an accessible house where I could get myself to the bathroom when needed 🫠

#cripsky #disabled #NEISvoid #AccessibilityMatters

“It is not controversial to say that there is no Christian salvation without the Crucifixion. It is less common, however, to highlight what should be an obvious corollary: there is no salvation without injurious impairment, and the presence of impairment evokes the specter of disability, even if the body in question—Christ’s—may not warrant the label of disability. Early medieval English Christians did not read Christ as disabled, or any medieval parallel thereof, but they did put his wounded body in conversation with other forms of bodily fragmentation, injury, and even disability in order to collectively construct an eschatological imaginary of the embodied afterlife.”

“The conceptualization of Christ’s body in conversation with impairment and disability makes his body crip.”

Finally finished reading through my proofs! A favorite passage from ch. 6.
Citation: Me, pp. 214-15 of Light of the Everlasting Life: Disability and Crip Eschatology in Old English Literature, forthcoming in August from @uofmpress.bsky.social
#CripSky #Disability #MedievalSky

“The text stands in for the poet’s body, the dispersal and reassembly of runes cripping the path to the afterlife body. The runes perform disabling and prosthetic roles, containing both the certainty of fragmentation in the grave and the promise of the Resurrection.”

I love a lot of lines in chapter 5, “Cynewulf’s Wounds,” that make little sense out of context, probably including this one.
Citation: Me, p. 199 of Light of the Everlasting Life, forthcoming August from @uofmpress.bsky.social
#CripSky #Disability #MedievalSky

“The potential consequence of being eaten, for Matthew, are undoubtedly unappealing: the eschatological hope for bodily resurrection would be alimentarily converted into scatological waste.”

Back at it: I remember writing this line in a Madison cafe for the dissertation version, but it’s still my favorite in chapter 4.
Citation: Me, p. 158 of Light of the Everlasting Life, forthcoming in August from @uofmpress.bsky.social
#CripSky #MedievalSky #Skystorians

An important reminder, and something that's incredibly easy to forget when you're disabled...

#chronicpain #medtrauma #disability #disabled #cripsky

It's tough when the pain from doing stuff like this (that my mental health really needed!) then feeds into the burnout.

Being disabled is constantly trying to tightrope, & balance out your physical / mental needs alongside symptoms, flares, triggers etc...

#cripsky #chronicpain #autistic #disabled

A white man's hand in the upper left corner, holding a circular pink plastic loom with blue and white wool wrapped around the pegs at the top. Hanging from the bottom of the loom is the brim of a white and blue knitted wool hat.

A white man's hand resting palm up with 4 small glass pendants balanced on it. From left to right the first has a yellow section at the top and bottom, with a glittery blue square in the middle. Next pendant is very small, it has a white background and then an orange blob of colour at the top, red in the centre, and green at the bottom. Third pendant has what resembles a fried egg on it, with the yellow 'yolk' in the shape of a loveheart, to the right of the pendant at the top and bottom are red dots. The final pendant is the smallest of all, it features an orange blobby line at the top and bottom, and a glittery black oblong in the middle.

When the burnout is beginning to lift, so you feel mentally strong enough to sacrifice yourself to pain for a while...and you get to *actually craft* for the first time in a month 🥹

#autisticburnout #chronicpain #cripsky #knitsky

“If the artist carved a deeper line here with the intention of depicting the scar, then in doing so he took on the role of the leech Cynefrith, inscribing a mark into the saint’s neck; the pale pigment of the saint’s skin parted before the artist’s tools like flesh before the physician’s blade.”

Favorite line from ch.4 (after the cat joke that shall remain secret). About the portrait of St. Æthelthryth in the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold. Citation: Me, p. 138 of Light of the Everlasting Life, forthcoming in August from @uofmpress.bsky.social
#CripSky #Disability #MedievalSky #Skystorians

“In Ælfric’s Swithun, the dependencies of the faith are evident in the dependencies of the narrative, but that narrative has real—and crip—eschatological consequences. The crutches and stools hung around Swithun’s shrine, quotidian relics of disability, reveal the importance of the impaired body for the construction of Swithun as a saint. The saint’s life leans on representations of disabled bodies to convey its doctrinal message and provide instruction to the faithful. The literal crutch left by an anonymous cure seeker thus becomes a figural, spiritual crutch for the figurehead of Christian doctrine. As spiritual prostheses, these crutches bear up the most important message of the Christian church, one of few doctrinal beliefs that have remained constant throughout the multimillennial history of Christianity; the relics of disability prosthesize the promise of salvation.”

Chapter 2 has some bangers if I do say so myself. Citation: Me, p. 81 of Light of the Everlasting Life: Disability and Crip Eschatology in Old English Literature, forthcoming in August from @uofmpress.bsky.social
#CripSky #Disability #MedievalSky #Skystorians

“To adapt Lakoff and Johnson’s phrase, these were metaphors that Alfred and the West Saxons lived by in the crip eschatology of early medieval England. They reflected and shaped everyday experiences of the world, associating sinfulness and impairment with stigmatizing effects, even while also naturalizing vision impairment as an inherent part of earthly embodiment. The {sight is salvation} metaphor became a frequent shorthand for eschatological matters in Alfredian texts, one that maintained complex ties to both embodied experience and concerns for salvation. Despite its ubiquity, {sight is salvation} was not at all a dead metaphor, but rather one that continually drew on experiences of sightedness and blindness in order to retain its effectiveness.”

Hit some bumps in progress this week, but finally found my favorite moment in chapter one. Citation: Me, p. 71 of Light of the Everlasting Life, forthcoming in August from @uofmpress.bsky.social
#CripSky #Disability #MedievalSky #Skystorians

Front cover of Mad Scholars: Reclaming and Reimagining the Neurodiverse Academy, edited by Melanie Jones and Shayda Kafai

Description As universities rethink their approaches to student and faculty mental health, this volume showcases academics who openly and proudly embrace the identity of “Mad scholar.” In twenty-three essays—from contributors working in nearly a dozen disciplines and across three continents—Mad Scholars explores how neurodivergent scholars’ work and lived experiences are richer because of their difference, not in spite of it. In doing so, these essays both expose the deep-rooted ableism that undergirds traditional mental health interventions and envision a more rigorous, more inclusive, and more outward-facing future for scholarly community and engagement, within and outside traditional academia. A long-awaited corrective by scholars accustomed to having their stories told for them, this collection draws on Mad perspectives at the intersection of various marginalized identities, boldly dreaming of a future where all students and educators can thrive. By offering concrete steps and strategies that radically reimagine the current academic landscape, Mad Scholars opens our eyes to much-needed innovations in research, pedagogy, and community, ones which promise to transform higher education and create vital paths for scholarly innovation.

Table of Contents Introduction: Naming Ourselves Mad Part One. Mad Pathways, Mad Exits 1. Don't Call it "Mental Health" - A Discussion on disability Euphemisms and Disability Community 2. My PhD Drove Me Crazy (but I Was Already Mad) 3. Complaint as a Maddening Practice (Moving through the University as a Mad Grad Student) 4. Rest as Feminist Disability Praxis, or How to Write While Flaring, Depressed, and totally Burned Out 5. Diary of a Mad Black Woman in the Academy Part Two. Researching the Self 6. I'm Too Crazy for a Job - Thoroughbreds, Fuckups, and Autistic, Mad, Disabled, Femme Grassroots Intellectual-Freedom Portals 7. Embrace the Lie - Seeking Truths through Reading, madly 8. The Madmotherscholar in Academia and Beyond 9. In-Cite - The Mad Possibility of Interethnography 10. The Subject is Mad

Part Three. Disclosure and Disruptive Pedagogies 11. Mad Lyrics - Toward an Embodied, Community-Responsive Pedagogy of Care in Academia 12. Mad Pedagogy in Disabling Academia 13. Teaching for Mad Liberation: Crip Dreaming toward a Transformative Pedagogy of Madness 14. Learning and teaching Bad as Resistance: Queer Crip Pilpinx Bad Pedagogy 15. "The Deadly Space Between" Toward and Mad Pedagogy and Mad Methodology 16. Crazy Femme Pedagogies: Toward an Archive Part Four. Mad Imaginaries, from Kinship to Community 17. Mad Resilience, Mad Kinship: Alternative Responses to Student Mental Health Crises 18. Anchoring in Mad Solidarity 19 Mad Laughter: On Finding and Forming Graduate Communities through Memes 20. On Mad Advantage, Redux: Covering, Passing, Negotiating (in) Higher Education 21. Landing without Failing: The Fucking Blue Dots 22. Orienting toward Togetherness: A Mad Phenomenology

Can't wait to dig into this collection
press.syr.edu/supressbooks...

#CripSky #DisabilitySky

“Even though the Old English texts I study here are by no means activist, in a modern sense, I would assert the importance of these histories for activist movements, to recognize the eschatological inflection of crip experiences that many culturally Christian and English-speaking communities have inherited. Invoking our medieval crip ancestors reminds us of the community we have had, much longer than we have had a name. Our crip ancestors did not fight quite the same fights for independence, self-determination, and human rights, and so they were not activists in the modern sense. Nevertheless, they existed, and their persistence earns them a place in the histories we write about disability, Christianity, and the European Middle Ages.”

The winning line from the intro, over an eight-way tie for second place. Citation: Me, p. 12 of Light of the Everlasting Life: Disability and Crip Eschatology in Old English Literature, forthcoming in August from @uofmpress.bsky.social
#CripSky #Disability #MedievalSky #Skystorians

I'm now back to constant severe pain & having to limit all movement. To say I'm frustrated would be a huge understatement!

There's nothing I can do to prevent this either, as when the pain from my nerve damage is that severe I can't control my actions at all. Ffs 🫠

#cripsky #chronicpain

First glimmer of hope today that my shoulder had improved a little (after a MISERABLE 3 months, inc basically losing the use of my arm). Then whilst out, because the seasons are changing & that triggers my CPS something fierce, I flailed uncontrollably + destroyed my shoulder again 🤦

#cripsky

Image of proof text, with the following sentence boxed in pink pen: “Characterizing the role of disability in early medieval eschatology facilitates our recognition—as scholars of the Middle Ages, as members of the disability community, as humans experiencing our bodies through cultural traditions deeply preoccupied with disability—of the part played by Christianity in a long history of conceptualizing disability through eschatological hopes and fears.”

I started with the conclusion (it’s short!) and I like this sentence. Citation: Me, p. 248 of Light of the Everlasting Life: Disability and Crip Eschatology in Old English Literature, forthcoming in August from @uofmpress.bsky.social

#BookSky #CripSky #DisabilitySky #MedievalSky #Skystorians

So excited about this book!! And not just because I have a deeply personal chapter in it lol

It also contains updated guidelines on making conferences accessible, essential reading for event organizers

#MedievalSky #Skystorians #CripSky #DisabilitySky 🗃️

Plaque on Lidwina of Schiedam case. It reads: Lidwina of Schiedam Christian mystic, patron saint of chronic pain and ice skating Schiedam, the Netherlands b. 1380, d. 1433 While ice-skating with her friends as a teenager, Lidwina fell and broke a rib. The injury developed into an abscess, the first in a series of debilitating health conditions that kept her bed-bound for much of her life. Lidwina turned to religion to make sense of her suffering and to find purpose, practising extreme self-discipline, experiencing spiritual visions and working as a healer. After her death, worshippers began visiting her tomb and her sainthood was eventually confirmed in 1890. She remains the patron saint of chronic pain and ice-skating.

Book of Lidwina of Schiedam's Life, open at page showing woodcut of ice-skating accident that leaves her with chronic pain

Quote from Lidwina of Schiedam, on a white banner hanging from ceiling: "I sleep, slumbering and free of the bodily pains they usually burden me, but my heart is awake to hidden, divine delights."

Traces of disability & crip life in the exhibition #CripSky #DisabilitySky