Hosted by UEA's MA Medical and Health Humanities and MA Gender Studies in partnership with CreativeUEA and HealthUEA.
Refreshments will be served from 15:30, and the lecture will begin at 16:00.
This talk rethinks what care means for ill and disabled people and ponders new possibilities of caring for ourselves and others in times of crisis. Bringing medical humanities in dialogue with critical disability studies and posthuman feminist theory, the talk explores how disabled people’s accumulated knowledge of care and care communities are not only critical for their own survival but also essential to building a sustainable future of healthcare.
Lee will begin with a discussion of the relationship between care and precarity and observe how chronically ill and disabled people are incapacitated by continual crises of care amid threats of violence from intersecting structures of racism, disablism, and xenophobia. Reflecting on the role of kindness in the cultivation of care intimacy and crip kinship, she will suggest that disabled people’s ways of knowing and sharing care through embodied vulnerability are forms of subjugated knowledge and explore how disabled activists mobilise crip knowledge during public health crises to resist the eugenic tendencies of dominant ableist crisis logic.
In the second part of this lecture, Lee will draw on a disability justice framework of interdependency to explore how generative crip kinships disrupt normative kinship systems and care practices. Extending Alison Kafer’s and Donna Haraway’s work on more-than-human kinships, she will discuss how crisis catalyses transcorporeal digital crip kinship with distant others and produces new kinds of care. Lee will conclude by making a case for the need for crip kinship in health research and calling on medical humanities scholars and health practitioners to make kin with disabled people.
Christina Lee (she/her) is a Research Associate for Knowledge Exchange for the Disability Matters project at the University of Sheffield. She is also an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London. She completed her PhD in English and Medical Humanities at King’s College London in 2023. Her thesis titled ‘The Care of the Dis-ease Self: A Foucauldian Critique of Buddhist Meditation Memoirs as Narratives of Healing’ examined the chronically ill and disabled Buddhist women’s experiences of self-care through meditation. Her research interests include cross-cultural narratives of illness and healing, intersectionality, disability studies, and the medical humanities. When not writing about illness and disability, she can be found talking to the crows and pigeons at the local park.
This event will also be livestreamed, details to follow.
Content note: Mentions coronavirus, lockdown, eugenics, ableism, racism, medical violence, austerity, birds
Photo of 12-sided die made of colourful post-it notes with doodles drawn in black ink by Christina Lee. Front facing pink post-it note reads “In case of emergency, wait 6 hours" with drawing of emergency button in the middle. Top face of die is pale yellow post-in note reading “Please send cat pics” with doodles of cats and cat paws around the text. Partially visible bottom facing pale green post-it note reads “pre-existing conditions” and a shield symbol with a cross below the text. Partially visible right bottom orange post-it note reads “low energy” with low battery icon in centre.
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