The Disability, Debility, and Crip Theory Working Group brings together graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and researchers, as well as faculty members to discuss disability studies in our contemporary moment, share work in progress, and foster community among disability studies scholars in diverse fields and at different stages of their career at Princeton. An intersectional approach is pertinent to this working group–our areas of interest range from disability and race, queer/trans/crip studies, justice and policy, mobility and migration, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, film and media, aesthetics and artistic practice, performance studies, and philosophies of language. Members of the working group support cross-disciplinary dialogue with their experience across the departments of African American Studies, Politics, History, Comparative Literature, Interdisciplinary Humanities, French & Italian, Philosophy, and Art & Archaeology, among others. The working group meets monthly to build upon our understandings of disability/debility, exchange texts, and respond to our colleagues’ work in the field in a way that encourages testing out new ideas. The group is open to anyone interested in disability studies, please contact Sonya Merutka at [email protected] for more information or questions.
The Disability, Debility, and Crip Theory Working Group is supported by the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Interdisciplinary Humanities Program.
Kymberley “Kym” Chu is a PhD student in the Anthropology Department. In her ethnographic work, she examines a wide range of human-nonhuman primate interfaces in Peninsular Malaysia. Kym is interested in how scientific paradigms such as ecology and its behavioral research methodologies mediate social relations between her human interlocutors and the free-ranging monkeys they interact with.
An amorous poet, story-keeper, performer, and feminist cartographer, Runnie has worked through the question of how the figure of the black captive maternal emerges in early modern cartography and archives of contemporary migration across the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. She has previously conducted research in Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador, Bahia, documenting the infrapolitics of black Brazilian women crafting resistance against state-sanctioned terror and forced displacement.
Chelsea Guo is a PhD Candidate in Political Theory in the Department of Politics. Her research interests are in political and social epistemology, feminist theory, democratic theory, and public law.
Kelsey Henry is an interdisciplinary historian whose work integrates perspectives from Black studies, histories of science and medicine, and disability studies. Her research asks how the conflation of Blackness and developmental disorder became integral to the language and logic of antiblack racism in the United States.
Katie Horan is an undergraduate in the Department of Religion, researching the interplay between religion and disability in the 21st century through ethnographic projects in communities that privilege people with intellectual, cognitive, and developmental disabilities. She runs a not-for-profit initiative that is pushing to make the bridal…
Timothy Y. Loh is a sociocultural anthropologist. Bringing together medical anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and science and technology studies, his ethnographic research examines sociality, language, and religion in deaf and signing worlds spanning Jordan, Singapore, and the United States.
Sonya Merutka is a Ph.D. student in Art & Archaeology with a focus on performance, queer theory, critical race and disability studies, and poetics within modern and contemporary art. As a recent Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, they developed a project on language, dysfluency, and crip temporality in performance.
Sophia Millman is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of French & Italian. During the 2023-2024 academic year, she is excited to continue teaching French, to work as a fellow at the Writing Center, and to be part of the instructional team for “Introduction to Gender & Sexuality Studies.”
Moad Musbahi is a joint Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. He researches the entanglements between bodily ailments, oral performance and financial relations within communities who claim ancestral belonging across Algeria, Libya, Niger and Mali.
Jiya is a historian of disability, the body, gender, sexuality, and caste, colonial and post-colonial South Asia, and transnational welfare. Her dissertation focuses on the centrality of disability welfare to imperialism and nationalism in India between the 1930s and 1990s.
Sara Purinton joins UCHV as the Postdoctoral Researcher in Moral Philosophy. Her research focuses on the nature and ethics of disability. Methodologically, her work is united by a commitment to studying disability from the margins, in the sense of starting the study of disability from non-paradigmatic instances of the category. She is currently…
Erin Raffety is a Practical Theologian and a Cultural Anthropologist who has studied foster families in China, Christian congregations in the United States, and people with disabilities around the world. She is currently researching how experiences of long COVID and chronic illness affect individuals’ access to spiritual care and religious…
I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, interested in colonial South Asia. In December 2019, I completed my B.A. in Global Affairs with a concentration in the Middle East and North Africa at George Mason University.
Aliya Ram is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities, as well as a certificate student in African American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her work explores the relationships between aesthetic innovation, subject formation and coercive social bonds…
John White is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art & Archeology. His research examines art objects and material culture that embody the intersections of art, nature, and science in early modern (northern) Europe, construed in a global context. Always driven by an attention to materials and materiality, his work has centered on…
Megan Wicks is a doctoral candidate in Princeton University’s Philosophy Department, who completed their undergraduate degree at Columbia University in New York City. Their work, which sits primarily in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Language, concentrates on hermeneutic methodology and meaning construction.
Recent Publications by Working Group Participants
- Kelsey E. Henry, Co-edited Special Issue “Origins, Objects, Orientations: New Histories and Theories of Race and Disability” with Sony Coráñez Bolton, Leon J. Hilton, and Anna LaQuawn Hinton, Disability Studies Quarterly, 43(1) (Fall 2023)
- Timothy Y. Loh, “Gaza’s Deaf Community in the Face of Genocide,” SAPIENS (September 2024)
- Jiya S. Pandya, “Crip Life Amidst Debilitation: Medicalization, Survival, and the Bhopal Gas Leak,” in Special Issue “Origins, Objects, Orientations: New Histories and Theories of Race and Disability” edited by Sony Coráñez Bolton, Kelsey Henry, Leon J. Hilton, and Anna LaQuawn Hinton, Disability Studies Quarterly, 43(1) (Fall 2023)
- Jiya S. Pandya, “Paranoid Breathing, Reparative Feeling, and Ambivalent Beginning, Or, I’m So Paranoid, I Think Your Covid Test Is About Me” in Special Issue “Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry” edited by Theodora Danylevich and Alyson Patsavas, Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 11.2 (Fall 2022)
- Sara Purinton, “Uncertain Abilities, Diachronic Agency, and Future Selves” in Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 8: Non-Ideal Agency and Responsibility edited by David Shoemaker, Santiago Amaya, and Manuel Vargas (2024)
- Erin Raffety, Families We Need: Disability, Abandonment, and Foster Care’s Resistance in Contemporary China (2022)
- Erin Raffety, From Inclusion to Justice: Disability, Ministry, and Congregational Leadership (2022)
- Erin Raffety, Co-edited Special Issue “Neurodiversity and Theological Education” with Michael Paul Cartledge II and co-published article with Michael Paul Cartledge II, “Theological Education with Neurodiversity in Mind: Research Insights and Future Possibilities,” Journal of Disability & Religion 27, no. 4 (2023)
Erin Raffety and Maria Insa Iglesias, “Re-Imagining Christian Education through Neurodivergent Fellowship, Play, and Leadership in Online Gaming,” in Special Issue “Teaching with Games: Formative Gaming in Religion, Philosophy and Ethics,” Gamevironments 19 (2023)
Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any event does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.