This issue features four articles that together create a conversation around disability institutions, a topic that remains a major focus of disability scholarship and activism. The first article, by Matilda Chowdhury and Niklas Altermark, will raise eyebrows when readers notice its focus on a Nazi institution that promoted disability inclusion. Amidst the horrors of mass killings and other eugenic abuses against disabled people, Germany's Nazi government also supported Bann K, a special unit of Hitler Youth for physically disabled boys. Although it only existed between 1935 and 1937, the organization sought to transform its disabled members from social burdens to contributing, productive members of the Third Reich. Bann K also promoted disability inclusion and social acceptance within Nazi society, though inclusion was something disabled boys had to earn individually—not collectively—by overcoming disability. In addition to shedding light on a surprising part of Nazi history, this article reveals the historical expanse of disability inclusion as well as its theoretical limitations.

The second article, by Emily Krebs, surveys some historical moments from the treatment of suicidal people. Krebs posits that modern suicidism—which is the sanist-ableist oppression that subjects suicidal people to human rights abuses, including institutionalization and other carceral care practices—has a long history in the West, going back millenia. This brief, sweeping survey begins during the Roman Empire and evolves along with Christianity and the rise of medical/psychiatric professions and institutions. Krebs argues that the earlier establishment of suicidism helped propel psychiatrization and justified the carceral authority of institutions, resulting in mass human rights abuses against suicidal people.

In the next article, Matthew Wolf-Meyer focuses on film documentary portrayals of two different institutional approaches to disability care. The article examines the ways that staff dehumanized disabled inmates in the 1960s at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, as portrayed in the 1967 documentary, Titicut Follies. Wolf-Meyer juxtaposes this with the support network campers created in the 1970s at Camp Janed, portrayed in Crip Camp, to identify four qualities of care for measuring the support institutions provide to disabled people. By using these disparate portrayals to map out issues of connectivity, modularity, facilitation, and animation, Wolf-Meyer seeks to provide a clearer language for discussing the aims and processes of institional care. This language, he argues, can be a basis for scholarly inquiry and institutional reform.

The final article, by Charles Bell, Miltonette Olivia Craig, Cresean Hughes, Sarah Franklin, and Constantus Akuma-Zanu, focuses on harmful restraint and seclusion practices at US educational institutions. This article looks at the intersectional issues of disability, race, and socioeconomic status and examines the different reactions and resources of Black, South Asian, and white parents with disabled children. Black parents, regardless of socioeconomic status, more often remove their disabled children from punitive schools. When describing their decisions, they focus on their goal of protecting their children from harmful disciplinary practices. White parents more often take legal action to challenge punitive practices that harm their children, with costs ranging from two thousand to three hundred thousand dollars. In addition to the financial cost, families that take legal action often face retaliation from school officials, putting their child custody and the safety of their children at risk. This study reveals the range of financial and social expenditures that different groups of parents face when they challenge school restraint and seclusion practices.

In this issue we also feature three creative works, curated by Creative Works Editor Orchid Tierny. She writes the remainder of this introduction:

The creative works in this issue undertake three different discursive approaches to the situated experiences and embodiments of disability. Gustavo Henrique Rückert's poem "it's impossible" underscores the textual interplays between the body of poem and a neuro-situated experience of poets. As David Mitchell, Susan Antebi, and Sharon Snyder argue in The Matter of Disability, embodiment matters; its "defining precarity and surprising unfoldings turn disabilities into productive, proactive expressive capacities within matter itself." To this end, while Rückert's poem enacts its own signification, another action is always at play. The poet's strategic arrangements of the line endings and erasures demonstrate the way that disability is a form of world making as well as a mode of witnessing.

This approach to world making is similarly reflected in Devon Healey's poem. "When I Leave... Exploring the Being and Appearance of Blindness" is an exploration into proprioception and the embodied spaces of blindness. The repetitive medial and terminal caesurae of the poem insist upon movements, of entries and departures. These pauses allow Healey to interrogate our assumptions of sight and its apparent inextricability from the social imaginary. Yet as the poet argues, blindness haunts the figure of sight. "Eliminate something I have, eliminate my blindness," Healey claims, "eliminate something I am, eliminate me."

The final poem in this section harnesses historical memory with respect to the violent legacies of euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The T4 program legitimized the murder of thousands of disabled people and provided critical experience in the mass killings that followed. Mel Hardy's accompanying essay emphasizes the significance of this violence. It is this context of memory and memorialization that their poem "Smoke and Ash" raises the daunting question: "how does one witness an atrocity that had no witnesses?" Rather than speaking for the victims of the T4 program, the poet carefully highlights the moral vacuum of language when it mobilized against vulnerable groups. By incorporating euphemism and censorship, the poet reveals the use and abuse of language, thus transforming both reader and speaker into "vicarious witness[es]" of these horrific acts.

We hope you enjoy all of these works. Please consider paying the SDS membership dues (reasonable and on a sliding scale) that help maintain this paywall-free, open access journal: https://www.patreon.com/SocietyforDisabilityStudies.