Introduction
In Alison Kafer’s seminal work Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013), she writes, “My future is written on my body.” She highlights the assumptions people make based on their perceived needs, almost as if they can project her future. She goes on to describe how this ethic is embedded in our society and that a better future “is one that excludes disability and disabled bodies; indeed, it is the very absence of disability that signals this better future” (2013, 2). This paper then traces a specific future of disability intertwined with the spatial imaginary, embedded in the presence of disability through what I’m referring to as Crip storywork; the process of using story for crip storytelling, engages the elsewhen.1 I articulate a process of bodily pedagogy that understands disability as political, relational, ethical, and integral to livingness. In this essay, I explore the relationship between disability and pedagogy; imagining forms of pedagogies of disability that promote possibilities of the future and expand disability studies through pedagogy (Jarman and Kafer 2014).
As someone who has multiple sclerosis (MS), I’ve wrestled with the ways becoming disabled (through my onset and diagnosis at nineteen) coincides with being invisibilized. This has led me to engage in ongoing reflections on masculinity, disability, and race. In the coming sections, I detail some of this by presenting myself as a case to foreground three individuals who I view as detailing spatial imaginaries through what I’m calling Crip storywork. Crip storywork, in this context, refers to the intentional practice of writing, illustrating, organizing, designing, and embodying futures that center on the lived experiences and imaginations of disabled people. Building from Endarkened (Toliver 2021) and Indigenous storywork (Archibald 2008), Crip storywork is an active, reflective process of examining personal narratives to understand how the past shapes present behaviors, emotions, and identity. I want to be clear that all stories by all disabled people are not explicitly doing the kind of radical placemaking and storywork I am describing here, nor are they intended to be pedagogical. While that’s the case, I’m articulating a process of critical inquiry into disabled people’s and communities’ stories, past and present, to learn with and from; generating possibilities of the future. It also differs in that Endarkened storywork focuses on reclaiming Black stories and addressing their exclusion from knowledge systems, while Indigenous storywork recognizes stories as teachers, both promoting cultural preservation and meaning making in complimentary ways. I argue Crip storywork similarly offers an often omitted knowledge, knowledge of the ways we are rendered disabled and how we can imagine a future that embraces access in a changing climate where disability is inevitable. I am particularly interested in how we can learn from the ways race, disability, and space coincide through the stories of Hazel Johnson, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Brad Lomax. As a Black disabled man, I am framing the ways their engagement in Crip storywork and their embodied knowledge invite a crip spatial imaginary that ensures our collective futures that are both intersectional and resistant to narratives of dominance, answering Karmiris’ (2025) request for contestation of neoliberalism in education practices to provide processes for educators to construct space for reimagining disabled futures. By centering disabled stories—and understanding them in their spatial, political, and historical dimensions—we can begin to imagine and build a better future—the elsewhen. In this future, the ways we respond to surveillance in a changing climate are inseparable from how we commit to access.
Working from this juncture, Crip storywork centers disabled people's knowledge from spaces and places they’ve been, and the offerings of those stories we hope to never lose, by building futures we’ve yet to know. For example, interrogating my own embodied storytelling and way of knowing, I’ve often struggled with my ability to navigate my Blackness, masculinity, and invisibility, and both the privileges my masculinity affords while uncovering the suppression patriarchal society demands with regards to my disability. In mending the fissure between my ability to be soft with myself, navigating my susceptibility to depression, physical pain, and enduring internal battle, I’ve learned to chip away at the exterior that forces me to self-invisibilize. In sharing parts of my own story, I view Crip storywork as a politic grounded in relational transitions; a centrifugal force disrupting the bifurcation of the body in space and time; a form of upkeep (Earle 2026). In my own experience, as a former (and still) athlete, I was hailed for being in tune with my body athletically. When I had my first relapse during a football practice, I couldn’t get over the idea that my body “failed” me.
At the time, my relationship with my body was fractured; the entity I relied on to carry me through the entirety of my life ventures up till that point was communicating to me a need for a transition. My mindset at the time was very much influenced by the destructive notions of the cis-heteropatriarchal society that wouldn't allow me to envision myself as disabled, because what does it mean to be a disabled Black man in a cis-heteropatriarchal society that thrives off ableism and anti-Blackness? In my heart of hearts, I understood that society was divided. My diagnosis and relapse occurred two years after Trayvon Martin was killed, and being two weeks older than him, my understanding of racial politics was very much emerging. At the time, though, I had little understanding of where disability fit into this equation. I think the first realization of how disability was both different and intertwined with my Blackness and masculinity came in the form of reactions when I shared that I have Multiple Sclerosis. At times, it was gasps and utterances of “I’m so sorry, are you ok?” or “Don’t people die from that?” Other times it was questions of “Oh wait, Black people get that too?” and “I thought only women got that.” Unless someone had a family member with MS, the literacy about what it is, how it operates, and how it manifests was seldom understood. I often found myself educating others, whether that was with my professors after struggling to write during an exam, or with my friends when I needed to take a break on a bench while out on a walk. I often found myself realizing I rarely have answers to my questions when it comes to disability or how to navigate it, and it took me a while to realize that they’re embedded in my bodymind. Our bodies in and across times, the stories they hold, provide a blueprint for radical and intersectional politics in a country where living with a disability is dangerous, and being committed to anti-ableism is to be in danger.
Disability demands recognition and pedagogical considerations that illuminate the transparent and inherent connections across disciplines. Crip storywork then offers a unique process of tethering movements and bodily knowledge together, while dissolving the fabric of complexity across disciplines, as it necessitates the core of those disciplines to flip and reverse their center. Crip storywork, too, is a relational process that engages the practice and pedagogy of story as a political endeavor by visibilizing disabled people’s realities, truths, and bodies into the present public consciousness, and the future.
Our bodies carry stories of the time, place and environments we’ve encountered, including our historical, cultural, political and spatial ties. Therefore, storytelling through the disabled body serves as a process to learn from. Questions of how the body is disabled, why, and by whom or what, are pedagogical anchor points to inquire through and teach from. As a form of pedagogy, Crip storywork addresses a deeper analysis and inquiries into processes of power relations, interrogating the engineering behind disablement, while also cherishing and honoring the survivance strategies that contribute to our overall liveness and livingness. Similar to pedagogy, storywork is a practice that engages these dimensions, where storytelling can lack depth and interrogation. This piece will carry an autotheoretical tone, or the process of embedding my story with others to invoke a depth of analysis while providing theoretical insight. In doing so, I’ll bring together concepts and ideas that may come off as disparate and utilize my story as a connection point to illustrate Crip storywork as a lens and process of teaching and learning through disability and bodily knowledge.
Remembering the Body in a Crip Spatial Imaginary
Disability in processes of teaching and learning is oftentimes flattened or omitted. This invisibilization is furthered by dominant narratives that force the underrepresentation of disabled stories. In Alice Wong’s (2020) anthology of stories by disabled people, titled Disability Visibility, the narrative serves as a process of visibilization of disabled culture and knowledge. Disability Visibility offers a glimpse into the complexity and depth of the disabled experience, centering on the everyday living of the disabled community. I understand this anthology to also be articulating a crip spatial imaginary, precisely documenting future and past articulations of how we engage the disabled spatial imaginary through Crip storywork.
Watkins (2015) explained that spatial imaginaries have discursive agency and power, “(re)producing, and changing, social perceptions about places even among those whom have never been there” (509). Dominant spatial imaginaries serve as discursive frames that guide social and political trends affecting action (Watkins 2015). Spatial imaginaries, both physically and figuratively, have shifted ideologies that disrupt how one engages and conceptualizes relations to various places. As Nickson (2021) notes, “although ideologically and materially powerful, dominant spatial imaginaries are not the only way to view space and resources.” Pertinent to this paper is the way spatial imaginaries are deeply implicated in visualizing our futures, while also offering an opportunity to learn about our bodies' historicity. I’m not saying we need to speculate or build utopic futures but rather understand past and currently unfolding stories to realize what’s possible while understanding the vision set out by many disabled people. A crip spatial imaginary then disrupts notions of where racialized and abled bodies do and do not belong and by facilitating the imagination of/for social and spatial relations of resistance (Jenkins 2021; Lipsitz 2007; McKittrick & Woods 2007). Crip storywork provides a necessity to account for how the disabled body shifts over time, and how the disabled person reacts and responds to that change, presenting disability as a fact of the body, but also a source of knowledge to influence navigating the disabled futures. In uplifting the body as a site of inquiry, stories allow for the engagement with one's disability in relation to the cultural, environmental, and spatial dimensions of one's life.
The late Patty Berne eloquently reminds us “all bodies are unique and essential, that all bodies have strengths and needs that must be met. We know that we are powerful not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them.” Storywork then serves as a process of performance that allows for “tracing how spatial imaginaries are embodied, and changed through embodiment, makes performativity an exciting research development for the field” (Watkins 2015, 518). Similarly, Sins Invalid incorporated performance art as a form of storytelling. In conversation with that work, I’m positioning Crip storywork as a form of pedagogical performance that allows for the understanding, communication, creation, and mechanisms for changing spatial imaginaries.
To unsettle the opportunities to engage disabled stories, while embracing a pluriversal pedagogy (Paris 2011), I ask us to continue to understand the social, physical, and material conditions that are disabling, not necessarily disabilities. In other words, systems of oppression such as settler colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism are disabling. This knowledge enables the opportunity to teach about ableism, inquire, critique, analyze, and dismantle it. These conversations about people’s bodies, or community bodies, when taught, are seldom linked to social, political, or historical contexts, limiting these connections to the cultural, environmental, and spatial dimensions of life.
My thinking for this essay builds on the work of my late grandmother, a Black special education teacher in Troup County, Georgia, during the post-integration era. I know she was an educator who honored her students’ Blackness and their disabilities. My grandmother embodied and exercised what we now call culturally sustaining pedagogies. She centered her students' stories and knowledge, viewing disability as its own culture that is both distinct and intertwined with other cultural lifeways and orientations. She explored learning through relational means, ensuring relations extended beyond the classroom and into the community to build on what we know as disability justice. This paper, in a way, is an ode to my grandmother and educators who, like her, centered the various intertwining identities and knowledge of disabled students of color. Vanessa Siddle Walker (2018) noted, “Black educators were quietly behind every movement for equality over a period of almost a hundred years” (10). I posit a similar notion is true about disabled folks of color.
A keen and timely example of Crip storywork as pedagogy in practice stems from the work of Crip Doulas and Disabled Oracles. There are ongoing projects across the disability justice community to visibilize disability through various forms and mediums of storywork (Wong 2020); ensuring our collective futures (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2022) and engage the role of disability knowledge as climate solutions (Ortiz 2023; Taylor 2024). A Disabled Oracle is described in The Society of Disabled Oracles as “a living chorus and archive of disabled wisdom from the past, present and future,” created by Alice Wong and Aimi Hamraie, with visual design by Jen White-Johnson. A Crip Doula is a disabled person or people who “help bring you into the disability community or into a different kind of disability than you may have experienced before” (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018, 82). Disabled people, particularly those of color, are increasingly recognized as generating insights on how humanity can lead in more care-centered ways with our bodies, each other, and our environments (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2022). These individuals serve as knowledge holders and facilitators of learning across generations in the disability community. For example, Nishida (2016) used an intersectional framework to operationalize storytelling, illuminating the mechanisms by which disability activists advocate and articulating storytelling as a political development process. Often absent from these discussions is the role of education and learning in regenerating the stories and knowledge systems of disabled people of color across their intersections (Pickens 2017; Linton 1998). Despite multiple forms of oppression (pandemic, genocide, land destruction), disabled people continue to construct ongoing socio-spatial systems built on care, shared knowledge, and collective interdependence to shift social systems towards honoring wholeness. As Mueller (2021) and McKinney (2016) highlight, in the literature teaching disability, particularly viewing disabled people and communities as pedagogues and knowledge holders, is an underexplored concept in learning spaces. The goal of this paper, then, is to identify means to critically highlight the epistemic and ontological orientations of disabled people of color as foundational to the pedagogy of disability, history, culture, and place, thereby tying Crip storywork to the political/relational model of disability.
Pedagogies of disability through Crip storywork, knowledge as a set of power relations that center disability knowledge to learn with, and from, forces us as a society to contend with the cis-heteropatriarchal status quo, where softness, slowness, and care are slammed to the margins. Using pedagogy and storywork as a process methodology to destabilize traditional hierarchies of knowledge, I directly engage the possibilities of Crip storywork to imbue a politic of the body. For example, I’m currently training to compete in para track and field sports to throw the javelin. I’ve been on this journey for four years now, training, learning and aiming to better understand the process of getting classified. This process, I’ve learned from other para-athletes, has a goal of classifying by your disability, but also by determining how disabled you are. I understand this intuitively so there’s fairness and equality, but there’s seldom explanations or reasonings deeper than this. This year, 2026, the US Para Track & Field nationals are being hosted in New York City at the end of July. As someone whose body is incredibly affected by extreme heat and humidity, my disability and performance have the potential to be dramatically hindered by the host location. I know that I am not alone in this battle, yet the governing institutions are valuing branding over consultation and access for para-athletes. This is a microcosm of how disability is viewed in wider society and disabled people are seldom consulted on how their wellbeing is affected. As a process, the USA Track & Field institution also changes our classification based on how disabled they perceive us to be. For instance, I compete in the classification where folks have neurological coordination impairments. For some reason, if I have a good symptom day, meaning minimal nerve pain, less chronic fatigue and limited delayed movements, and I test for my classification that day, they are able to reclassify or not at all, determining me to not compete.
Here again, we see ways that institutions exercise control in the process of disablement, systemically inhibiting, harming, and isolating communities and people; for profit. In so far, this has brought me to continue asking how does disability history, rights, advocacy and stories affect the learning experience and knowledge construction? Pedagogies of disability through Crip storywork, is a methodology to destabilize traditional hierarchies of knowledge while directly engaging possibilities of Crip storywork to imbue a politic of the body. Crip storywork calls for the recognition of our narratives, which includes engaging with historical records and archival materials. Education plays a pivotal role in this process, acting as both a catalyst for awakening and a gateway to new perspectives. In this context, I believe it's essential for educators, scholars, and pedagogues to unearth and highlight stories that have been overlooked or erased—stories from which we can teach and learn. The goal is to create communities and learning environments that center these narratives, integrating them into the design of educational spaces. For example, teaching how empires engage in the process of disablement, systemically inhibiting, harming, and maiming communities, lands, waters, people and life ways for profit. Tying labor, racial capitalism, and gentrification economies through early immigration laws that required “ability to work” to our educational models based on fueling the current economy. Therefore, some pedagogical and methodological questions that are emerging are:
What does it mean to teach disability studies courses on campuses with inaccessible buildings or with faculty and administrators who are unsympathetic, even hostile, to accessibility concerns and requests for accommodations?
How might crip storytelling and knowledge offer us processes to engage in impossible projects? How might the blueprint be flipped and reversed?
As a form of storywork, this conceptual framing builds off the Indigenous and Endarkened storywork, furthering storytelling to detail how we can live in the world, how spaces came to be, and how to refuse whiteness through the retention of stories of the past (Archibald 2008; Brayboy 2005; Toliver 2021). Therefore, with the added dimension of resisting ableism, this marks the beginning of conceptualizations of Crip storywork as a pedagogical practice and qualitative method, reclaiming stories as teachers for and through disabled people's geo-onto-epistemologies (spatial ways of knowing and being) in our bodies. I draw on critical storytelling methodologies—like Endarkened storywork, Indigenous storywork, and cripistemologies—that disrupt White bodymind normativity and center on the lived experiences of marginalized disabled communities. These approaches emphasize storytelling as an embodied, political act of knowledge-making. By weaving together their key insights, I engage with crip knowledge and cosmological frameworks to explore how storytelling shapes understandings of disabled futures. Through this lens, I consider how teaching and learning can embrace disabled narratives as vital to building collective, transformative futures—paying close attention to time, space, people, content, context, and form.
Through Endarkened storywork, Toliver (2021) asserts that storytelling is not a luxury for Black people; “it is our very existence” (xv). Yet, our storied lives are often shunned in academia. For Toliver, stories teach, heal, and sustain life; they serve as a refusal to let whiteness sever connections to the past, to land, and to communal identity (xv). This act of refusal is central to what she terms endarkened storywork, a framework that values oral traditions, ancestral knowledge, and spirituality as legitimate ways of knowing, being, and researching. Building on Dillard’s (2006) articulation of research as a form of responsibility, Toliver insists that scholars must be ethically accountable to the communities they engage, honoring stories as “alternative sites of knowledge and being” (Toliver 2021, xvi).
Endarkened storywork makes room for those traditionally excluded from qualitative inquiry by inviting them into the research process not as subjects but as co-creators. It recognizes that stories often exceed rigid methodological boundaries and challenges researchers to attend to what is “lost, forgotten, and erased” when dominant frameworks dictate how knowledge is collected, analyzed, and represented (xxxiv). Toliver encourages researchers to engage as story listeners, grounded in relationality and curiosity—not just to fulfill a research agenda, but to better understand our shared pasts, presents, and futures (xxxvii). In dialogue with this approach, I develop Crip storywork as a methodology that similarly centers storytelling as a political, embodied, and relational practice. This invokes Dillard’s (2016) process of (re)membering; embracing pedagogies and methodologies to engage with context-specific disabled knowledge that offers unique insights into the ways we can unforget the past. This process is a form of research that enables us to learn from and contextualize the things we've forgotten, allowing our bodies to be articulated and understood in the future.
Like Endarkened storywork, Crip storywork disrupts dominant norms—in this case, the ableist logics of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness—by valuing the lived experiences and knowledges of disabled and mad people. Both frameworks call for an ethical orientation grounded in respect, responsibility, reciprocity, and reverence, refusing the traditional separation between researcher and the researched. Drawing from Toliver’s refusal to use the term enlightened, I see crip and endarkened storywork as aligned in their insistence on decentering Eurocentric, disembodied, and so-called objective epistemologies in favor of community-rooted, situated, and embodied truths (Toliver 2021, xvii, xx). Together, Endarkened and Crip storywork create space for storytelling as not just a method, but a decolonial and anti-ableist practice of world-making—one that remembers joy, honors interdependence, and insists on the legitimacy of those stories so often deemed illegible or irrelevant in academic discourse.
Furthermore, building on Archibald's (2008) Indigenous storywork—originally developed to guide ethical engagement with Indigenous students in higher education—to guide my engagement with disabled stories; I’m adding an element of reclamation of story. Reclaiming space, both literally and figuratively, is a key facet of Crip storywork, which I glean from my reading of Archibald’s articulations of Indigenous storywork. Not just reclaiming stories of disability but placing those stories in the collective and cultural memory that often omits and actively fights to forget disability and the disabled. Like Crip storywork, Indigenous storywork reminds us of the vast web of relations our bodies are intertwined and in conversation with. This is particularly relevant as many disabled stories do not exist in our current informational and knowledge infrastructure (think libraries, archives, public institutions). Within this work, there’s elements of building with Berne’s (2013) and Sins Invalid’s cosmological process of building the disability justice principles that are grounded in the story.
Indigenous storywork (ISW) provides a foundational framework grounded in the 7 principles of respect, responsibility, reciprocity, reverence, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy, which emphasize the ethical and holistic approach to story as pedagogy. Both ISW and Crip storywork view stories not simply as narrative tools, but as living knowledge systems that engage the heart, mind, body, and spirit, and that require relational accountability to storytellers, communities, and broader cosmologies. Crip storywork synthesizes these insights through a disability justice lens, asking: how do disabled stories disrupt normative epistemologies, and how might they guide us toward new pedagogical and cosmological understandings of disabled futures?
These questions center storytelling as a practice of resistance and reimagining. In doing so, I explore how teaching and learning can embrace crip narratives as sites of transformation—requiring attention to constructing liberatory futures. There is an opportunity to honor each storyteller’s voice and bodymind, which speaks to the ethical care in how stories are held, shared, and contextualized. Reciprocity ensures mutual benefit and relational accountability, while reverence reflects a deep honor for the cultural, spiritual, and epistemic power of storytelling. Through these ethical principles, I synthesize insights from Crip storywork and cosmological understandings to explore how disabled futures take shape—futures that reimagine teaching and learning as spaces where disabled stories function as sites of critical pedagogy and knowledge creation. In this process, considerations of time, space, people, content, context, and form become essential to shaping collective, justice-oriented futures.
Reclaiming acknowledges the political and spiritual necessity of disabled people, especially those at the margins, which allows for taking back ownership of their stories, knowledge, and cosmologies. It is both an act of resistance and healing, one that supports the creation of liberatory pedagogies and futures rooted in self-defined narrative power, opening the way for crip theory to add depth to storywork practices.
Crip theory builds on the social model of disability while incorporating queer theory’s anti-assimilationist stance to resist normalizing mechanisms that discipline and erase non-normative bodies (Sandahl 2003). As a politic and method, cripping disrupts “compulsory able-bodiedness” (McRuer 2006, 1) by exposing the everyday beliefs and practices that center able-bodied/minded norms (Connor & Gabel 2013). Disability, within a crip politic, is understood not as a deficit but as “a desirably generative and creative relational practice” that challenges liberal inclusion frameworks (Hamraie & Fritsch 2019, 2).
Alison Kafer (2013) expands this critique through her concept of crip time, which reveals how compulsory able-bodiedness/able-mindedness structures notions of time, productivity, and normalcy, marking some bodies as deviant, defective, or disposable. In tracing these logics, Kafer opens space for alternative epistemologies—what Johnson and McRuer (2014) call cripistemologies, or crip ways of knowing and being—embracing the political and relational dimensions of disabled people’s knowledge. I’m adding the cosmological component, or the origin stories of disability, ways of being and knowing, and the axiological commitments associated with cripistemologies and disabled futures.
Crip theory thus responds to critiques of the social model by scholars who argue it underemphasizes the material realities of impairment. Instead, it positions disability as a form of “situated embodied knowledge” that holds together both structural critique and lived experience (Erevelles 2011; Ferri 2014). Despite its transformative potential, few educators have taken up crip theory or cripistemologies in formal learning contexts (Connor & Gabel 2013; Loutzenheiser & Erevelles 2019). To address this gap, I develop Crip storywork as a methodological and pedagogical framework that synthesizes crip theory and cripistemologies with storytelling practices grounded in relational ethics. Crip storywork foregrounds disabled and mad narratives as epistemological sites for teaching and learning. These stories are not merely anecdotal but are critical modes of knowledge production that challenge ableist norms, reclaim embodiment, and offer pedagogical pathways toward more just and inclusive futures.
By utilizing crip storytelling, critical disability scholars and critical feminist disability scholars employ this onto-epistemological tool, asking readers to engage with disabled futures, crystallize crip imaginings, and consider how disabled knowledge constitutes a qualitative futurity. By focusing on disabled stories and storytelling, we are not only able to better understand our collective history and our shared current world, but we are also better equipped to design inquiries that scaffold our future world and future research. This work taps into the rich textures of science fiction, fantasy, cosmology, history, and realism—genres that open portals into the complexities of crip and disabled thought and existence across crip space and time (Price 2024). It calls for a bold embrace of crip cosmologies and challenges researchers to rethink how we collect, analyze, and represent data to honor and articulate a crip spatial imaginary. At its core, it centers the ways disabled people reclaim lost histories, confront present-day realities, and imagine liberated futures.
Crip Storywork as Crip Cosmologies, Defiant Education and Illuminating Ecological Systems
Crip storywork serves as a form of cosmology, a mechanism for communicating and articulating origin stories of disability. Telling the stories of our bodymind is a crip strategy for liberation, and it begins with the telling of what Arthur W. Frank and Rak call “embodied stories” (1996, 2). Embodied stories are the stories that disabled folks share about their bodyminds, through their bodyminds. It is an empowered act of reclamation to reach into ourselves for our stories in search of what might be lost. In this way, Crip storywork is a form of embodied and cultural activism. The relational situated knowledge of invisibilized bodies illuminates portraits of being and knowing in the world, building living mosaics within and through space and time, as individuals, communities, and stories phenomenologically construct future worlds. This presents an opportunity to embrace a cosmology of the body, or where our body knows form and how it came to be within political and relational dimensions of space and time. Therefore, there’s a need to understand the context in which disability is understood and constructed, while also embracing the adaptations and access created by disabled people that offer knowledge for liberatory futures.
I approach cosmology through Brayboy’s (2023) articulations of Indigenous cosmology, grounded in place and time, and origin stories of genealogy and relation. Disability is different in that some of us are ‘born with it!’ while others acquire it through various means. Within these origins, the relational and political model of disability requires us to ask why, how, and what the origins are of creating a society where ableism and disablement are central. On the flip side, cosmology presents us with the responsibility to embrace the origins of the future in the current moment. What do we want to value, teach, learn, resist, embrace, care, and love across time? In my process of conceptualizing Crip storywork, I was constantly in conversation with Black disabled, femme, queer, and trans individuals. Therefore, most of my examples, citations, and understandings stem from them, as the identities I share with them inform my own Blackness and disability identity (read more at Germinaro 2026).
Further, in my own confrontations with environmental collapse, racial capitalism, and systemic ableism, I turn to the leadership and wisdom of Black disabled oracles such as Brad Lomax, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Hazel Johnson, who have not only survived these intersecting violences but built alternative systems through land, story, and care. Fannie Lou Hamer and Brad Lomax exemplify such visionaries who have disabilities, while Hazel Johnson employed various pedagogical techniques to combat the disablement of her community in Chicago’s South Side. Their activism, grounded in Black Disability Politics (Schalk 2022), offers a pathway to understanding how we might build climate-resilient, disability-informed futures through what Robin D.G. Kelley calls the “cognitive maps of the future” (Kelley 2002, 10). Sami Schalk (2022) argues that Black disability politics have long been central to Black liberation movements, even if they have not always been explicitly labeled as such. I argue that the work of organizers like Fannie Lou Hamer, Brad Lomax, and Hazel Johnson represents a form of Black-led disability justice that is deeply embedded in environmental and spatial struggles, or the origin stories of these movements. Brad Lomax, a Black Panther and disability rights activist with multiple sclerosis, made visible the racialized exclusions of the 1970s disability rights movement. Experiencing racial ableism in the supposedly radical spaces of Berkeley, Lomax founded a Center for Independent Living in Oakland—reclaiming space for Black disabled people in a movement that often erased them (Schalk 2022). His pivotal role in the 504 Sit-In, especially his coordination with the Black Panthers for logistical and moral support, helped transform the sit-in from a prolonged protest to a turning point in disability history.
Lomax’s life and work reveal how Black disability politics resist siloed approaches. Brad Lomax reshaped the disability and civil rights movement. By linking racial justice, urban geographies, and disability liberation, Lomax demonstrated that anti-Blackness, ableism, and environmental injustice are mutually constitutive (Curley & Smith 2024). Learning through the story of his praxis sharpens how we understand disabling landscapes—not only as polluted or abandoned spaces, but as terrains of exclusion and possibility. This stems from Brad Lomax’s articulation of being ‘multiply disabled’ both by racism and a physical disability; his story brings the concept of crip cosmologies into view. Not only does this offer a rhetoric of cross solidarity movement making, it also illuminates the intersectional future that Brad Lomax (and others) seeded in and through their advocacy.
Like Brad Lomax’s story, Crip storywork and the use of such stories provide opportunities for defiant education through pedagogical practice. Using a DuBoisian double-consciousness articulation, disabled people operating at various intersections of race, gender, class, status, sexuality etc., we/they are “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (Du Bois 2015, 194). Therefore, as an opportunity of “learning through the body” (Germinaro 2026), bypassing “the Veil,” multiply disabled people could then “bear their true selves to one another.” As intimately detailed in Kafai (2021) as an ode to Patty Berne and Sins Invalid, disabled people’s creativity around community building continues to be a centrifugal force through which performance, art, care, learning, storytelling, and gathering allow for evolving collectively in the wake of white supremacy, ableism, and ongoing invisibilization of disabled people, histories, and knowledge. Establishing Crip storywork as the new ‘behind the veil’ helps to amplify the experiences, stories, images, and possibilities of disabled futures. They explore participatory art projects, inter-institutional consortia, and exhibits by disabled artists—each acting as sites that reveal the transformative potential of disability studies through processes of disorientation, destabilization, and collaborative reorientation. Disability embodiment and epistemology open pathways to unexpected practices, speculative inquiry, and generative relationships.
In realizing our stories, we are afforded the opportunity to dream of the future. In dreaming of the future, we must reckon with the reality of the changing climate as well. Hazel Johnson, often hailed as the mother of the environmental justice movement, offers a vital case study in Black Disability Politics and Crip storywork by learning through the body to advocate for a future that addresses disability justice through environmental advocacy. Johnson’s activism was catalyzed by personal and communal loss including the death of her husband from lung cancer and her children’s chronic respiratory and skin illnesses (People for Community Recovery, n.d.). Living in Altgeld Gardens, a public housing project surrounded by factories and positioned as a “sacrifice zone” (Córdova et al. 2022). Johnson traced these health crises back to environmental violence. Connecting Disabled ecologies and the disablement of the environment that causes a community’s suffering is not coincidental but structurally produced through racialized environmental neglect. This reflects what Sami Schalk (2022) identifies as a key feature of Black disability politics—understanding disability and illness not solely as individual medical conditions, but as social and political outcomes deeply tied to race, place, and power.
Johnson (who I deem a disabled oracle) founded People for Community Recovery (PCR) in 1979 and they were/are not just environmental advocacy—they use story, pedagogy and learning, rooted in the relational knowledge of a community forced to crip itself into survival as central praxis to demand justice. Like Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative and Brad Lomax’s dual organizing in civil and disability rights movements, Johnson’s work illustrates how Black disabled ecologies emerge through resistance to environmental degradation and institutional neglect. She collected health data, conducted community surveys, and mobilized her neighbors to confront not only corporations like Sherwin-Williams and Waste Management but also the Chicago Housing Authority itself, which had built homes atop landfills and asbestos-laden soil (People for Community Recovery, n.d.). In doing so, Johnson did not merely advocate for “clean” environments—she used storywork as a process of revealing how environmental design and policy are co-authors of mass disablement. Her work insists, like Kelley (2002) argues, that new worlds are born through the everyday poetics of struggle.
Hazel Johnson’s story also forces us to expand our pedagogy of disability justice as a climate solution. In this example, reproduces ableism and the ongoing dismemberment of black bodies as disposable. Similarly, disabled bodies are not useful to the economy, and this is a result of the destruction of our environment. This shows up in my personal life living with MS as well. As the climate shifts, so too does my preparedness for future climate disasters because I’m both extreme heat and cold intolerant. Thus, I’m forced to build a care team where I’m at, and as the climate shifts this necessitates building a particular set of care protocols despite my inability to live anywhere that supports my disability. There’s an ongoing need to pass down this knowledge over time as the inevitable climate shift unfolds, rendering more people disabled. A crip approach, through storywork allows us to build and learn through region, context and environmentally specific scenarios of how not to leave one another behind.
The toxic exposures that disabled her community were not isolated events; they were part of a systemic logic of racialized eugenics via environmental design—a logic mirrored in the displacement of Indigenous peoples, the redlining of Black neighborhoods, and the siting of polluting industries in poor communities. It shifts the dynamics of relationships, reconfiguring and adapting relations as sources of knowledge for navigating the world.2 Pedagogical techniques that elicit Crip storywork address the fissures in sustaining lifeways, as we are the stories that are omitted, forgotten, and erased, when we’ve always been the binding force across movements. Pedagogies of disability and Crip storywork make available the use of relation in understanding complexity, providing complex solutions to complex problems.
Framing this work is an understanding of storywork as pertinent to knowledge infrastructure, illuminating the dynamic, relational, and often invisibility of disabled knowledge until breakdown. Star and Ruhleder (1996) characterize infrastructure not as a static object, but as a condition that becomes visible when it fails, revealing the complex relationships that undergird everyday life. This too renders these relations across disciplines a politics of collaboration and intellectual futurity that guides pedagogy past metaphoric disability justice towards acknowledging a future that is disabled; where disability is the society, or in other words, anti-ableism is the foundation of our future. Pedagogies of disability must be an essential element within the world in which we engage, as it allows us to work against repeating current structures of exclusion, harm, and invisibility.
Crip storywork makes visible disability in and across contexts, unearthing the webs of connection that exist within and across ecological systems. How might the practice of radical placemaking make new lifeworlds, realities of the mundane and every day, possible by centering crip stories in climate futures? I point to radical placemaking as enacting solidarity that allows for prefigurative politics to emerge beyond the boundaries of ideological difference, demonstrating the importance of solidarity in worldmaking. An ecological disability-justice lens is needed to build a climate-resilient future, serving as a framework and ethic for shifting and learning to rebuild the world anew. Guided by a combination of disability knowledge, ecological resistance from marginalized communities, and the environment itself, we can couple hope with action to build complex climate solutions. I employ Crip storywork as a lens to frame disabled ecologies and their relationship to the ways that white supremacy shapes disability with placemaking processes through entangled processes of settler colonialism, empire and racial capitalism. Crip storywork as crip politics and necessary component betwixt relations within disabled ecologies; one that emphasizes interrogations of white supremacy, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism. A formal definition of placemaking is “the set of social, political and material processes by which people iteratively create and recreate the experienced geographies in which they live” (Pierce et al. 2011, 54). Placemaking is not necessarily liberatory—it can be carceral or abolitionist. Ybarra (2025) invite radical placemaking as a verb that “often, although not exclusively, is clearest in material practices of taking space such as through a riot, a police precinct shutdown, graffiti, sit-ins, and teach-ins—that can turn sites of harm into places where we enact relations of care,” embracing the ongoing acts of disabled activism and storytelling as cultural activism and reclaiming space in the public conscious.
Taylor (2019) describes disability ecologies as “the webs of disability that are created spatially, temporally, and across species boundaries when ecosystems are contaminated, depleted, and profoundly altered… the material and cultural ways disability is manifested and produced between and among human and nonhuman entities.” Now, there’s a gap in our climate strategies and futures that excludes those of us with disabilities. Climate futures work can follow pathways set out by scholars integrating disability justice across fields (Schalk 2022; Bailey & Mobley 2018; Dunhamn, et al. 2015), hence, the engagement of these two frameworks as a means of building a transdisciplinary project. Although the ecological frameworks serve as a guide, our thinking aims to center on building transdisciplinary forms of decolonial learning stemming from disability knowledge and culture, which help us view learning as a climate solution and a process of reclaiming (see Warren et al. 2020; Schalk 2017; Vossoughi et al. 2024). These interwoven theories are complex enough not to cancel each other out, but rather to focus attention on the intricate intersection of Blackness, Disability, the environment, and the future. I aim to support the critique, refusal, and reclamation of the knowledge production process as a means of resistance and world-building by and for disabled folks (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2022). I exercise critical theorists’ and pedagogues’ notions of humanizing praxis (hooks 1996; Wynter 2003) and revolutionary practice to make “freedom as a place” (Gilmore et al. 2017, 227; Kelley 2002), by interrogating the ways Disability Ecologies engage in liberation praxis through land-based curatorial methods across time and space. The hope then is also not to elucidate the body as a ‘forgotten place’ (Gilmore 2008).
To embrace the intersection of Blackness, land, disability, and liberation, I lean on the example of Fannie Lou Hamer, described in Blain’s book titled Until I Am Free (2021), detailing key moments in Hamer’s life, including her disability—a Black disabled activist whose life and work illuminate what might be called a Black Disability Ecology. Hamer’s survival of polio and disablement through anti-Black violence in Mississippi, where she was brutally beaten by police after attempting to register to vote, left her with a permanent limp, kidney damage, and chronic pain (Blain 2021). These experiences informed her organizing practice and storytelling experience through her ecological and political imagination, informing how she connected bodily harm to environmental, racial, and economic violence.
Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC), launched in 1969 in Sunflower County, Mississippi, was an agricultural initiative grounded in disability-informed spatial intervention; radical placemaking. By collectivizing land ownership for Black people in the Jim Crow South, Hamer engaged in what W.E.B. Du Bois called abolition democracy: the building of new institutions that allow for full participation in life after the destruction of systems of domination (Du Bois 1935). Simultaneously, her work aligns with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of abolition geography, which attends to how space and land are organized to either liberate or contain (Gilmore 2022). The Freedom Farm embodied principles of disability justice, even before the term was coined. Recognizing how economic dependence and environmental degradation disable entire communities, Hamer’s land work was grounded in care, mutual aid, and interdependence (White 2017). The pig bank initiative, for instance, redistributed resources to support food sovereignty, health, and ecological criticism and radical placemaking antidote to systems that left Black people both politically and physically vulnerable by shifting the material conditions of Black families by providing pigs and boars for self-determination (Moulton & Salo 2022).
This is where storywork coalesces. Storywork, in this context, refers to the intentional practice of writing, illustrating, designing, and embodying futures that center on the lived experience and imagination of disabled people. Hamer’s organizing was a form of embodied storywork, utilizing her voice, her disabled knowledge, her land, and her organizing to challenge the dominant narrative that Black rural communities were deemed to have less power. Her storytelling at the 1964 DNC, where she recounted the beating that led to her disability, was not only testimony—it was a narrative intervention into how the nation understood democracy, race, and justice (Kafai 2021; Blain 2021). Additionally, her work directly anticipates the frameworks proposed by Moulton and Salo (2022), who argue for a Black ecocriticism to envision climate futures that refuse erasure; with the added intervention of a Black disabled ecocriticism. Hamer then serves as a key node in a Disabled ecology, one that ensures and shifts the ecological environment through story, teaching and learning. For example, solarpunk and cli-fi restoryings often imagine high-tech or green-washed utopias, but Hamer’s life asks: What does climate justice look like when the future is grown from a place like Ruleville, Mississippi—from a cooperative farm, from a disabled body, from mutual aid? What does it mean to design futures with disabled people, not for them? Not only is she offering us a afro-futurist articulation, but a Black crip solarpunk rendition.
Moreover, Hamer’s work aligns with Du Bois' concept of abolition democracy (1935) and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s abolition geography (2022). She understood that true freedom required spatial and ecological transformation is not liberation without land, food, or safety from environmental harm. As Sunaura Taylor (2024) reminds us, the poisoning of land and water is not only environmental injustice; it’s a producer of disability. Hamer’s cooperative, in contrast, was a counter-ecological practice, a space of resistance to the plantation logics that continue to disable Black communities through extraction, neglect, and exposure. In today’s world of climate chaos, ecological collapse, and mass disablement, Hamer’s legacy calls us to storywork rooted in land, body, and care. Her organizing efforts offer a blueprint for building disability ecologies that are interdependent, sustainable, and radically imaginative. The story she lived and told was not a singular one. It is an invitation to restory the future together.
Concluding Thoughts
Returning to Kafer (2013), she asks us to find disability (and then incorporate disability theoretical critique) in places where we previously have not, such as in this case, the archive. How can crip theories help us reinvigorate the archive and archives as educators by partaking in what Hartman (2021) calls critical fabulation? Critical fabulation is the “speculative history, close narration, and documentary poetics. All are methods for engaging and remaking the document, for assembling and composing alternative narratives of Black existence” (Hartman 2021, 127). This approach builds on what Kafer asks us to engage in, placing disability where it’s previously not been articulated and the archive—whether through historical record, controlled by disabled people, or used to critically teach disabled people’s relations and knowledge—disability has been politically omitted from the archives; articulating the body as an archive. What knowledge is preserved is a political effort, therefore, crip theories offer us a mechanism to reconstruct archives that define disability in temporal, relational, and political dimensions, moving past the medical and social realms. My project aims to build on this by shifting not only from the medical and social realms of disability that connect to the environment (often focused on the built environment and the ADA) but also by exploring the broader environmental context through the political and relational dimensions of the disability; expanding the elsewhen. Kafer’s work, along with others (see Ortiz 2023; Hamraie 2024; Taylor 2024), showcases how disability across temporal, relational, and political dimensions engages the wider environment through ecological mechanisms.
Our collective and cultural memory then serves as a haven for disabled futurity and how we understand bodily knowledge. Thus, I’m asking us to continuously choose to remember as a political and relational endeavor that ensures our futures (Armstrong 2026). I envision Crip storywork (and the many ways people have engaged in crip storytelling) as a means of resisting memoricide, a term coined by Mirko Grmek in 1991 (Grmek et al. 2019). This often refers to the destruction of physical artifacts, where I include the body as a form of artifact that provides space for cultural and collective memory reclamation and worldbuilding. I think in my experience, I’ve felt enormous pressure to devalue the body, at times aspiring to “hyper-ability,” what Bailey & Mobley (2018) describe as the pressure felt by Black youth and people to be twice as good as their white counterparts. Returning to my time as an athlete who played football, it was often hit or be hit. Sacrifice your body for your team. Sacrifice your future for this play. I often reflect on that notion because I had to unlearn the devaluation of my body to both love myself and value my body in the future. Sports, then, for me served as a process of both understanding and sifting through the murky waters of an unhealthy relationship to my body, one that patriarchal society forces us as athletes to rid ourselves of. I found, too, in my ongoing bodily journey, there are elements of dissociation with our body, which is the ongoing paradox of being so in tune with the body for performance, yet sacrificing it for someone else's benefit. I think this, for me at least, connects to the ways Blackness and anti-Blackness operationalized the body as property, as object, as someone for the plantation economy. This realization has set me on the path to reclaiming the story of my body and sharing it in a way that continues the conversation and development of a crip politic for our collective futures. For example, in 2021, the National Football League (NFL) Players Association won a settlement filed by Black players with the NFL to end their use of race-norming3 in a concussion settlement for $1 billion. Race-norming made it extremely difficult for Black players to receive payouts for neurocognitive disorders such as dementia. These neuropsychological tests led to higher rates of denial and/or lower payouts to Black players who made up 60% of the retirees at the time (see Press 2021). Not only was this articulation of devaluing of the body, but this is also an example where intersecting with US racial politics and anti-Blackness reaffirms the white supremacist and ableist notion that Black bodies are lesser than human. Thus, reaffirming the notion that ableism and racism are intrinsically linked and fuel one another (see Annamma et al. 2013). Within this example, my own experience and story are affirmed by the notion that, as a Black man with a neurodegenerative disability, my relationship with my body is political.
In my experience playing football, race-norming showed up in my thinking and reflections in the months after my relapse (the early part of winter and spring 2015), as I worked through who and what I wanted to be, I realized that my whole life up to that point relied on proof of work. I was constantly mulling over the question of what does the obsession with proof of work mean when you’re disabled and the goal posts don’t exist? Not even shifted, they just disappear? It’s been a reminder that being well educated and successful is not something that would save me in that moment, or ever. In processing my MS journey, it feels like a constant reflection, dwelling on the memories and embracing them, while reconfiguring them to pull together ideas for how to navigate the future. I really have no clue what’s going to happen, or how my MS will continue to manifest. This allowed me to come to more of the realization of how my body is both political and inextricably tied to its production, not just on the football field but in the workplace, society, and relationships as a whole. Not once did a coach pull me aside and inquire into the drastic decline of my performance, as brain scans later revealed I had a relapse around the middle of fall semester of my freshman year (2013) that lasted weeks. I had a practice during that time where I dropped 11 passes during essential periods that I was getting repetitions with the first and second-string groups. It reminds me of how many of our bodies didn’t matter. In reality, the relationships that did manifest were what mattered, the people who show up and wrap around you when we don’t know what else to do. It’s also interesting because sports have, and will always have, an interesting relationship with disability because it’s inevitable. How we understand our bodies shapes how we respond and take care of ourselves differently too, which is where we have a choice to remember and use our memory to shift how we care for each other and ourselves.
Crip storywork in relation to education ensures that “as we work in all our activist movements to reclaim our collective humanity, we engage in the radical act of learning and unlearning; we engage in the radical act of education and knowledge sharing” (Kafai 2021 58). Education also serves as an awakening, as a pathway to new frameworks. In turn, I believe there’s a need for educators, pedagogues, and scholars to uncover and identify stories to teach and learn from and through, ones that have been omitted and erased. We can depart from nondisabled supremacy and from normative knowledge systems that silence and invisibilize our bodyminds. Education and unlearning can center us again as our brazen and bold selves. Learning with Crip storywork advocates for self-discovery, which gives voice to the body. From both a Black studies and critical disability studies framework, this notion and opportunity for self-discovery invoked by Crip storywork invites what Alice Wong describes as “power in storytelling. Before I can even tell you a story, you need to really love and praise yourself. You need to say that ‘I do have a story, that I do matter’” (Berne et al. 2018, 243). Inhabiting our bodymind stories requires reflection. It requires the realization of our stories, and part of that is engaging historical record and archival texts.
In realizing our stories, we can build towards speculating the future while archiving the past and present. For example, Crip Doulas4 serve as pristine pedagogues that facilitate the knowledge transfer and transition into and through disability; while Disabled oracles and archives of wisdom, origins and stories that connect our bodies to the cosmos of the wider social, political and geographical context. This offers a way to both expand disability studies and engage in speculative worldbuilding by positioning stories of the past and present as educators of our future (Jarman & Kafer 2014). This concept then positions community archival cultivation as an educator on disability and the environment, filling gaps in current archives on disability, with disability serving as a lens of analysis to understand the changing climate and ensure our collective futures. Disability provides us the lens to answer put forth by “[w]hat methodology is needed to write a history of the environment that includes slavery, colonialism, imperialism and racial capitalism, from the standpoint of those who were made into ‘cheap’ objects of commerce, their bodies as objects renewable through wars, capture, and enslavement, fabricated as disposable people, whose lives do not matter?” (Verges 2017, 73) As Curley and Smith (2024) argue, moving towards an embodied and land-based pedagogy can help us understand our temporalities and shift our relations with environmental crises, emphasizing the interwoven history of space, place, and solutions. I’ve detailed a bit of the role of embodied ethnography and my own relationship with my body navigating the changing climate (Germinaro 2026) and there’s a need to utilize disability as a lens that binds these various systems of oppression together to different means, thus allowing us the soft power needed to put reengage our collective memory through this lens of shared experience; disablement and disability through systems of oppression that created dimensions of disability. Crip theories allow us to view knowledge as a set of power relations, calling for a binding perspective that shifts power relations through knowledge and our historicity. This serves as a form of reclaiming and repositioning cultural memory, disabled culture, and memory as a tether and mend for the fissures in time that omit, exclude, and erase crip knowledge, cosmologies, and ways of being.
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