This issue features five articles that fall into two broad themes. While the first two articles feature an examination and demonstration of disability art, the final three pieces look at disability and disabled people within three institutions: higher education, the courts, and the church.
Jenna Gabriel opens this issue with a piece that combines artmaking and writing to explore her dual experience of becoming disabled and becoming a mother. This arts-based autoethnographic project uses the creative practice of papermaking—of breaking down materials and reconstituting them into a new structure and art medium—to explore the author’s experience with disability, medicine, and motherhood. In addition to art, Gabriel uses critical autobiographical methods, Deleuzoguattarian philosophy, revolutionary material theory, and disability critical race studies (DisCrit) to deconstruct normative motherhood and its ableist, white supremacist logic.
In the second arts-based article, Ria Gualano reflects on the importance of the curation process for exploring disability representation, especially as it relates to the invisible experiences of disability and neurodiversity. Gualano demonstrates how to use art and curation to bring unrecognized disability to light and make conversations about disability and neurodiversity more explicit. To do this requires a deep commitment to a collaborative process that makes curatorship, or co-curatorship, a collective enterprise that involves artistic creators. By centering notions of access and care this process can also lead to deeper visitor engagement.
In the next set of articles that examine disability within powerful institutions, we begin with an examination of higher education. Jessica Hinson-Williams offers a critical examination of how students involved in disability-focused campus organizations (DFCOs) conceive of disability and ableism. Drawing from work on dysconcious ableism, this study interviews students involved in DFCOs to understand the ideas that drive these individuals and their organizations. The study offers a sober assessment and a set of recommendations for promoting disability-centric views among students as well as the DFCOs themselves.
Our next article moves from the campus to the courtroom. While court decisions have dramatically shaped and reshaped the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the court system does not strongly enforce its own provisions for personnel working within the judicial and legal system. Through interviews with workers to explore the (under)representation, accommodations and treatment of disabled employees, especially judges, Mamadi Corra seeks to understand what accessibility now means for disabled people who work in the judiciary, thirty-five years after the ADA.
The last article, by William Stell, looks at disability within American churches with an examination of the rise and decline of “Deaf Christianity” in the nineteenth century. Deaf Christianity was born during the rise of Deaf education alongside religious revivalism in the early part of the century, both of which were movements led by hearing people. However, the religious movement soon became “unscripted” as deaf people reappropriated Christianity for themselves and in ways that sometimes provoked consternation among hearing Protestants. Deaf Christianity adhered to the revivalism and theological liberalism of the era but also took on some Catholic characteristics, thereby focusing on the embodiment rather than the articulation of faith, contrary to the emerging practices of Protestant Christianity.
Finally, we want to explain and reflect on the artificial intelligence (AI) issues that led us to retract an article we published in our last issue. Two weeks after the last issue was published, a reader emailed to say they had been cited for an article they did not write and that it appeared to be an AI hallucination. After verifying this, we audited all 117 footnotes and found five additional citations that also appeared to be AI hallucinations. We looked at the article’s history and found that all the false citations were added after the first peer review. We decided to retract the article, as was warranted due to the false citations, and the author confirmed they used AI to generate a list of references to bolster their citations. We also contacted the scholars who had been falsely cited in our journal.
At the journal we have taken steps to address AI issues, but this showed we need to do more, and in ways that go beyond what happened in this case. Last year we added a simple statement about AI usage that prohibits the use of AI-generated content unless it is used to illustrate artificial intelligence, and then only when clearly identified and with the express written permission of an editor. Like most journals, we do not ban the use of editing tools but focus only on AI-generated content. Because of what we found during our March investigation, we will now require DOI hyperlinks for all citations (when available) so that we can easily verify citations during copyediting. One issue that other journal editors have raised is that some people are using AI to write peer reviews, which threatens the credibility and perhaps even the confidentiality of peer review. As part of revising our AI policies this summer, we plan to add an AI statement to our instructions for peer reviewers.
There is a debate within disability studies about the use of AI. On the one hand, some see it as a welcome assistive device. On the other hand, some activists see AI as a neoliberal product with harmful effects, including to the environment and the risk of reproducing systemic biases through data scraping. Others see AI-generated content as a threat to academic integrity and the credibility of academic publishing. We understand the very real need for assistive writing technologies and recognize there can be a place for editing assistance tools, but AI-generated content introduces issues of plagiarism, false citational practices, and other problems that run counter the values of academic integrity that our journal endeavors to uphold.
For those looking for some silver linings, here are a couple. First, the AI-generated content we have identified affirms that humans are still better scholars than machines. At least that is reassuring. Second, while the use of AI is disconcerting, it has been heartening to see our community of disability scholars respond to it. In all the AI cases we have identified or suspected, including for some unpublished submissions, it was a reader or a peer reviewer who cared enough to alert us. Disability studies and DSQ have always relied on a strong community of mission-driven scholars and activists, and we find ourselves again relying on that community to respond to the challenge that AI poses.