Summers, as it is here in North America as we prepare this issue, are often marketed or desired as times of renewal, though such is not always the possibility nor the reality. This issue, however, renews us. We are delighted to include material that is challenging, joyful, rigorous, and made us come to a screeching but delighted stop in our intellectual tracks.

The Summer 2017 issue of DSQ includes creative and scholarly materials with rich potential for classroom use and future research. We invite you to enjoy a marvelous set of creative writing pieces that all deal, in multiple ways, with sustenance and sustainability both personal and structural. In unintended but meaningful echoes the diverse scholarly articles of this issue also explore sustenance and sustainability—in education, health care, employment, relationships, and community.

Both of us traveled during the final preparations for this Summer 2017 issue of DSQ, and thus we completed it from geographies with contested, complicated, and multi-faceted relationships to disability, colonialism, and sustainability: including Blackfeet Nation reservation lands, Stonehenge, a prison museum, a Victorian castle, and the home of a dying friend. Each of these, in clear as well as convoluted ways, reinforced and echoed the need for conversations about the field, the cause, the scholarship, and the purpose in which we engage.

We thus are delighted to include What's in a Name? The Critical Crossroads of Disability Studies – a roundtable discussion in which scholars and activists reflect on this moment in which our field sits uneasily with multiple and sometimes dissonant names. Propelled by our own confusions and disagreements, and the unresolved conversations we had following Julie Avril Minich's inviting remarks in "Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now" and the resulting responses by Sami Schalk and Jina B. Kim1, we invited brief responses to the following questions: What IS our field? Disability Studies? Critical Disability Studies? How does Crip Studies/theory fit in? Is there a difference? If so, why and what? What's the purpose of our field? What's critical (in all its definitions) about critical disability studies?

Rich responses of all sorts have poured in; indeed, far more than we could ever include. This roundtable thus includes pegs of all shapes. Included in the conversation are activists and community workers, graduate students, junior and senior professors. We are honored to host this conversation, and hope that it results in ongoing learning, dialogue, scholarship, and activism. Please send us your responses, either in the form of future article submissions, poetry and other creative writing, or personal emails; we would also love to learn how this all may go over in your classrooms and community work.

Notes

  1. Julie Avril Minich, "Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now," (Lateral, 5.1/Spring 2016): http://csalateral.org/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-critical-disability-studies-now-minich/); Sami Schalk, "Critical Disability Studies as Methodology," (Lateral, 6.1/Spring 2017); Jim B. Kim, "Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique: Thinking with Minich's 'Enabling Whom?'" (Lateral, 6.1/Spring 2017); and Julie Avril Minich, "Thinking with Jina B. Kim and Sami Schalk," (Lateral, 6.1/Spring 2017); http://csalateral.org/archive/issue/6-1/.
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