How does one—how do we—grow a field? In developing this special issue, we invited contributors to share answers to that question; we asked them, in other words, to reflect upon, to grapple with, and to imagine possible futures of the field. 1 As their responses attest, considering where and how the field may grow requires wrestling with the past, acknowledging the gaps, tensions, and possibilities of the present, and articulating critical questions for future field development. Part of that work is an acknowledgement that the field is, in fact, already growing: in recent years we have witnessed the development of new programs, an increased demand for courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, an expansion in online offerings, a rapid proliferation of disability studies publications, and wider recognition of disability studies as a field. 2

This growth has been accompanied by formal and informal conversations about the risks and benefits of such expansion. From essays in The Feminist Wire to debates on the Society for Disability Studies listserv to discussions that happen during and along the edges of disability studies conferences, people are struggling with the complexities involved in growing the field in academic spaces that are ill-equipped to accommodate disabled people, an exclusion intertwined with long histories of economic, racialized, and gendered exclusions. (How is decolonizing disability studies, in other words, tied to decolonizing the academy as a whole?) For many, then, the discussion of "how to grow a field" calls attention to the relationships between disability studies and disability activism, including the academy's deep indebtedness to the intellectual work of activists; demands radical, innovative approaches to conceptualizing and increasing "access" in the academy; requires re-thinking (often unmarked) normative assumptions within the field; and highlights collaboration as a potential way to undo ableist assumptions about individual academic achievement. The essays that follow touch explicitly and implicitly on these issues, and we—the editors and the contributors—hope they spur more questions, more dialogue, and more critical collaboration.

For both of us, the specificities of our own academic locations drove our interest in this topic. We wanted to think collaboratively about what it means to grow disability studies from different positions. Michelle, who originally conceived of the idea for a special issue of DSQ, explains:

"For me, the desire for this conversation emerged directly out of the responsibilities of my academic position. When I was hired to oversee the development of a newly created undergraduate minor in disability studies at the University of Wyoming in 2007, the 'program' had two students, so growing was immediately essential to my academic survival. Happily, the minor has grown beyond expectations, but in this role, I have been forced to constantly consider questions related to the field: selecting essential texts and methodologies for the program curriculum; offering exposure to advocacy and activism in a small-town, frontier environment; adequately supporting disabled students and pushing for a more complex understanding of access on campus; building academic and collegial partnerships based on social justice; and identifying opportunities for graduating students who want more of 'the field.'"

Michelle's position as a faculty member in disability studies, in an institute for disabilities 3 with a program in disability studies, places her in a select group; there remain few full-time faculty lines explicitly in disability studies, and perhaps fewer still in disability studies centers or institutes. In contrast, Alison does disability studies work, both teaching and research, under the rubric of "feminist studies," her official home at Southwestern University:

"I think my focus in disability studies was certainly a component of my hire at Southwestern, but it's not what I was hired to do; they created my line because they wanted to bring in someone to grow feminist studies. My curiosity about this topic stems from my need to grow disability studies through teaching in other interdisciplinary programs: feminist studies, environmental studies, and race and ethnicity studies. Fostering interest in disability studies among our students has meant making explicit connections to their intellectual and activist interests in other movements for social justice. How have students and faculty in other institutions made similar moves? I'm also interested in making space for more conversations about what it means to grow disability studies in undergraduate liberal arts settings, or in environments where we don't have graduate students coming in to move a disability studies program forward."

Between the two of us, then, we represent two of the key patterns of growth in US colleges and universities: through autonomous disability studies programs with their own lines, centers, and institutes—programs that often have minors, majors, and even graduate students; and through faculty housed in different disciplinary departments and interdisciplinary programs who bring disability into other courses and curricula. We know still other models exist, both within and especially beyond the borders of the US, and the essays that follow detail some of them. One of our many hopes for this issue is that it prompts continued discussion on what it means to grow disability studies within different kinds of programs, departments, and institutions and what kinds of structural supports need to be in place.

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To return to our opening question, how does one, or how do all of us invested in disability studies, grow the field? We imagine that those in the field are interested in such possibilities, hoping and working for a vibrant, critical, and effective disability studies. But is it possible for the field to get too big, or to grow too rapidly? Are there offshoots or manifestations of disability studies that we would like to caution against, or disavow, or refuse? In other words, are there ways or moments that we need to see the growth of the field as deeply connected to the work of the field, such that the expansion of the field—into new programs or new lines, for example—doesn't undercut the field's principles?

We recognize the dangers of such a line of questioning as it can easily be used to police what counts as disability, what constitutes disability studies, or who belongs in the field—definitions or delineations that can be used to maintain white supremacy or to foreclose cross-disability alliances and developments. We're aware of the dangers of asserting that certain conversations or topics or positions don't belong in the field.

At the same time, perhaps such dangers require not an avoidance of these kinds of questions but a thorough reckoning with them. We are troubled by the possibility, for example, that schools, colleges, and universities can develop disability studies courses and programming without simultaneously pushing for increased access for disabled students. 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? Or to tout disability studies courses and programming while simultaneously holding students to ableist expectations of time and self-sufficiency, refusing to offer accommodations or shaming students for asking "too much"? What does it mean to divorce questions of physical access from questions of economic access? How might such contradictions or inequities then foster a disability studies devoid of disabled people, encouraging departments to hire faculty who neither need such accommodations nor see the advocacy for such accommodations as part of the work of disability studies faculty (not to mention challenging the very logic of accommodation and its individual/medical framing of disability)? Can we, instead, demand that the growth of the field be accompanied by a growth in access (and "access" understood broadly, radically), making space for more students and faculty to participate fully in their universities, regardless of their disability identifications, both within disability studies and beyond? 4

As we envision the expansion of such labor in disability studies, we also want to argue that growing the field—and increasing access—demands collaboration, and collaboration at many different levels (curricular, programmatic, community-engaged, etc.). Indeed, it was for that reason that we explicitly invited "collaborative essays" and "collaborative approaches" in our call for papers. The enthusiastic response we received from our contributors suggests that collaborative projects might become more common (even among those of us working in fields more focused on individual production) if we make known our desire for them. And the collaborations featured here go beyond co-authored essays: Kudlick and Schweik describe visual access as a collaborative process, one that can unfold over months of interaction or through rich, real-time conversation; Lindgren, Cachia, and George reflect on collaboratively building innovative disability programming across multiple institutions, offering new insights into ideas of "field" and "discipline" in the process; and Schwartz and Stout examine the potential for growing disability studies through faculty-student partnerships around campus activism, event programming, and curricular development.

All of these projects lead us to the sense—the promise, the hope—that disability studies can serve as a site for articulating a politics of collaboration. We can't help but notice how often access serves as the catalyst for collaborative energies, reminding us of Anne Finger's insight that access is always a work-in-progress. How can we use the disability studies/disability rights movement/disability justice movement's commitment to thinking access expansively, and always in the context of greater social justice, as an opportunity for building more collaborative practices into our work? (We think here, for example, of Dalke and Mullaney's performative reading of their essay, captured here in audio file.)

As we wind down work on this issue, reflecting on both the status of the field as well as our contributors' vast insights, we find ourselves thinking about the other components or dimensions of a critically-engaged disability studies. Anyone intending to grow the field within their home institution—whether by starting an autonomous program, initiating a minor, integrating disability and disability studies more fully into the curriculum, or even expanding existing programs and offerings—is going to wrestle with questions about what disability studies is, or what it requires, or what it assumes. Indeed, the Society for Disability Studies issued a set of guidelines for disability studies programs over a decade ago, stressing both academic and activist dimensions. Building on and extending that work, and thinking not only at the program level but the field level, we offer five components of a critically-situated disability studies. We want to stress from the outset that this list is not intended to be all-encompassing or definitive; indeed, one of the promises of such lists is that they generate still more lists as well as interventions, extensions, and interruptions.

First, we join the many other disability activists and scholars stressing the need for a greater attention to materiality and the material effects of disability and debility—whose bodies and minds are valued or permitted to thrive, whose aren't, and by what means. Second, we support those strains of disability studies and disability activism that sit in solidarity with other interdisciplinary fields and movements for social justice, such as race and ethnic studies, LGBTQ/queer studies, feminist studies, indigenous studies, and the like. At the level of field development, not only does disability studies have much to learn from these other fields, but it can also position itself as an ally in struggles over the meanings and appropriations of terms such as "diversity," "inclusion," and "interdisciplinarity."

Intentionally making connections across fields and movements will require, third, a disability studies open to continued struggle around the meanings of words such as "disability," "crip," and "access." Indeed, we suggest that some of the most promising developments in the field of late have erupted from precisely these types of contestations. We believe that the growth of a critical disability studies requires open, expansive, flexible understandings of disability and disability studies, understandings continually open to debate and dissent, from both "within" and "outside" the field.

All of the above suggests, fourth, a disability studies—and disability studies scholars—willing to speak truth to power, willing, in other words, to make plain our understandings of why this work matters. Finally, and very much inspired by our contributors, we see critical disability studies as an interdisciplinary field that continues to have a deep critical engagement with art, performance, and cultural production. In other words, much as we call for a disability studies linking scholarship and activism, we suggest that attention to materiality and a focus on cultural production need not be separate or opposing.

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The contributors to this special issue include a mix of perspectives, ranging from pioneers in the field to emerging scholars, students to program coordinators, curators and artists to activists: all build upon existing conversations and push toward new engagements and discussions. We could have organized the essays in many different ways—we're thrilled with how the essays resonate with each other on multiple levels—and we hope that their resonances lead to unexpected, even improbable, connections for readers.

The opening section, "Shifts," contains three essays that deal with widely different topics, but they share a focus on gaps, tensions, and productive ruptures in the field. Anne Dalke and Clare Mullaney develop a close reading of the competitive academic culture at Bryn Mawr in order to trouble the dichotomies of sane/insane, or rational/irrational, and to expand notions and practices of mad pride. Drawing on crip/queer theory and Bethany Stevens' framing of "transability," they offer the term "transminded" as a way to reshape traditional academic spaces by challenging norms of intellectual success and fears of mental variability. Disrupting "academic time" is a key component of their creative intervention. In an effort to animate this process, they engage in a collaborative poetic meditation that pushes those of us invested in disability studies to think more seriously about the costs of embracing productivity, calling us instead to engage with wasting time, unproductive acts, and open, unstructured time. Their collaborative exchange is also captured here as an audio file, which provides greater access and texture.

Nirmala Erevelles pulls readers into a powerful, deeply self-reflective meditation on the field and her complex positionality in relation to disability and disability studies. Always committed to material conditions and the complex intersectionality of race, ethnicity, poverty, and disability, Erevelles pushes scholars to engage more fully with these issues. She offers a compelling analysis of the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman trial, and its intertwinings of race, class, and disability, as a powerful example for "thinking disability studies" intersectionally and materially. She focuses on the cross-examination of Rachel Jeantell (the young woman on the phone with Martin just before he was killed) and public responses to Jeantell's testimony. As Erevelles traces the use of the terms "retard" and "rachet," readers see that although disability is not the issue of the trial, racialized bodies and minds remain haunted by narratives of disability, inability, and impropriety. Disability epithets can function as defensive attacks as well, as the word "retard" is used by Jeantell to re-assert her own authority. Erevelles' analysis demonstrates, as she has in much of her work, that disability brings a new dimension to questions about race and class; her observations highlight the social pain, suffering, and condemnation that are woven into disability and deserve more direct attention. She closes her reflection by urging scholars in the field to think deeply about the labor of disability activists, artists, and independent scholars, labor often made invisible within an academy shaped by neoliberal capitalism and white supremacy.

Taking up issues of disability injustice, Karen Soldatic and Shaun Grech move the concerns of the field to a transnational register. Their essay argues that northern frames of justice and rights are not capacious enough to address injustice claims based on impairment production. Soldatic and Grech worry that disability identity, pride, and justice models silence or subvert necessary critiques of impairment caused by war, poverty, and political instability. Through a close reading of the CRPD (Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities), they argue that human rights are too often equated with citizenship rights, when in fact the most vulnerable groups—such as people in the global south impaired by political conflicts, war, and the forces of global capitalism—are set outside current disability frames of justice. Ultimately, the authors suggest that an affirmative politics of disability (which they situate as the main political thrust of the field thus far) must be infused with a "transformative politics of impairment" in order to effectively provide frames for redressing injustices transnationally.

"Energies," the second group of essays, maps out a radical politics of collaboration. Not only are all of the pieces co-authored, they also actively investigate how collaboration functions as methodology, how it enhances pedagogy and student engagement, and how it encourages the development of new questions, models, and processes—for leading scholars in the field as much as for students just discovering disability studies.

Kristin Lindgren, Amanda Cachia, and Kelly C. George open this section with a fascinating articulation of the promises and possibilities of seeing DS as a field—even further, a field of energy—rather than a discipline, department, or program. For example, while a program offers crucial infrastructure and a vertical curriculum, it can also impose restrictive practices of taxonomy, surveillance, and "over-coding" of disability-related activities. Building upon recent scholarship by Petra Kuppers and others, they suggest a Deleuzoguattarian framework for growing disability studies "rhizomatically"; such horizontal growth—"offshooting" and alliance building—highlights specific modes highly valued in disability studies such as "interdependence and creative, vibrational intersection." Each author comes to the discussion from a different location, but all three explicitly frame the development of the field, and its creative potential, as tied to access. They describe participatory art projects, inter-institutional consortium events, and an exhibit of work by disabled artists—each site, they argue, maps out the exciting potentialities of disability studies to develop through disorientation, destabilization, and collaborative re-orientation. Although they focus on the gallery space as a site of possibility, they recognize that it can also mirror the marginalization or segregation of disability in academic departments and social spaces; thus, the authors pay attention to energies, processes, and interconnections in diverse spaces and offer readers much food for thought toward nurturing offshoots of their own.

Catherine Kudlick and Susan Schweik also map out multiple, creative, and energetic possibilities for engaging with art, access, and universal design in new ways. In "Collision and Collusion: Artists, Academics, and Activists in Dialogue with the University of California and Critical Disability Studies," Kudlick and Schweik describe how, over the course of two interrelated collaborative projects, disability embodiment and epistemology paved the way to unexpected practices, speculative questions, and generative relationships. They recount unanticipated discoveries resulting from following the unique insights of disabled participants; these led the group toward investigating the creative potential of blind forms of knowledge and, specifically, of audio description. Responding to this collective interest, group members experienced the "fluidity and audacity of critical disability studies." Through process and practice, Kudlick and Schweik share the tangible delight and resourceful quality of disability phenomenology, especially when artists, scholars, graduate students, and designers locate "access" as a site for collaborative experimentation.

The next essay also models a collaborative form of learning and pedagogy. In "Disability Is a Feminist Issue," professor Alison Piepmeier and two undergraduate students, Amber Cantrell and Ashley Maggio, trace the importance of disability studies in shaping their investment in women's and gender studies. Using dialogue as a process/ methodology to destabilize traditional hierarchies of knowledge, the authors directly take up the question of "institutionalizing" disability studies; they want "to think through the possibilities of having disability studies become part of the academy." Using women's and gender studies as a reference, they explore the advantages inherent in programmatic structures. At the same time, the dialogue demonstrates the usefulness of unpacking "'intuitively obvious' connection[s]" such as disability studies and gender studies; while the authors see the two as deeply intertwined, they also see tensions between and within the fields as generative to their own thinking. Piepmeier, Cantrell and Maggio also discuss the REACH program—a post-secondary opportunity for students with diagnoses of intellectual and/or developmental disabilities—at the College of Charleston. For Cantrell and Maggio, their involvement with the REACH program animated their experience of disability studies; for Piepmeier, who has a daughter with Down syndrome, having REACH at her institution allows her to imagine Maybelle's potential academic future. The discussion of the REACH program suggests an important role for disability studies to play in many universities. REACH requires the college to think differently about what "students" look like, or what "students" do; it takes the notion of accessibility or universal design to a whole different level, and disability studies faculty and/or programs could lead efforts to provide institutional support for student success.

The final essay in this section focuses on the generative energy of disabled student activism. In their essay, "'It'll Grow Organically and Naturally': The Reciprocal Relationship between Student Groups and Disability Studies on College Campuses," Allegra Stout and Ariel Schwartz use their experience as student leaders at Wesleyan to shape a broader investigation into how disability studies programs, faculty, and curricula inform student activities. Following academics who often see their own teaching or work as a form of activism, Stout and Schwartz trace those particular relations for students: how does theory impact practice, inform practice, motivate practice? Drawing upon the activism and theoretical engagement they experienced with Wesleyan Students for Disability Rights (WSDR), they identified two other institutions with active disability student groups and at least some disability studies course offerings. Through qualitative interviews with students and faculty, the authors found that, like Wesleyan, even when students were not explicitly engaged in the field, their activities toward disability rights worked to expand disability studies on campus. Stout and Schwartz highlight unique formations such as student-directed seminars and point to the importance of growing disability studies in ways that build upon and integrate student energies and insights.

The final group of essays, "Locations," considers unique histories, directions, and developments in the field in varied spaces and places. The authors explore how disability studies has developed within diverse regions and in relation to specific disciplines; for some contributors, formations of disability and disability studies have directly influenced their personal and professional identities and affiliations. In a provocative, critical self-reflective essay, "The Story of My Work: How I Became Disabled," Rosemarie Garland-Thomson traces a specific history of disability studies in the humanities through her own journey toward identifying as disabled. Drawing upon Simone de Beauvoir's famous declaration that one isn't born but becomes a woman, Garland-Thomson plays with the difference between being "born this way" and becoming disabled. Her narrative takes readers through multiple levels of disability identification—stressing that "becoming disabled" is a repetitive process, not simply a matter of birth, illness, accident, or age. Her focus on the multiple shifts entailed in "becoming disabled" leads her to approach the question of disability identity through what such identifications can do or can make possible. Asserting the necessarily activist component to disability identity, she argues that the "category disabled is necessary to pressure social orders to produce an environment which sustains not only normates but the rest of us as well." For Garland-Thomson, theoretical approaches that blur the boundaries of disability potentially threaten the political work the category of disability may still do. She positions identity at the crossroads of activism and academia, and demands an ongoing engagement with that tension as the field of DS grows.

We found a compelling resonance between Garland-Thomson's sense of isolation prior to finding other disability studies scholars and the isolation described by Negin H. Goodrich in her own search for and investigation of disability studies in Iran. Although she does not take up the question of disability identity, Goodrich shares Garland-Thomson's belief in the necessity of a vibrant community of disability studies scholars. In her essay, "A Persian Alice in Disability Literature Wonderland: Disability Studies in Iran," Goodrich queries some of her colleagues, both academic and activist, in order to speculate what resources or structures might be necessary to nourish a "local disability studies" in Iran. One such resource might be an open-source "literature bank," featuring disability studies texts in both English and Farsi; with this suggestion, Goodrich points to the hegemony of English in disability studies scholarship, an hegemony that prevents monolingual English-speakers from engaging more fully with the work of scholars and activists across the globe.

Goodrich's concerns about the inaccessibility of disability studies literature to scholars working in languages other than English are echoed by Lisa Pfahl & Justin J.W. Powell, as are her calls for greater international and transnational collaborations among scholars. In "Subversive Status: Disability Studies in Germany, Austria & Switzerland," Pfahl and Powell offer a detailed assessment of disability studies in the German-speaking world, building on Köbsell & Waldschmidt's special issue of DSQ on the topic (2006). Their essay will be invaluable to scholars interested in tracing the field's development since 2000, providing a thorough review of the literature and current themes and topics. Their catalogue of resources—from publications to conferences to institutions—provides an image of a field in motion. At the same time as they highlight the subversive nature of the field in generating new scholarship and collaborations, they call attention to the dearth of faculty lines and programs in this region; the lack of institutional support forces many scholars interested in disability studies to affiliate with other disciplines, effectively slowing or shaping the growth of the field in particular directions—an issue that resonates in many locations.

David Connor considers the growth of disability studies through the lens of K-12 education in the US. Connor's essay on the productive tensions between "special education" and "disability studies in education" illustrates how fields often move in unpredictable but productive ways. He suggests that it is the overlap between "special education" and "disability studies in education" that potentially—but not necessarily—enables the latter to subvert and destabilize the assumptions inherent in the former. His essay, "The Disability Studies in Education Annual Conference: Explorations of Working Within, and Against, Special Education," considers the relatively short history (since 2000) of Disability Studies in Education (DSE), a special interest group within the American Education Research Association (AERA), to ask pointed questions about the practical success of DSE in changing educational assumptions about disability. Connor shows the benefit of zeroing in on a particular site of growth, showing how such close readings offer insights that can benefit the field more broadly. In addition, he closes the essay with a robust conversation among scholars invested in DSE about how they might have more direct influence upon general and special education, policy makers, and inclusive practices more broadly—a critical dialogue many readers may find useful and applicable to their own situations.

Connor's essay also offers a wonderful segue to Linda Ware's review of Dan Habib's documentary film, Who Cares About Kelsey? Ware's review, the only one submitted specifically for this special issue, orients readers to the practical complexities of providing access to high school students struggling with emotional and behavioral issues—students often dwelling in the borderlands of general and special education. In this space, the insights of DSE come into sharp relief, and they remind us how easily individual students can become sad statistics of a public school system set up to fail them.

The final essay provides a fascinating glimpse of the evolution of the field from Disability Studies Quarterly itself. In "The View from DSQ," Elizabeth Brewer and Brenda Jo Brueggemann examine every issue of the journal from 2000 (when DSQ first became offered online through an open access format) through 2012, making note of contributors' methodologies, self-reported fields and disciplines, and topics. In so doing, they suggest that tracking patterns in titles and keywords might offer a more productive way of tracking the growth of a field than attributions of "first wave" or "second wave" scholarship. Indeed, one of the benefits of Brewer and Brueggemann's study is that it invites readers to pose their own questions about the data. What might we learn about the field's growth from contributors' self-identification with new subfields such as "accessibility studies" or "chemical sensitivities studies"? Or, moving in a different direction, what can we learn from the frequency of some keywords and the near absence of others? Does the presence of "disability" as a prominent keyword suggest that contributors still imagine readers who aren't disabled or who don't "do" disability studies? Does the presence of "mental" but not "physical," the presence of "deaf" but not "hearing," suggest the persistence of unmarked norms within the field? Does the inclusion of the keyword "sexuality" but the absence of "race" demonstrate a continued absence of attention to race and ethnicity? Or, if such work exists—and we believe that it does—but rarely in DSQ, what does that absence imply? Many of us doing intersectional work—bringing race and ethnic studies, queer theory, and feminist studies to bear on disability and vice versa—have often opted to pursue publication in explicitly intersectional disability studies anthologies (Chris Bell's Blackness and Disability, for example) and in journals not focused on disability or disability studies in an effort to push dialogue about disability studies beyond the boundaries of the field's "home." As we all look toward how best to build disability studies, we can think through the risks and benefits of always locating such work "in" disability studies.

Finally, an insight offered by Brewer and Brueggemann brings us full circle back to the issue of collaboration. Considering the seemingly collaborative nature of the field of disability studies, Brewer and Brueggemann expected to find a great number of such contributions to DSQ; instead, strikingly, they found a relative paucity of co-authored, collaborative works. On one hand, this lack serves as a reminder of how academic reward structures continue to undervalue, and even punish, collaborative efforts. But, we also hope that it evokes a broader motivational question: how might those of us invested in the field work to encourage and reward more collaborative projects in disability studies? We found in this process, for example, that naming collaboration in our CFP made it more likely to appear. In fact, many contributors seemed to respond explicitly to that element—and the insights that emerge in these essays demonstrate how collaborative processes move projects in different, sometimes unexpected directions. In the spirit of celebrating and hopefully pushing "collaboration" toward prominence as a future keyword in DSQ, we also want to acknowledge the invisible collaboration and labor that shaped this special issue. Our anonymous reviewers provided generous comments, wonderful field-specific guidance, and engaged, encouraging advice during the process. Finally, we must express sincere gratitude to our wonderful contributors, who all worked collaboratively with one another and/or with us to shape this issue into a tremendous, thought-provoking meditation on the potential growth of the field. Many of us, scholars, students, and teachers in disability studies, are actively involved in sustaining, supporting, and growing the field. We hope this issue will provide food for thought and ideas to borrow. We hope it will, ultimately, foster more conversation, a wider community, and new forms of collaborative work and pleasure.