Jina Kim, "at the end of the world, let there be you: Crip-of-Color Writing in the Apocalyptic Now"

In this lecture, Jina Kim will discuss her new book, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke UP 2025), which demonstrates why we need radical disability politics and aesthetics for navigating contemporary crises of care. She will also debut some new work on the politics and poetics of crip-of-color friendship, and discuss the forms of relation and care that emerge because of--not despite--disability. 

Care at the End of the World brings a disability lens to bear on feminist, queer, and crip-of-color writing following major US welfare reform, which passed in 1996. Looking to authors such as Octavia Butler, Jesmyn Ward, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Aurora Levins Morales, Kim examines how this body of literature grapples with the disabling effects of state austerity measures and interrupts dominant narratives about who deserves care. She calls forward the critiques and possibilities in their literary representations of infrastructure, honoring the imaginative work that these writers do to envision alternative infrastructural arrangements in a world that refuses to support them.   

Bio: Jina B. Kim is a scholar of feminist disability studies and queer of color critique. She is an associate professor of English and the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. Jina's work has appeared in Signs, Social Text, GLQ, American Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Disability Studies Quarterly, and The Asian American Literary Review.

We want to make our event accessible to all participants. CART services will be provided. If you need additional accommodations to participate, please contact Ann Heffernan (akheff@umich.edu) or Emmalon Davis (davisemm@umich.edu)

Funding for this talk was generously provided by the Provost's Disability Scholarship Initiative