2022

Autistic, Surviving and Thriving Under COVID-19: Imagining Inclusive Autistic Futures

Abstract

This article takes up Mia Mingus’ call to “leave evidence” of how we have lived, loved, cared, and resisted under ableist neoliberalism and necropolitics during COVID-19 . We include images of artistic work from activist zines created online during the COVID-19 pandemic and led by the Re•Storying Autism Collective. The zines evidence lived experiences of crisis and heightening systemic and intersectional injustices, as well as resistance through activist art, crip community, crip knowledges, digital research creation, and the forging of collective hope for radically inclusive autistic futures—what zine maker Emily Gillespie calls “The neurodivergent, Mad, accessible, Basic Income Revolution.” We frame the images of artistic work with a coauthored description of the Collective’s dream to create neurodivergent art, do creative research, and work for disability justice under COVID-19. The zine project was a gesture of radical hope during crisis and a dream for future possibilities infused with crip knowledges that have always been here. We contend that activist digital artmaking is a powerful way to archive, theorize, feel, resist, co-produce, and crip knowledge, and a way to dream collectively that emerged through the crisis of COVID-19. This is a new, collective, affective, and aesthetic form of evidence and call for “forgetting” ableist capitalist colonialism and Enlightenment modes of subjectivity and knowledge production that target different bodies to exploit, debilitate, and/or eliminate, and to objectify and flatten what it means to be and become human and to thrive together.

This manuscript has been published and is available in Lateral: Journal of The Cultural Studies Association, published online at: https://csalateral.org/section/crip-pandemic-life/autistic-surviving-thriving-covid-autistic-futures-zine-restorying-collective-liska-singer-gillespie-peters-douglas/

Recommended Citation:

Liska, Sherri, Katrissa Singer, Emily Gillespie, Sheryl Peters and Patty Douglas. (2022). Autistic, Surviving and Thriving Under COVID-19: Imagining Inclusive Autistic Futures—A Zine Making Project by the Re•Storying Autism Writing Collective. Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry, 11(2).

You can read the article here.

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the Autistic artists, and technical and artist facilitators from the Re•Storying Autism project who brought this project to life.

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grants (435-2019-0129) and grant (430-2016-00050).