Greetings from Katie Sullivan!

Greetings, all – my name is Katie Sullivan, and I’m quite excited to be contributing to Labs for Liberation. Currently, I am a third-year undergraduate, studying Medicine, Health, & Society, Gender Studies, and English at Vanderbilt University. I primarily situate my scholarship and organizing efforts in critical disability and access studies; I’m interested in examining online disability communities and the sociospatial politics of chronic illness and pain.

Prior to transferring to Vanderbilt this semester, I studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I also participated in coalitional efforts to open a Disability Cultural Center. Organizing to secure a dedicated campus space for disabled folks over the course of a few years was an incredible labor of love, and– although I am no longer in Madison– I’m proud to say that the center is now operational, staffed, and frequented by disabled folks on the UW campus. Through that work, I learned of cross-disability solidarity, Disability Justice, burnout, and crip joy; I’ve remained afloat in the academy due to the networks of care and disabled kinship. My disabled friends have taught me so much, and they enabled me to reframe my personal relationship with disability and madness– for that, I am oh-so grateful. The opportunity for me to exist, learn, research, and create within the academy has been made possible by disabled people who’ve come before me and those now within the system who have committed to sustaining and practicing anti-ableism. I value the aim of Labs for Liberation in that it seeks to sow these seeds for local organizing, placing equity, justice, and the pursuit of liberation at its center.

There’s something thrilling about embarking on this collaboratory; in extending the legacies of disabled tinkerers, creatives, queer-of-color feminist collectives / labs / cooperatives, I envision this project as a generative, radical circuitry. I envision this work destabilizing the notion that there is any singular “correct” approach to cultivating access, to organizing, to design, to imagining and building crip futurity. I’m looking forward to creating, gathering, archiving, and learning in community.

Warm regards,

Katie