Thursday, October 10
5:00 – 6:30 PM,
Buchanan Tower 1112
Logan Smilges
Assistant Professor of English
Language and Literatures
https://english.ubc.ca/profile/j‐logansmilges/
“Toward a Crip Metaphysics”
To ask about disability at the end of the world is
tautological because, in the public imaginary, disability is
the end of the world. Broken bodies. Missing limbs.
Scattered minds. Disability as apocalyptic synecdoche. In
this talk, Smilges dials in on the relationship between
disability and the apocalypse by rendering it a
metaphysical problem, one concerned with our collective
orientations to time and space. A crip metaphysics,
building on the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva, Margaret
Price, and Kris McDaniel, illuminates how disability is
operationalized as the negative grounds out of which
spatiotemporalites are contested. By attending to these
contestations when it feels as though the world is coming
apart, it becomes easier to glimpse how
