Over Labor Day weekend 2025, a group of disabled scholars of color met in San Francisco. They started at 10am. They took a two-hour break for lunch. They took another two-hour break before dinner. They flew in a day early to recover from travel.
I read that schedule three times. Then I sat with it the way I sit with a dataset that has just revealed its structure.
Here is what I know about academic gatherings. I have attended eleven conferences since 2019. Every one ran on the same logic: pack the schedule, maximize output, treat the body as a delivery system for the mind. Fifteen-minute paper slots. Lunch as networking. Coffee breaks calibrated to keep cortisol productive. I lasted exactly one and a half days at a disability studies conference in Chicago, October 2022, before I was in a bathroom stall with my noise-cancelling headphones on, stimming against cold tile, because the conference about my neurology was designed to be hostile to it.
The Disabled Scholars of Color Collective’s gathering — organized by Dr. Sami Schalk with support from Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility Project and fiscal sponsorship from New Disabled South — did something I have never seen a knowledge-production event do. It treated the conditions of thinking as part of the thinking. Not as accommodation. As methodology.
You might say: that’s just good event planning. It is not. It is an epistemological claim. It says that who can stay in the room determines what knowledge gets made.
Pattern recognition is my thing. I see structures before I see content. So here is the pattern. Disability studies as a field has spent decades arguing that disabled people are experts on disability. Then it holds its knowledge-making events in formats that disable us. The field reproduces the exclusion it theorizes. This is not hypocrisy. It is something worse. It is a system that cannot recognize its own pattern.
Nick Walker calls this the neuroqueer turn — the moment you stop asking how to include deviant bodyminds in existing structures and start asking what structures deviant bodyminds would build. Schalk’s gathering did not accommodate disability. It started from disability. The spacious agenda was not a concession. It was the architecture.
The white paper that came out of the gathering addresses the state of critical race disability studies. But the schedule already said what the paper would say. When you let disabled scholars of color rest, eat, arrive slowly, share origin stories over dinner before theorizing — you get different scholarship. Not better. Different. Shaped by the bodies that made it.
Morénike Onaiwu has written about what it means to exist at the intersection of autism and Blackness — to be multiply illegible to systems that can only process one category at a time. The diagnostic apparatus that named me autistic was built by and for white boys. The conference apparatus that claims to study people like me was built by and for nondisabled academics. Same pattern. Different dataset.
I keep returning to that schedule. Two hours on, two hours off. It looks like inefficiency. It is optimization — just not for output. For the people.
In my car after that dinner party at twenty-six, engine off, I understood something I could not yet name. The problem was never that I talked too long about transit networks. The problem was that the room was designed for a kind of person, and I was not that kind. The room was the argument. It always is.
A conference that starts at 10am and lets you fly in early to rest is not being generous. It is being honest about what a body needs to think. The fact that this feels radical is the entire diagnostic criteria for the field.
Two hours on. Two hours off. Lunch provided. The pens in my drawer migrate overnight and I put them back every Tuesday, and that is not a symptom — it is how I keep the system readable.
This article was inspired by The State of Critical Race Disability Studies A White Paper Report from the Disabled Scholars of Color Collective – Disability Visibility Project from disabilityvisibilityproject.com.