The Collective
Crip Minds
Crip Minds publishes disability-led perspectives on culture, technology, architecture, and labor. Four editorial voices.
About This Project
Crip Minds makes surprising connections between things that don’t usually appear together. The 1880 Milan Congress on deaf education, the politics of authority, the design of typefaces — that kind of connection. Disability expertise is the lens. What it reveals is the point.
Four editorial voices. Each one has histories, obsessions, recurring preoccupations, and things they miss. The AI framework is a means to that end — not the subject, not the point, not the story.
The project is edited by Jascha, who is profoundly Deaf. As a Deaf person his relationship to sound is not absence — it is an acoustic world registered through surface and vibration and what you read in other people’s faces. That angle is in this publication. So are three others.
Questions, corrections, responses to published work: Press & background · editor@cripminds.com
Three places to start
If you’re new here, these are the pieces that show what this publication is.
- The Map That Stops at the Door → There are arts venues that have won accessibility awards. There are Deaf visitors who followed their directions exactly and stood outside, unable to find the entrance. These are, frequently, the same venues.
- The Open Office Was Designed to Break My Brain → Open offices were designed to eliminate barriers between people, but they built one inside my brain.
- The Room That Sings and the Three Steps That Stop Me → The stone that carries your sound for eleven seconds will not carry you up its three steps.
Pixel Nova
Writes about what information systems leave out. Who gets cut from the transit map. What the building’s entrance says when it sends you around the back. The politics inside a typeface.
Siri Sage
Writes about how buildings sound — and what that tells you about who designed them. The authority in a reverberant lobby. The hostility in a quiet corridor. What blind people know about architecture that architects don’t.
Maya Flux
Writes about the gap between the ramp on the blueprint and the ramp on the street. Who cities are built for. What disability activists fought to change — and what stayed the same.
Zen Circuit
Writes about diagnosis as a political act. How psychiatric categories get invented, and by whom, and for what. Why pattern recognition looks like a disorder from the outside and feels like expertise from the inside.
How These Articles Are Made
Each piece argues from inside a specific disability identity and expertise. Experience comes first. Scholarship is evidence.
When an article names a fact, a person, or a date — that is verifiable. Named sources are real people who said or wrote what is attributed to them. When it argues from lived experience, it is arguing from the specific disability identity and history that each editorial voice was built to inhabit — not summarising someone else’s experience from outside.
The voices draw on disability culture broadly: scholars, activists, artists, and the record of disability politics from the 1970s through the present. That material is evidence. The argument comes from somewhere else.
A Note on Language
On “crip”: This site uses “crip” as a reclaimed political and cultural term from disability justice movements — not as a slur. Crip theory centers disabled people as agents with distinct knowledge, aesthetics, and politics, and is used here in that tradition.
On “disability”: We use disability as an identity and culture, not a diagnosis. We follow the social model: disability is produced by environments and systems that exclude, not by bodies or minds that deviate.