KIMBERLY JONES  

Welcome, Travis.

 

TRAVIS LAU  

Hi, it's so lovely to be here. I'm really excited for our conversation ahead.

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

I want to begin by talking about how you see yourself, how do you define yourself as a scholar as kind of a being on Earth? I know I gave a list at the beginning of one form of you. But that's not all that anyone ever is.

 

TRAVIS LAU  

I think of myself very much as a public scholar, especially nowadays, I guess I've been sort of haunted by my experiences in graduate school where I felt there was a real sense of mismatch between the work that I want to do, and the groups and populations that I think about and work on.How inaccessible a lot of that work is. And I find that the work that I'm most invested in doing now is working with public audiences, or at least translating what gets to be referred to as scholarly work or theoretical work into forms that are more accessible for the wider public. So that's why a lot of my scholarship is in public forums. And I've been trying to really experiment with the ways that my writing can take different forms. So I like to think about myself as a public scholar. But most of all, probably a queer, disabled scholar of color.

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

One area of your work that I have come to really appreciate is your approach to democratizing the academy, demystifying the academy and making it more accessible, particularly with your recent piece in the online journal Synapses, which is about the ethics of editorial care? Where do citational politics fit into these concerns about the inscrutable Academy and the need for editorial care? 

 

TRAVIS LAU  

This isI think, a really pressing question, at least for me, this is something I've been thinking about a lot in which I've thought about at now that I've been in these positions of being an editor myself, how much editors tend to be gatekeepers, and sometimes in ways that they don't intend, editors get to decide what work gets to have a future, it gets to determine what pieces get to be published that start to shape fields. So I've been really thinking about editors as gatekeepers and a lot of my thinking about editing, and particularly the point you're making about citational politics. I'm really informed by the work of Sarah Ahmed and Sarah Ahmed talks about this in “Living a feminist life,” about citational politics being a form of feminist memory. And while I don't see my work is directly intervening in questions of feminist scholarship, I think the that sentiment still applies, right to think about when you cite someone, or who you cite, or who you put yourself in dialogue with is a deliberate choice about who gets to be remembered as part of a set of conversations, my colleagues now many of them and scholars of color, and marginalized scholars are being very deliberate about who they cite projects in which all of their citations are other scholars of color. I'm thinking about indigenous scholars who are citing only indigenous scholars, when you sort of have a bibliography stand in for a field, it's those voices that start to dominate what that field looks like. And I think citation can have a really powerful way of shaping at least your reader who you are actually thinking of as your interlocutors and who you see yourself being in dialogue with.

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

Yeah, I think it's really hard. In my project, I keep trying to be more in dialogue with people of color. But it is really difficult to navigate those demands that I put on myself as a woman of color, and as an upcoming scholar, and also the demands in the academy.

 

TRAVIS LAU  

Yes. And I mean, I find it so frustrating that to even make the decision to in our scholarship, very deliberately work with, say, only other scholars of color, how much resistance we get, and the fact that it falls on us as already marginalized scholars to have to justify those decisions. It's it I mean, it also speaks to just how inflexible academic conventions tend to be and how much our work is shaped by the fact that we need to acknowledge past work which I don't want to say we shouldn't do. Like I don't want to ever suggest that we shouldn't acknowledge the work of scholars even though they may identity wise be over represented, but I do think there shouldn't be as there's so much resistance to doing what you do for instance, which is I decided to relegate some of these already over represented scholars to the margins of your work and uplift voices that don't get representation. That should not be something that we should resist with the intensity that I've seen, at least in the field. And I definitely share your experience of trying to like justify those kinds of decisions,

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

I didn't notice that you have so many upcoming projects and expressions of your intellectual labor, especially with the way that productivity and labor are expressed during this ongoing pandemic. And the way it reveals so many comorbidities and mental illnesses. So I'm becoming more vigilant against becoming enamored with productivity. Can we use productivity, I think, as an expression of freedom, even if, even in this capitalist world?

 

TRAVIS LAU  

I mean, you've asked such an important question. And I mean, I'll try to respond to it in two different ways. The first way is, I'm thinking about the profound irony of the fact that about just over a week or so ago, I actually lost my uncle quite suddenly. And it really occurred to me just how little space the academy makes for things like grief, or things that are counterproductive. And a lot of my writing, once I finished graduate school, has been meditating on the way that ableism underpins how the academy works. And it's very dependent on the Publish or Perish model where we're constantly expected to be productive. And productivity, I think, is something that Disability studies scholars and disability activists have been extremely sensitive to, because it essentially says that you have to have a body mind that can keep up or you don't belong here. So my way of responding to this is productivity, I think can be an expression of freedom, so long as it can be used toward ends that are sustainable, right.

 

 So I think there are ways to be productive that don't involve punishing yourself, or depleting yourself to the extent where you can no longer do that work sustainably and in a way that is caring for you. And I think this is perhaps for those who are listening, they know my work they might be they might find that quite ironic, given how much I find splitting myself into different arenas in different projects at once. I think for me, I've learned that I really enjoy having my hands in different projects. Because maybe this is a byproduct of my neuro divergence, or my sense of self. But I feel like when I'm too narrowly focused on something, I don't get to expand my mind and my imagination and express myself creatively. So I like to actually have multiple projects that are going to push and pull in different directions. But that's not to say that that is something I need to be doing all the time. Something I've been really thinking about is this project by a black activist called the Nap Ministry, right how important rest is. And that rest is also something that is not passive, but active, something that is also productive, because it's a self care strategy. And I think that can be a form of productivity, even though it is not productive in the usual neoliberal and capitalist ways. So I think I, too, am a little squeamish about the word productivity. But maybe it's less about either being pro or anti productivity, but thinking more capaciously about what productivity could mean,

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

 I like that,I like that I have been using it when I go get a facial or nails done or pedicure, but I'm going for self care. 

 

TRAVIS LAU 

Yes.

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

Can you talk more about your upcoming project Insecure Immunity, Inoculation and anti vaccination in Britain 1720 to 1898. I'm especially curious about what causes insecurity in health and is it related to how we define able bodies?

 

TRAVIS LAU 

Sure. So insecure immunity is my first book that I'm still working on. And it evolved out of my dissertation project. But I'm really interested in thinking about the longer histories in at least British cultural and literary histories, vaccination and immunity. And the way that I'm thinking about this project is I'm trying to intervene in what often gets referred to as this kind of presentist phenomenon of I hear from academics, I hear from people that I know as friends and loved ones. They describe the anti Vax movement as this kind of modern phenomenon that has not been seen before, where people are resisting vaccination in a way they've never seen. But what I'm trying to argue at least is that this is an 18th century phenomenon that evolved out of the very moment when vaccination becomes popular, particularly from a disability studies standpoint, trying to historicize what gets referred to now as the anti autism bent of anti vaccination, that this this anxiety about cognitive disability or particularly what gets called at that time, cow mania, this idea that vaccination was using fluid from cowpox to substitute for smallpox generated deep anxieties about whether or not people who were vaccinated would descend into a bovine state And I'm trying to think about how much that cognitive ableism is used to justify anti vaccine vaccination positions where there is some sort of cultural or ideological standpoint that says I would rather my child die of a life threatening communicable disease than live a life of autism, or cognitive disability. And to think about the history of that ideological position to me is really interesting, for thinking about the much longer history that we have of vaccine resistance, that in many ways we still live with. So this project is really deeply invested in making a present is claimed, but also saying, hey, as a culture, we have a lot of cultural amnesia about the kinds of histories that still animate what we think of as anti vaccination discourse

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

I think cultural amnesia is a great way to set foot how people ignore the past. Right? I mean, so many things happened that mirror what's happening now, it seems too, that there's some tension between this idea of creating a modern technological world with the environmental world with animals and with the concerns about bovines.

 

TRAVIS LAU  

Yes, I mean, in the 18th century, there would have been deep anxieties culturally and religiously about the species division between human and animal. And I think one of the ways that vaccination provoked those anxieties was that did vaccination violate that boundary and suggest that there was a hybridity between man and animal? And you can already imagine the ways in which that gets racialized, especially as vaccination as a as a technique originated not just in England, but from Turkey and other places in the global world that would have been threatening to primarily white audiences who see this as a kind of exotic or externalized practice that is not native to England.

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

I think, too, that Disability Studies is one of the emerging areas of historical research and academic engagement that is very tied to activism outside of the academy. Can you talk about how you bring disability activism into the classroom and into the academic Academy?

 

TRAVIS LAU  

I think this is the part of my formation as a disability scholar that I care most about because I feel like it has active ramifications for other people's lives that I encounter. So in the classroom, I've been thinking a lot about not just accessibility, which has become a truly vexed issue in COVID-19. I think like many other colleagues of mine, in March 2020, many of us pivoted for the first time to emergency remote teaching. And I like to call it that very deliberately, because many of us were not trained to do this kind of teaching, let alone do it ethically and accessibly. So a lot of my experience has been trying to learn from disability activists who have been trying to model what Universal Design looks like. I'm thinking here of Jay Dolmage’s work and thinking about how to move toward increasing universal design, where everyone benefits, not just disabled students. But in my classroom, something that I take great pride in, has been modeling for my students what vulnerability looks like and thinking about our community as communities of care. For a long time, I was very tight lipped about my own disabilities, I have scoliosis related disabilities that manifests both in terms of chronic pain and brain fog. And some days are really hard for me to get my words out or to lead a classroom. And I remember when I first started teaching, I wouldn't I wouldn't tell us all about it. 

 

And I would just sort of toughed it out. And it really occurred to me the moment I started disclosing in class or starting my classes with a sharing of my experience, students felt safe in a way that they didn't feel safe before, they were able to better inhabit their body minds in ways that they weren't before. And I find that to be really urgent and important where a lot of students don't see their instructors as sympathetic to their experience, let alone seeing their faculty members as people that they can trust and rely on. Because they don't necessarily identify publicly, as, in my case, queer disabled. And I think that work has been really important to me, especially if I'm asking students to engage with difficult material. For instance, just recently in my Literature, medicine and culture course, where we do health, humanities and disability studies stuff. We're talking about difficult issues like the Tuskegee syphilis study. And it's hard for me to talk about that work without cultivating at least a culture in the classroom where we can get through those difficult encounters together. And part of that, for me, has been about disclosure, not obligating disclosure, but using disclosure as a way of creating intimacy and vulnerability in the classroom. 

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

Yea,I think one of the things that's come out of COVID, too, is this idea that remote learning is less rigorous. I think that it still has challenges for people with disabilities. But people develop eye fatigue and different things with their eyes from having to stare at so many screens for such a long time. How do you navigate those conversations and build that into a curriculum while making sure that you are being attentive to the way people think college courses ought to be as far as rigor and the needs of the students?

 

TRAVIS LAU  

That's such a great question. And I've been thinking a lot about the way that so at Kenyon, Kenyon has a small liberal arts college, and Kenyon really was committed to returning in person. So this whole academic year, we have been in person and sort of virtual and remote contexts are reserved for extenuating circumstances. But even some of the lessons we learned from our year of remote teaching prior to this have started to disappear. And it was troubling to me because I felt like we were missing an opportunity to put into practice a more accessible way of learning. But the point you made, I think, is really important. And I want to underscore this, that just because we move remote does not mean it's necessarily more accessible for students, even disabled students. And I think one of the really urgent things that you're you're raising is that we need to avoid this either or model where either it's all remote, or it's all in person, I think what we need to do is think about ways we can sort of facilitate both in the classroom make both options available, or at least understand that there is no one size fits all model. And one of the things that I've been doing recently is in my class, right now, since we've been all in person thus far, cases on our campus have been skyrocketing. And I have then made the decision, in consultation with my students, whether or not we should go virtually briefly. And I think that another option was thinking that these things are not permanent, but constantly in flux based on the needs of our students. So this is sort of a long way of saying that instead of having a top down model where we sort of demand that certain learning environments and models be the one and only one. What if we did this collaboratively with our students, it's something that's a conversation that we need to be having all the time, rather than just once.

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

It's always something I keep in mind, because I did discover that I really enjoyed teaching. And I do feel like an emotional connection to students. Like I'm always worried for them. So figuring out ways I think to help them. It's good for everybody,

 

TRAVIS LAU  

I was thinking about the Disability Visibility Project, and Alice Wong's work and how one of the projects that's related to that is The access is love project. And I think it's actually very healthy to be concerned for your students. Because if you love your students, you want them to be able to access materials, I think there's no shame in loving the work that we do, and loving the people that we serve.

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

So, yeah. Well, I want to have a slight pivot and say that I also love films. Besides students.  Sundance this year had several documentaries and short films that spoke to different disabilities and included disabled people. Especially maybe for visible disabilities, like hypopigmentation like albinism, there is a lot of stigma and cultural language around this figure of the evil, evil villain with people with those sorts of disabilities. You see any changes,currently, 

 

TRAVIS LAU  

This is a big question. And I'm going to see if I can synthesize some answers to this.I think on a sort of larger level, I think I am seeing quite a bit of transformation in the way that we tell disability stories. One is that there are more disabled people telling their stories and then actually getting platforms. So I'm thinking about major news outlets and publications, actually focusing on disabled experiences, everything from the New York Times, to some smaller publications that are getting quite a bit of visibility for telling disabled stories. But with regard to something like Sundance, I'm really struck by the ways that disability is now becoming less sensationalized in a lot of ways. Sure we get these kinds of stereotypical representations. But we have really sort of moving representations and examples where disability is normalized, or kind of seen as unremarkable. 

 

And I really love that because one of the ways in which I think disability gets represented even by well meaning people is that it is this sort of object of wonder or fascination, or the idea that somebody is interesting because they have a disability rather than other facets of their identity. It's nice to see now films, other forms of media are exploring disability among other identities. So that's not to say that we've reached a place where representations are truly intersectional. But we are starting to move in that direction. And I've been thinking a little bit about that question about language. And there's a lot of politics surrounding whether or not we need to use identity first or person first language. And it's really exciting to me to see that we're having those conferences Asians, seeing things like the AP offer a, an actual guideline for how to talk about disabled people in journalism. I think that that's incredible, right? I think about how for how long, even in journalistic circles or in popular media, really inappropriate use of slurs or reductive language or even inspirational language used to talk about disabled people that was a mainstay for a long time. But we're finally having, I think, a moment where we're recognizing that the politics surrounding language is not something to be disregarded or not something that we can just cast aside in our telling of these stories. But we actually have to be really attentive to the fact that people may choose to identify quite differently than we imagined them to be. So I think to sum up the way that I think about it is, again, I'm, I'm less invested now in this tension between should it be person first versus identity first, but actually taking very seriously how individual disabled people identify. 

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

We write about the past, though, right, so I've heard different scholars say that we have the language to express with more exactness the type of disabilities that people in the past had. So they may have called it fits. But we understand today what that could have meant. Can we offer that nuance while also being attentive? Or should we always be kind of expressing what they said in the past? Rather than putting terms from the president onto it?

 

TRAVIS LAU  

I think what you're describing is a methodological question that doesn't have clear and cut answers. My instinct is to always preserve the historical terms by which people identified and describe their experience. But I think there's value in being strategically presentist or anachronistic, such that you can describe a phenomenon with maybe a clearer way of talking about that set of experiences, if you're trying to import theory into the past, right, I think there's a really sort of thin line between speaking for the past versus using a framework in our present that helps us better understand that past. 

 

And I think that's where the distinction is, for me, there are times where I really want to claim a historical figure as disabled, when in fact, they may not see themselves that way. And there's a fine line between saying, I am going to reclaim that person and identify them in a way that they wouldn't identify themselves versus saying, If I were to look at this person as a disabled figure, what is gained in doing so, right? It's for me, it's about intent and the outcome rather than just sort of saying, Is it right or wrong?

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

As we've been talking about? So much of the language of disability is racialized? How do you navigate these nuances in your professional life and in your scholarship?

 

TRAVIS LAU  

I think this question is really hard for me. One, because I feel like this is maybe a byproduct of my formation. But I found myself at least confronting the reality that least in Asian American communities, and in my upbringing, as Chinese American disability was a taboo, right, so we didn't talk about things like mental health, or I think about all the time about even in my own language, I speak both Cantonese and English. And in Cantonese, some of the closest words we have for something like mental health is madness, or insanity, or craziness. And I think about that baggage that is carried on to the way that I think about myself as a racialized identity, but also someone who is disabled. And I've often found them to be in tension. It really occurred to me over these recent years, the ways in which my body gets read by different audiences in different ways. The presumption that when I write about issues of race or disability, that is sometimes called MeSearch, a kind of reductive sort of navel gazing obsession with one's own marginalized identities. But I've been really pushing back against that where it always makes me wonder when people say, Oh, you're you're pursuing MeSearch as if any research is not motivated by some sort of personal investment. And who gets this who gets to call out someone for doing the search? What position? What kind of privileges does a person have, such that their work is considered legitimate, while others are considered MeSearch? So I've been, I mean, this is maybe not the most direct answer to your question. But I've been really sort of seeing the ways that my racial identity and disability often interact and our intention with one another, and this is an area that I need to do better work on as somebody who has been sort of trained to think about disability in history. I often encounter very white histories of disability, but what about racial histories that have yet to be untold? Like projects like yours, which are thinking about the legacy of slavery that still underpin how we think about disabled people today?

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

My interest in my project stemmed from my grandmother who had vitiligo and one of my brothers has vitiligo. So it's, it's hereditary. A lot of people in my family have either albinism or vitiligo. And that really started me into my project. And I don't mind telling people that but it's not like, I lead with that all the time. But then you're making me think maybe I should. It's an important part of how I discovered this project, and how I think through what it means to be disabled in that way.

 

TRAVIS LAU  

I think it helps people understand where your intellectual commitments are. And I think disability theory has been called out a lot recently for abstracting disabled body minds without attending to lived experience, I think the way that you're conceptualizing your project, and what your project is insisting on is that you can't talk about disability without thinking about actual lived experiences. And I think that's so important right now,

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

This is a question that has been coming up a lot recently. And the range of responses that people give about what it means to kind of decolonize language decolonize the academy to colonize the syllabus. This is, I think, a theme lately in academia. And I'm wondering what your take on this emerging new concept of decolonizing the work that we do means, can we decolonize the academy? Can we decolonize the work? And what does it mean for us to actively do so and work toward doing so,

 

TRAVIS LAU  

I am really mixed about the language of decolonization now in the academy. And I think it's partially bound up with my overall discomfort with the ways of getting deployed. So I've been really thinking a lot about how the language of diversity, equity and inclusion and access has become something co opted by the Academy as something marketable, I think about the ways we have diversity officers who many of whom get paid an exorbitant amount of money, but then essentially use their positions to corral diversity issues into things that can end up on a flier or for campus visits for students. But that kind of equity work doesn't actually happen at a structural and systemic level. And I believe this is Eve Tuck, but that Decolonization is not a metaphor. And I remember that essay really strongly where people think about decolonization as adding that token week, where we have a disability unit or race unit, and I'm worried about the way decolonization becomes tokenizing, or just a way to absolve people of the kinds of bad politics that they might be ascribed to where people have virtue signal that they are aware of these positions of thinking, or they sort of admit their privilege, but then kind of go on about their, their daily life and their work without having to be actually critical of the ways we've received, maybe the ways we think about our own fields, or actually go about those practices. And I think to really sort of think through what your question is asking is, so what does it mean to actually do the work of decolonization?

 

And, for lack of a better way of saying it, I think it is going to really do that would mean to radically destabilize a lot of our customs and cultures in the academy. And I don't know how many people are really willing to do that. Because those, those cultures, those conventions are also linked to power. So I can imagine that even scholars that I know who are supposed to be extremely committed to better equity access, and inclusion might actually be the very people who are least likely to do the actual work of decolonization. So I think that's a long way of saying that this is something that I acknowledge the spirit of, and I'm committed to as a larger project, but I am sort of mixed about how it's actually going to be lived out in the academy, especially when the very fields that are supposed to bring this about are under threat, right, I think about how many Indigenous Studies programs are still under threat. Now, how can we think about decolonization happening when those scholars are not accepted into the academy or getting pushed out?

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

And thinking about DEI, it always seems to me that the people who are tasked with this labor are people of color, who are already stretched very, very thin in the academy? Is there a way to kind of navigate that? And this is me for a personal question. If you're committed to being there for students and being supportive of other people of color, how do you navigate saying no to those things, right? Because your desire is kind of always to say yes, to be there and to be present.

 

TRAVIS LAU  

I think this is going to be unsatisfying as a response. But it's something that I don't actually really know how to do very well. I'm super aware of the fact that at least at my institution, I am now one of the youngest. Queer scholars, openly queer scholars of color and as a result, a lot of students come to me for mentorship for solidarity, and I think you're right, I really want to underscore what you just said, which is that oftentimes, the work of diversity, equity inclusion is disproportionately put upon people for whom those resources are not accessible. We don't get enough support as faculty to do this kind of work, even though students are the ones who are most likely to come to us. 

 

I think what you're getting at and reminding me of is that sometimes saying no, can be really important and urgent, not to sort of turn down that work? And to say that you don't want to do it. It's not a sort of dismissal or rejection of that work. But something that many of my colleagues who have been mentors to me have said is, you're not saying no, just to say no, you're saying no, in one capacity to say yes to something else somewhere else? I think it's about priority. I think as we navigate the academy and have what power we do have to push people to do in step up that step up in their positions of power to do that kind of labor that feels more urgent to me than saying yes to everything

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

It makes sense. I do as well tend to say yes, probably more than I ought

 

TRAVIS LAU  

Guilty as charged.

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

Recently on Twitter, and I think conversations around literature and language, there have been these articles coming out talking about the use of the habitual. So I'm curious about your perspective as a scholar of English and literature. What work cultural, political, racial work is done when grammar forms are acknowledged, are derided. Particularly when use of the habitual-B had at one point been one of those signals to an inferior mind, and is now more recognized as an appropriate form of grammar usage?

 

TRAVIS LAU  

I'm not sure I have the sort of compelling answer to this. But I'm, I've been thinking about this debate that happens, particularly in social media circles, when it becomes this tension between should we use more just language? Or is it a policing of language? And I've seen sort of convincing arguments on both sides where people say, “Oh, I feel like disability activists are just pointing out every time there is ableist, language and ableism is baked into our language, they're going to exist, instead of policing people's language.” Shouldn't we talk about larger scale issues? Rather than sort of nitpicking on how people use terms and words, the response, right, is that words have meaning and they have power. So when we dismiss the like, a flippant use of an ableist, slur, are we sort of confirming that that kind of language is okay, and that that language’s power over people, is something that we should just let go. 

 

And I've always been of two minds about this, where I always think about where's the fight really going? Is it about using more just language? Or is it about confronting ableism as a sort of larger set of ideologies and cultures. And I'm glad now, though, that we're having these conversations about word use, and thinking about the histories of words. But I want to think about what the long term gain is of doing this. And where we're moving as a community. And I think the way that we're moving toward is not just harping on word and language use, but thinking about their associations with etiology and power. Right? So how does the use of a word get associated with different forms of privilege? Or when that word is used? What are the kinds of material consequences of a word like, for instance, having a word signify a kind of inferior mind, those that comes with a lot of ideological, political, cultural and social baggage that we are finally I think, starting to acknowledge, so for me, the first step is to talk about the word. But then the second and third and fourth step is to unpacking what is surrounding that word, in terms of power and institutions and structures. 

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

Yeah,I think that's true. It's difficult to separate, especially when some people don't want to acknowledge where power is. Actually. When I first read the title of our speaker series, I, I internally read it as medicine, race and freedom, right? Because people tend to think of this relationship between democracy as a relationship to freedom, especially because of I think, the American Revolution and what it meant politically. But today, and if you believe in a kind of progressive ideology, democracy has failed, and we really need to think of a new system. But what we've been talking about lately is that, dismantling this democratic system that’s failed, this capitalist system that’s failed, and whatever we create, there's a problem in between, especially for people with disabilities. Can you talk about that? What does it mean? What do we do with that space in between? And can we do anything at all?

 

TRAVIS LAU  

I'm not sure if this actually gets to the question. But I've been thinking a little bit about the way that activist movements have worked and how the disability community has been a really interesting example of how activism is always caught in this divide, as you just you've been describing as a kind of pessimistic view about progress about talking about democracy, capitalism as a failed project, and a kind of radical optimism about better futures that are more inclusive. And a lot of times, I feel like the disability community is precisely the community that gets left behind in this belief in a more radical future. 

 

But when we think about a better world, where more people are included, it feels like disability is always left behind. What it means is that for a lot of disabled people, some of the things that are necessary for a profound revolution are actually deeply abilest. 

 

And I was thinking about this a lot where people were talking about so I'm thinking about the tension between the disability community and people who are invested invested in environmentalism, there is this huge outpouring of support and outcry about major restaurants and places like Starbucks, abandoning the use of plastic straws, because it is extremely damaging to the environment. The disability community pushed back and said, those straws are precisely what disabled people need to access things like beverages and drinks, right? So here's the tension between two progressive movements that say, “Hey, actually, it's pretty able-ist to say we need to get rid of this” versus environmentalists saying, “Wow, disabled people are really just committed to letting climate change become a thing and destroying our planet.” 

 

And I was really sort of struck by that conversation. It is really emblematic of where there are two sorts of imagined futures between these two progressive groups that miss an opportunity to think about solidarity, right? Is the answer. They're sort of faulting disabled people for being bad consumers, when really the issue here is about structural problems that produce climate problems that actually are not reducible to the disability community. Right. But your question was really making me think through about how we go about libratory politics, where, in our pursuit of a better future, how many people do we leave behind?

 

I also think about the guilt that a lot of disabled people felt during the Black Lives Matter protests. Many disabled people weren't able to be in the streets. And a lot of them felt they were unable to participate and be visible in the ways that the Black community needed. But for a lot of disabled people being in the streets was not accessible. What does it mean that online activism or activism by bedside is equally valuable when we're all sort of invested in the same thing at the end? For a more inclusive world? Like these are questions that are ugly, and uncomfortable, but they're important ones.

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

Yes, I think so. I was thinking a lot about what we do? And how do we be in solidarity, because I think that's the important part is that if we're not in solidarity, then we keep capitulating, in a way, to these forces that are actually the thing that are damaging us.

 

TRAVIS LAU  

And they benefit from our infighting. And that's the part that breaks my heart the most when people who are being pushed down and oppressed actually turn on one another because it's easier to fight amongst ourselves than actually fight the forces that are actively oppressing us as groups.

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

Talking about the future. You have written about elements of science fiction and public books, articles, female features, feature females, and about epidemic and pandemics and your lapis quarterly essay, what preparations are due. I think they both speak to what we imagined about humanities and non-human futures and the influence of our perceptions of the body and the body's ability, whether it be based on gender or immunity to disease. How do you see your work speaking to what is possible for the human and the nonhuman world?

 

TRAVIS LAU  

That's a really interesting connection you made in my work about my ongoing preoccupation and fascination with science and speculative fiction, I will be the first to admit that I have been a long time reader of this genre. And right around the time of the pandemic, I started really becoming fascinated by the work of feminist black feminist writers of speculative fiction. So I've been thinking a lot about work by NK Jamison and Octavia Butler, and the way that they imagined futures and this is partially influenced by my reading of our fellow Disability Studies scholar Sammy Schalk’s work on black speculative fiction and its relationship to disability. But I think what draws me so much to speculative fiction is that speculative fiction is a genre that not only asks us about futures but asks us about presents and thinking about how present issues may or may not continue to exist in the future. And there are things that we can do in the now to make those futures possible. It's not just about this imagined future that has yet to come, but actively, what can we do to start to realize that future? 

 

The other thing too about speculative fiction is that I think speculative fiction allows us to think about possibilities in ways that maybe our present doesn't allow us to, especially when we are facing overwhelming circumstances that make it very hard for us to even imagine the past our present day. I feel like speculative fiction says, Hey, what would it mean to really radically think about a future that hasn't even come yet. And I really loved that boldness of imagination that says, We're not trapped in our present, we have every opportunity to bring forth a future, but it may take some pretty significant changes. And I think that that willingness to imagine without consequence, or to imagine, even beyond the terms we have even now to think about our moment, have been really incredible to me. And I think, just to sort of address how disability fits into it. I think whenever we think about disability, we have to think about the ways in which disability and history has been framed as a temporal problem, right? that disabled people are either drains on resources, or they have they are imagined to not be desirable in the future. And one of the ways I tend to teach this in my classroom, is the politics surrounding something like genetic gene editing technology. So I've been thinking a lot about CRISPR, and even the inventors of CRISPR. 

 

And many of the biotech companies that have something to do with CRISPR are imagining futures without disabled people in it. But what does it mean, to think about how disabled people imagine their futures as more radically accessible for everyone. And that means, right, pushing back against this kind of fantasy narrative of progress for medicine is going to fix everything, where disabled people are not going to be coded as without futures or undeserving of futures. But imagining a more inclusive future that says, hey, just because you would have it your body mind differently, doesn't mean that you don't deserve a future. I think that sometimes will involve really painful conversations that push back against the promise of a more somehow enlightened, a future for us all. That, in many ways, is an ableist, right, I think about how many people in medicine, I've spoken to say, “Oh, I welcome a CRISPR for how it'll eliminate things like disability.” But I think about how if that were the case, myself, and many of the people that I love in the disability community would simply not exist. And that's a pretty horrifying thing to think about.

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

When you think about the way much of science fiction and the future expresses that people with disabilities, black people are often not present, right that we are a problem that is solved through science in the future. And then are we supposed to assume that in the present, we are the stain against progress, the stain against science, the stain on the world.

 

TRAVIS LAU  

The way that you've described that also raises really important questions about who gets to imagine a future and who gets to have a say and what that future looks like. And oftentimes, it is precisely the people whose views on race, gender, sexuality and ability, they're the ones most hostile to these identities. And that, to me, is what good speculative fiction reveals, which is that there is not this kind of singular future. That is good. There are very subjective futures that people imagine. And we have very explicit choices we can make about what that future looks like.

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

Yea,I hope we continue toward making better choices, right?

 

TRAVIS LAU  

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that's what we're doing. But I think that's what we in the Academy are doing now. And that's the most utopian way of thinking about what we do.

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

I have a few final questions. One is that I like to ask everyone I speak to lately. What are you reading right now?

 

TRAVIS LAU  

Oh, my gosh, this is such a tough question. On the note of speculative fiction. I've been reading a lot of speculative fiction, I was just reading this really great kind of mystery speculative fiction book called Pure Uneasy, which is just a trip to read. But I've been thinking a lot about the theme of this particular lecture series, its relationship between medicine, race and democracy I've been thinking about in my own work. I've been reading a lot of work on the history of race in the 18th century. I'm thinking here of a Suman Seth  book Difference in Disease which is about the constitution of medicine and race in the 18th century, but also some really, really incredible work by Black scholars on the history of race and medical exploitation, I can think of my favorites, right Harriet Washington's Medical Apartheid, which is, I think one of those iconic books that teaches itself and Lundy Braun, Breathing Race into the Machine right thinking about medicines, deep implication with race. I've actually revisited this work because I'm currently about to try to write a piece about the romanticism of British romanticism and the rise of romantic medicine. And how much of that was predicated on the deliberate production of disability in order to create things like medical progress? What does it mean that much of our medical technologies are predicated upon the exploitation of, for instance, black bodies, or poor bodies or criminal bodies. And I've been, I've been trying to confront some of the gaps in my own training, particularly in fields that are very white like mine, where I actually have not done my due diligence with issues of race.

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

I read Harriet Washington, and I didn't give it the justice I think it deserved. And then I revisited at the start of writing my dissertation. It is one of the reasons why I started Black Marxism and Cedric Robeson, yes, I read it over the pandemic. But now, it's just completely changed my approach to my dissertation where, as you said, I'm looking at people with disabilities, not as the groups of people that slave masters kind of dispose of, but they continue to extract from their bodies constantly consent to see through new technological developments in violence and labor regimes, that people consider people with disabilities usually are off to the side. But really, they're really part of the cycle of the plantation machine.

 

TRAVIS LAU  

And I mean, this is, this is a kind of recovery work that we need, where we sometimes don't want to reproduce some of the ableism of our own scholarship that says, oh, disabled people were always marginalized, and always sort of cast them aside. But to think about disability as central to the project of slavery is such a huge intervention. And I'm so excited to read your work moving forward.

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

I also want to say one of the other people that we're speaking to is a doula here, and Houston, where I am. So I wanted to ask you, how do you think about this relationship that we see between birth and birthing in the kind of the continuation and perpetuation of violence against black women and black women's bodies, through reproductive labor?

 

TRAVIS LAU  

I have two ways of thinking about this one, and they're both related to my teaching. And this is something that I've been actually wanting to do better about teaching. So the first thing is related to my earlier point about CRISPR. And it's sort of an imagination of the future in which certain bodies get to flourish, and others are seen as worthy of being eliminated or need to be cold from the population, sort of Neo eugenic stuff. And I've been thinking about how this plays out along racial lines regarding sort of reproductive medicine, in vitro fertilization, and this sort of language about producing perfect families. I've been really influenced by this collection of essays called Beyond bioethics, there's a lot of conversations in there among a number of scholars of race, and Madison, who are sort of calling out this more recent phenomenon of MI medicine where people can essentially buy the health they want, or they are imagining future generations of children that have the traits that are most desirable. And you can imagine they're going to be typically white, able bodied, right. 

 

And it's also bound up with certain forms of class privilege, where I still remember there was a conversation about whether or not it is ethical for people seeking IVF, or other forms of fertility treatments, wanting certain kinds of bodies to be donating eggs and sperm, right. And it is predicated on a kind of racial assumption of what is desirable, and what futures get to flourish. So like that's the first one. 

 

The second one is thinking about the flows of capitalism and global trade has been really haunted by this unit I had when I was in graduate school about the ways in which the global south has been exploited for reproductive purposes, full industries, for instance, in India in which people who live in the Global North essentially purchase women in the Global South to do the reproductive labor, be it in the form of surrogacy or to donate their eggs. I'm thinking about so many scholars who have been talking to us about the ways in which biological matter is both commodified and used by people in the Global North and often to frightening exploitative conditions for people in the Global South. So this is, I think, like a really ongoing and important conversation to have, because this is not going away. It's only intensifying as we've made these cottage industries that thrive based on the consumer habits of the Global North.

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

Thank you. Thank you. This has been a fabulous conversation. I feel like I want to hold you all day to talk more. But

 

TRAVIS LAU  

Anytime I can. Your questions were so generative, and you'll have to forgive me if I was sort of babbling my way through a response and my mind was going in so many different directions, and I'm so thankful to be part of this project.

 

KIMBERLY JONES  

Thank you, Travis. It was a pleasure to have you. I enjoyed our conversation so much, and I look forward to speaking again. And to everybody else out there. Thank you for another session of the Medicine Race and Democracy Lab Speaker series. Tune in to more conversations.

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CREDITS:

Hosted by Kimberly Jones

Assistant Produced by Jason Lee and Lauren Ginn

Produced by Lan A. Li

Music by Paolo Pavan