UCSB English’s Early Modern Center with collaboration with the Disability Studies Initiative presents Dr. Travis Chi Wing Lau (Kenyon College) on Cripistemologies of Pain.

Dr. Travis Chi Wing Lau's talk represents some early thinking toward the conception of a second book project on the literary and philosophical problem of pain in 18th and 19th century British literature and culture. Lau is interested in tracing the ideological underpinnings of what we often describe as a new, modern crisis: the opioid epidemic. Drawing together insights from disability theory, literary studies, and interdisciplinary pain studies, Lau's project contributes to what Alyson Patsavas has called "cripistemologies of pain" that prompt us to think from the position of pained lived experience to imagine radically different models of care that move beyond the reductive binary of either amelioration or annihilation of pain. Can we theorize a standpoint (or what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has called "sitpoint") theory of pain that attends to its crip and queer chronicities while also working toward new forms of care and interdependence?

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Contact Anita Raychawdhuri, EMC Fellow at araychawdhuri@ucbs.edu or emcfellow@gmail.com for more information or questions.