The DISCO Network and the Digital Accessible Futures (DAF) Lab, housed in the University of Michigan’s Digital Studies Institute, invites you to a virtual Zoom roundtable conversation with William Cheng and Sunaura Taylor on disability and publishing, publishing as a disabled author, and publishing in/beyond disability studies.

In a climate of scarcity and uncertainty, how might one respond to hyper-normative demands for productivity? What does it mean to write (and publish) as a disabled scholar? What does it mean to compose while crip/mad/sick—especially when our embodied knowledges are deemed antithetical to (academic) life?

Meet the Panelists

William Cheng, Chair and Professor, Department of Music, Dartmouth College

William Cheng is a writer, pianist, and gamer. He is a professor of music at Dartmouth College and a founding coeditor of the Music & Social Justice Series with the University of Michigan Press. He is the author of Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination (Oxford, 2014), Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good (Michigan, 2016), and Loving Music Till It Hurts (Oxford, 2019). His op-eds and features have appeared in Washington Post, Slate, TIME, Huffington Post, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Pacific Standard.

ALT text for photo: smiling man with short dark hair, white button-up shirt with rolled-up sleeves, hands resting on knees with fingers interlaced.

Sunaura Taylor, Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley

Sunaura Taylor is an artist and writer. She is the author of Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (The New Press, 2017), which received the 2018 American Book Award. She works at the intersection of disability studies, environmental justice, multispecies studies, and art practice. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. Her latest book is Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert (University of California Press, 2024).

ALT Text for photo: A photograph of Sunaura Taylor, a white woman with short brown hair, smiling and looking into the camera. Behind her is a large black-and-white photograph mounted on a wall, with a dark background upon which many white lines flare out.