The Nest Collab
A Disability and Chronic Illness Justice Project
The background image is a digital art piece titled “Woven Love,” by Niv, a chronically ill, sometimes fiber artist. It is a photograph, edited to appear pixelated, of overlapping macrame and knit coasters in shades of orange and cream, with strips of white paper braided through to form a nest. The nest rests on a rumpled, dark blue blanket.
Artist statement: “Coasters made by my mom and chosen sister, in anticipation of the endless cups of tea, soup, and herbal concoctions I would need; strips of recipes written by a grandmother and sent to share nourishment from afar; ribbons of medication guides collected by my partner to keep track of side effects and warnings my brain cannot hold; a blanket gifted as a hug. In illness, I am patched together by love. ”
Rooted in the politics of disability justice, this project is a collaboration between Professor Ryan Lee Cartwright’s working group at the University of California Davis and Professor Kalindi Vora’s lab at Yale University. Our goal is to craft spaces where disabled and chronically ill communities can share learning, care, and resources.
We ground ourselves in the wisdom of grassroots movement-building and center disabled expertise and the often invisible labor of curating access. In doing so, we work to support expansive and imaginative forms of inclusion and to create a greater sense of ease and collectivity around access making, while lessening conditions of scarcity. We understand the process of creating collective access to be an art, an act of imagination, and a form of knowledge production, in addition to a form of labor.
The Nest Collab aims to further these goals through co-teaching seminars; facilitating care-centered groups and paid collaborations with disabled and chronically ill activists, scholars, and artists; experimenting with imaginative approaches to accessibility and care; developing research on the labor of access and care; and sharing the resources we’ve assembled through creative means.
We dream of a just and interdependent world, based on collective power, where disabled and chronically ill people thrive.
The Nest Collab is working to:
Facilitate institutional transformation by nurturing a pipeline of disabled & chronically ill students and scholars and growing the field of disability studies through co-taught multi-campus seminars.
Strengthen and build support networks between disabled and chronically ill cultural workers, activists, and scholars across the country through convening “care clusters.” These care clusters are small groups of chronically ill and disabled community members brought together to build relationships, share resources, and support one another’s original community care projects.
Develop research on the labor of crafting access in collaborations between disabled and chronically ill cultural workers, activists, and scholars.
Share findings and resources with disabled and chronically ill communities outside of academic institutions through collaborations, public pedagogy, and symposia.
Experiment with collective access and care by developing pilot projects that explore small-scale ways to build mutual support and creative access.