In the Fall of 2019, Legacies of the Enlightenment had the honor of joining up with the newly-formed HIVES Research Workshop and Speaker Series to bring disabled poet, performer, and scholar Petra Kuppers to MSU to read from her book of science fiction short stories Ice Bar and her (then) yet-to-be-published book of poetry, Gut Botany.
Since then, Legacies of the Enlightenment has been glad to support the efforts of HIVES as they have continued their work to interrogate the overlaps and frictions of disability studies and animal studies in popular culture. To that end, we are glad to feature them as the first of, we hope, many new trends in research on our website.
The HIVES Research Workshop and Speaker series is an organization that operates out of Michigan State University’s English department and is headed by co-founders Michael and Jessica Stokes. Together, these two graduate students have hosted events featuring nationally and internationally recognized disability studies scholars, poets, and activists. They have created and hosted multiple workshops for graduate students on accessible pedagogy (including “Accessibility in Online Teaching” and “Antiracist Pedagogy is Accessible Pedagogy”). They have recently been awarded the Excellence in Diversity Award for “Emerging Progress.”
Michael Stokes is a second year PhD student in the English department and currently serves on the Association of English Students (AEGS) Executive Committee, the Council of Graduate Students, the Accommodating Technology Committee, and the Graduate Welfare Committee. His work on these committees has been to ensure that disabled graduate students in every college of MSU have access to health, wellness, and their classes in this time of remote teaching. Michael’s academic research interrogates the ways in which disability is fundamentally encoded into science fiction as a genre, teasing apart the ways that disability became one of many literary tools for pulp science fiction writers, early science fiction novelists, and science fiction film creators.
Jessica Stokes is a third year PhD student in the English department. In addition to her work with Kate Sonka in Educational Technology, Jessica has consulted with multiple campus organizations about access and inclusion. In the 2019-20 academic year, Jessica was a graduate student consultant on both the Integrated Arts and Humanities Equity and Inclusion Task Force and the Michigan State University Writing Center Accessibility Working Group. Jessica was also awarded the Varg-Sullivan award in the arts for her installation “Mirrors Shall Be Mounted with the Bottom Edge of the Reflecting Surface No Higher than 40 Inches,” which highlighted accessibility concerns around MSU’s campus. Jessica’s work addresses Eco/poetics of Pacific Ocean Worlds and the ways in which critical disability, bio/geopolitics, and decolonial feminism are at work in contemporary poetics.
HIVES is an ongoing scholarly, artistic, and communal organization dedicated to developing an understanding of the ways in which matter and beings function in interdependent networks. This research workshop seeks to create a generative space for conversations at the intersections of disability studies and animal studies in popular culture. In his book Brilliant Imperfection, Eli Clare emphasizes how “White Western culture goes to extraordinary lengths to deny the vital relationships between water and stone, plant and animal, human and nonhuman, as well as the utter reliance of human upon human” (Clare 136). Clare offers the disability studies notion of interdependence as a way to undo fantastical narratives of independence and the individual. HIVES is an engagement with hiveminds, relationality, and interdependence across and within animal/human divides. This research workshop draws on popular culture in the form of novels, films, and video games and theory from disability studies to critical race theory to queer studies to animal studies in order to think through disrupting white western denials of interdependence. We are guided by the questions: what are the potentials and pitfalls of the overlap between disability and animal studies? What forms of inter-reliance arise from lived disabled existence and/or representations of disabled characters in popular culture? What does (and does not) separate animals and humans? What frictions exist in turning to animal studies to find alternate conceptions of relational being?