Crip digitality: A poetic writing workshop with Cat Chong

Thursday 27 July (5-6pm) | Online

In what ways can scrolling offer a crip method of reorganising time, affective resonance and access? How does the flatness of the screen impact the level of the poetic line?

Even as ecopoetics has flourished within disability arts spaces proposing alternative, ingenious, and unexpected pathways of crip connection between our bodies and the “outside”, complicating binary notions around the distinction between public and private space, and charting more methods of enacting solidarity with the non-human, the outdoors can still remain an inaccessible, hostile, and difficult place for disabled communities to navigate.

As much of disabled life can often take place within digital spaces, in video gatherings, on social media, on Discord servers, this poetry workshop considers crip relations to digital space. Building on the work of CA Conrad, Anne Boyer, and Alison Kafer, this workshop aims to apply an ecological approach to digital space to encounter the world-wide-webscapes that we encounter day to day.

Bio: Cat Chong is poet, publisher, PhD student at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and visiting PhD fellow at the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University where their work considers the intersections between gender, genre, and disability within contemporary illness narratives. They’re a graduate of the Poetic Practice MA at Royal Holloway, co-founder of the Crested Tit Collective, and digital editor at Osmosis Press. Their most recent publications include the pamphlet Plain Air: An Apology in Transit (2021), ‘—I’m writing my way out – and this is a place of refuge—’ a chapter in Not Without Us: Perspectives on Disability and Inclusivity in Singapore (2023), as well as installations such as The Kindness Connection (2022) which was commissioned by Singapore General Hospital. Their debut collection 712 Stanza Homes For The Sun (2023) was published by Broken Sleep Books in April 2023.