We Can't Wait

How disabled people and those around them create inhabitable worlds in an ableist presentIn the rush to build a better tomorrow, disability rights advocates often focus their energies on planning for a more inclusive future while critiquing today's inaccessible society. In We Can't Wait, Michele Ilana Friedner instead offers a new lens on the current daily acts of worldmaking performed by disabled people, their kin, and nondisabled allies, attending to the joys and complexities that arise within these spaces.Examining three educational sites in India—a foundation-run school for intellectually disabled children, the complex relationship between a college's sign language interpreter and the students she works with, and abundant disabled student activism at a university—Friedner's vivid ethnographic analysis bears witness to the physical, cognitive, and emotional labor with which disabled people and their social circles build inhabitable worlds as they are made to wait for an accessible feature that may never arrive. This practice of antiabandonment distributes agency throughout these communities and stretches social worlds in crucial ways.Drawing from Alice Wong's proclamation that disabled people are oracles of our collective futures, We Can't Wait uplifts affirming approaches to today's world in which no one is left behind and disabled ways of being can thrive—a care that is needed now, without delay.Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.