The Department of American Studies will host as series of research presentations by a faculty member, recent Department Ph.D., or American Studies graduate students. As experts and emerging scholars in fields devoted to the study of American culture in the U.S. and globally, we invite students and scholars, at any stage of research, to attend and participate in discussions of the core issues and challenges of our time.

Doing “Access Frictions”: Mad Ecologies and the Public Humanities

Emerson Cram, PhD
Associate Professor, Departments of Communication, Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies, University of Iowa

Mad Ecologies is a public humanities podcast and book project that retells the story of Iowa’s Johnson County Historic Poor Farm (JCHPF) and the networks of medicine, social welfare, and state institutions that shaped its lifespan and memory. This talk primarily reflects on scholarly podcasting as a mode of public criticism. A relatively under theorized medium for the public humanities, podcasting’s affordances make it ideal for holding rather than negating the frictions of a given political community, particularly within contexts of traumatic disability histories. First, I explore some of the foundational assumptions of “access” within public humanities scholarship, alongside some vexing histories of university knowledge production of disability. Then, I consider the value of “access friction” as a storytelling orientation. As a disability cultural practice and site of “knowing-making” (Hamraie, 2017), access friction is a vital practice of generating just relations. As a critical narrative practice guided by a commitment to liberatory access (Mingus, 2017), I argue podcasting’s affordances can preserve moments of friction through practices of critical listening and the archive’s “useable memory.”