Crip cultural practices are grounded in the disability justice concept of “crip wisdom,” which has been articulated by members of the performance collective Sins Invalid and animated in their 2016 performance Birthing, Dying, Becoming Crip Wisdom.
Crip wisdom describes the embodied knowledge of disability community and disabled people. It captures all of the ways/things/practices/habits that disabled people know and share as ways of supporting their bodyminds and navigating through ableist systems. As Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha describes, “I see crip wisdom in all the life-giving ways disabled, Deaf, sick and neurodivergent folks mentor each other, giving each other lifesaving wisdom that no doctor’s office will” (as cited in Leibowitz, 2016, para. 2). Patty Berne describes it as “Wisdom is when we know something because it’s in our bones. It’s our experience. Some things you just have to live through to really fucking get it” (as cited in Leibowitz, 2016, para. 3).
Crip wisdom is an important part of making cultural practices crip cultural practices. As Chandler et al. (2023) observe, “Without crip wisdoms and perspectives […] the efficacy of access practices can be compromised, particularly when the focus and investment in access is on making things ‘better for all’ over disrupting normative culture in order to make it more hospitable to disabled people, or create new cultural enclaves altogether” (p. 37).
Explore Further
- READ: Kafai, S. (2016) Creating community: Sins Invalid’s Birthing, Dying, Becoming Crip Wisdom. TheatreForum 50, 11–12.
- READ: Richardson, J.T.E. & Kletchka, D.C. (2022). Museum education for disability justice and liberatory access. Journal of Museum Education 47(2), 138–149.
- WATCH: Sins Invalid YouTube channel
- LISTEN: Crip Times Episode 8: The Shannon Finnegan Episode
