Alison Kafer (AK): Ruth Bartlett and I have never met in person, and we weren’t familiar with each other’s work before beginning this chapter. But in 2016, the editors asked if we would be willing to try something different for this anthology. What if, they suggested, its concluding chapter featured a “dialogue between a scholar whose work focuses on disability and a scholar whose work focuses on aging”? How might this exchange “make visible the negotiations involved in analyzing the aging/disability nexus from multiple perspectives,” including both “their differences and overlaps”? We were both excited about the possibility of learning alongside the editors and each other, and in the summer of 2017 we began passing thoughts over email and Skype. As a way of marking the process of the essay (and staying true to the invitation), we have presented it as a dialogue, with each of us expressing her own thoughts. Although we did rearrange and reassemble those thoughts to create the sense of a narrative, we also preserved some of the gaps in our exchange—apparent here in diverging trains of thought or quick transitions—as a way of acknowledging that nexuses are often achieved alongside other, missed connections. How might we continue thinking together, even as we sometimes think apart? Questions of process are deeply connected to those of content, and we felt strongly about the importance of foregrounding both.

Bartlett, R., & Kafer, A. (2020). Thinking into aging-disability nexuses: A dialogue between two scholars. In K. Aubrecht, C. Kelly, & C. Rice (Eds.), The aging-disability nexus (pp. 251–267). UBC Press.