Conference Program

Within the emerging debates in Critical Disability Studies, crip activism can be understood as a space for the production of pedagogical practices and strategies of resistance capable of interrogating the ableist logics that permeate educational and social spaces. In contexts characterized by the strengthening of neoliberal and cisheteropatriarchal norms, disabled bodies and minds are frequently subjected to regulatory mechanisms that determine who can participate, under which temporal regimes, and according to which capacities (Russell, 2019). In this scenario, crip activism develops collective practices that make these normative regimes visible and produce alternative forms of social organization and knowledge production (Kafai, 2021).

This paper situates itself at the intersection of Critical Disability Studies, Crip Theory (McRuer, 2006), and Disability Justice (Sins Invalid, 2016), placing these perspectives in dialogue with critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994; Giroux, 2011). Within this framework, crip activism is interpreted not only as a sociopolitical practice but also as a pedagogical space in which activist and educational strategies of resistance are developed for the broader community, disabled and non-disabled alike.

On the one hand, crip communities develop practices of collective care, mutual support, and coping with minority stress that challenge the material and symbolic effects of ableism and other systems of normative oppression. On the other hand, these practices generate processes of self-education and shared knowledge production that configure activism as a site of collective learning oriented toward care and social justice (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018).

Through the analysis of these practices, this paper argues that crip activism, grounded in cripistemology (McRuer & Johnson, 2014) and in the collective production of knowledge, can be interpreted as a form of critical pedagogy capable of fostering agency, interdependence, the political imagination of desirable futures (Kafer, 2013), and the democratic transformation of educational spaces. This reflection aims to contribute to the development of the field of crip studies (Centrone, 2025; McRuer, 2006), particularly to its articulation as a pedagogy of resistance. From this perspective, the analysis of crip activist practices makes it possible to explore how crip studies may offer theoretical and methodological tools for rethinking education as a relational and interdependent practice oriented toward social justice.