Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, English

In this dissertation, I provide a reconstruction and analysis of the Anglo-Saxon conceptions of impairment and disability, as they are preserved within the textual record of the period. I develop the Old English lexeme unhælu as the most appropriate term for these conceptions, as it reflects the holism that is central to the Anglo-Saxon understanding of health and ability. Unhælu is a large and fluid category, which covers physical impairment, illness, and injury, and which takes into consideration their impact on both the body's functionality and appearance. Importantly, it does not seem to cover mental health impairments and other similar conditions. It may perhaps be best understood in terms of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's notion of the “extraordinary body,” which brings together various kinds of corporeal otherness, such as impairment, deformity, monstrosity, and mutilation. Consequently, this dissertation focuses on defining the polysemous concept of unhælu, determining how the Anglo-Saxons perceived the concept, and discovering how these beliefs impacted the lives of unhal people. To achieve these aims, I employ rigorous textual and linguistic analysis, and adapt the insights of present-day disability theory to an early medieval context. In the opening chapters, I begin by establishing the linguistic and educational foundations of the Anglo-Saxon conception of unhælu. Chapter One examines the Old English lexicon that reveals how they spoke and thought about impairment, while Chapter Two considers the school-room texts that would have served as the contemporary equivalent of their disability theory. In the following chapters, I discuss what the Anglo-Saxons' various responses to unhælu reveal about their perception of the state. Chapter Three uses the medical texts to provide a detailed reconstruction of unhælu, as suggested by the leeches' remedies and their understanding of etiology. Chapter Four builds on this foundation by employing the law-codes to further (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2020, Sociology

Women who experience disability in Bolivia have been largely ignored within the Disability studies and feminist scholarship. The daily situations that these women face are not documented, which contributes to their oppression, invisibility and lack of public policies that address their issues. This thesis presents global south experiences of disabled Bolivian women and describes how their active involvement as disability activists shape their identity, their social and political engagement and how they navigate social institutions. Using a series of questions framed by past disability activism scholarship, the global disability agenda of the United Nation Convention on the Rights of Persons with disabilities, and previous scholar activism in the field of disability, data was gathered, explored, analyzed through transnational feminist and global south disability studies perspectives. The aim is to identify how disabled activist women's experiences in Bolivia may be different from the existing literature on disability, explore their activism and political agenda as examples of a new transnational feminist studies approach to disability, and propose a new theoretical understanding of disability by focusing on the unique social, cultural and political environment of Bolivia. The sources of information for the thesis include unstructured interviews and official Bolivian Government documents. This study is important for developing policies and practices that attend to the needs of disabled women in Bolivia.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, English

Using grounded methods and deploying a critical disability studies framework, this dissertation assesses how people who identify or are identified as having intellectual/developmental disabilities (I/DD) use their rhetorical skills—specifically, their self-advocacy skills—to access academic life. Through interviews and observations of rhetors affiliated with an innovative inclusive education program pseudonymously titled “STEP” (“Successful Transitions and Educational Progress”), I offer a practice account of I/DD's relation to rhetoricity, or rhetorical capacity, in academic spaces. Contra to officialized discourses that portray self-advocacy as the responsibility of individual rhetors, I attend to self-advocacy's social and rhetorical dimensions across three “sites”: student self-advocacy practices, assessment technologies used to measure student self-determination, and the self-advocacy practices of professional self-advocates. After a methodological commentary on the need for qualitative researchers in rhetoric and writing studies to attend to accessibility as a practical and theoretical concern, I conclude by reflecting on the implications of my findings for rhetorical education writ large: specifically, for how teachers conceive of the relationship between collaboration and credibility in their classrooms.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Although self-determination theory has been used in studies pertaining to students with disabilities (SWD) in high school STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) very little self-determination research has focused on SWD in college STEM programs. Additionally, there is a paucity of research that examines how self-advocacy, one component of self-determination theory, is operationalized from the perspectives of STEM SWD themselves. Further, no research exists to date linking self-advocacy to stigma management, a critical concept for understanding SWD's and other underrepresented groups' navigation of educational environments. The dissertation examines how self-advocacy and stigma management are related to better explain pursuit of college STEM programs and degrees by students with nonvisible disabilities (SWND), the largest group of SWD (Newman et al., 2011). I explore the experiences of SWND majoring in STEM fields at The Ohio State University (Ohio State), using a mixed-method approach utilizing both quantitative and qualitative approaches to examine student factors and learning environment conditions that enhance and/or thwart SWND's learning and persistence. Over the course of the 2016-2017 academic year, I disseminated surveys, conducted in-depth interviews, and facilitated focus groups with twenty SWND to understand their experiences at Ohio State. The results of this research demonstrate a significant connection between stigma management and self-advocacy enactments among participants, which is then more thoroughly explored at the level of theory. This dissertation utilizes intersectionality and standpoint theories as lenses to interpret the data gathered through the quantitative and qualitative methods to explore reports of self-advocacy and stigma management. Foregrounding the experiences of SWND in STEM contributes to an understanding of how self-advocacy can be approached from a critical feminist disability studies perspective that is inform (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2017, English

This work outlines the case for destigmatizing madness, especially within the academy. The censoring of the mad that occurs in present-day United States society is a social justice issue that must be remedied. The supposed origin of this censoring is explored through rhetorical texts both antique and contemporary, and an argument is made that the way forward is through expression of madness in scholarship and pedagogy. Power structures that will resist such a move are outlined, and a case is made for the use of deliberate rhetorical positioning to provide “cover” for those who wish to express their madness in their publications. As evidence, an “OCD analysis” is outlined and then performed on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that serves as the primary diagnostic tool of the American Psychiatric Association. The analysis argues that this work is in and of itself an assertion of social power, and reveals several places where the work is vulnerable to criticism, despite attempts to position it as unassailable authority. Finally, the results of a study are discussed; the study consisted of interviews with 11 self-identified mad scholars, seeking to determine how they function within the boundaries of academic life and what might be changed to further their participation. In the end, a call for solidarity with neurotypical scholars is issued for the improvement of all.

Master of Liberal Studies, University of Toledo, 2015, College of Languages, Literature, and Social Sciences

“All Made-Up: The Hyperfeminization of Fat Women” analyzes the way some fat women conform to cultural ideals regarding femininity with the goal of having fatness included within that ideal. Fat phobia is used by the dominant culture to oppress women and keep them `in-line' with the heternormative, white, cultural ideals of beauty in the United States. “All Made-Up” argues that fatness is socially constructed via medicalization, political rhetoric, and mother blame. It argues that hyperfeminization is an important form of fat activism, but one that is narrow in its ability to change cultural ideals. Hyperfeminization reinforces cultural ideals regarding femininity and excludes a vast group of women in the process.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2009, Art Education

This dissertation critically examines mental illness discourses through the intersecting disciplinary lenses of art education and disability studies. Research from multiple disciplines is compared and theorized to uncover the ways in which discourses, or language systems, have oppressively constructed and represented “mental illness.” To establish interdisciplinary common ground, art education research on disability and disability studies research on art practices are reviewed and juxtaposed. Building on these reviews, art education and disability studies discourses are critically examined and elaborated to advance anti-oppressive scholarship on mental illness. In particular, I examine art education's adoption of special education language, and I explore the limited employment of art practices within disability studies. As an interdisciplinary example, I write about my experience of mental illness and some of the art processes I have used to make sense of mental illness as both a stigmatizing label and as a matter of complex embodiment. My research shows that oppressive, ableist discourses persist in such diverse forms as popular visual culture and special education legislation, while art education and disability studies are generally invested in challenging oppression. Such discourses reinforce stigma by misrepresenting mental illness and by excluding first-hand perspectives of people who experience mental illness and subsequent stigma. Disability studies scholars have used performance and writing to critically express self-revealing, self-disclosing, and therefore educative discourses. Other than performance and literature, however, there are few scholarly examples of using contemporary art practices to critically engage mental illness and other disabilities. As research, guided by my own embodied knowledge, I construct an example of how art education and disability studies practices can be integrated to construct critical disability discourses that challenge sti (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

My dissertation aims to discuss how Hong Kong literature, including speculative fiction, science fiction, and zines, in English or translated into English, might help us to open new avenues of transformation by working through the past and imagining alternative futures. Referencing scholars and activists in queer, transformative, and disability justice, Postcolonial Studies, and Hong Kong Studies, my dissertation adds new materials from the Hong Kong context to enrich the discussions of affect that have hitherto mostly focused on Western societies. It also employs affect as a heuristic device to re-examine the rampant neoliberalizing process and its dire consequences. Diverse and divergent as the materials for analysis are, they are all organized around an investigation into the collusional connection between the biopolitical regulation of populations and the manipulation of affective potentials that upholds and sustains the transnational neoliberal system. While foregrounding key concepts of decoloniality and affect from a range of interdisciplinary approaches, my project probes deeply into the question of what imaginations are intentionally denied, foreclosing possibilities of hope and change. The central questions that my study intends to answer are: How can literature and other cultural products created by Hong Kong writers and artists construct the foundation of a liberating aesthetic that reflects a capacity to imagine alternative worlds? And what are the conditions in which new forms of livability, sociality, and futurity can emerge, survive, and flourish? My project seeks to contribute to anticolonial traditions and decolonial thought. While grounded in literary and textual analysis, my research thinks with people's everyday practices under conditions of political and economic duress in imaginative and hopeful ways. Modelling the cross-disciplinary, cross-border work required for this moment and drawing from the rigorous and well-establ (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, English

This project explores the mental health experiences of graduate students enrolled in humanities programs in the United States. To this research focus, I apply first the lens of material rhetorical theory, a field of study that seeks to understand connections between and amongst environments, humans, non-human animals, discourses, and objects. Doing so enables an articulation of the various elements with which graduate students come into contact during their study, as well as the influence those elements exert upon students' success and wellbeing. Of primary interest are neoliberal, capitalist ideologies undergirding the functioning of the university institution and promoting unhealthy productivity standards. Then, I discuss the concept of capacity, explored through readings in disability studies, human rights discourses, and legal studies. I do so to offer and examination of what is at stake when graduate students work too much for too little pay, and often subsequently experience a decreased ability to focus on what excites them about their research or take the time to care for themselves. The next half of this project addresses the qualitative research undertaken, in which I distributed a survey to humanities graduate students across the country and then conducted semi-focused interviews with three survey respondents. In addition to methods used, I present findings from the gathered data, diving deep into a discussion of barriers to access and mental thriving students identified themselves as facing as a result of their enrollment during COVID-19. I then emphasize the human relationships, rooted in care and mutual support, that sustained these students. Finally, I present the affordances gained through sustained communion with others, particularly as they apply to students' intellectual, emotional, and physical capacity to accomplish their goals while enrolled in their given programs. This communion is the ultimate intervention made through this work—an asserta (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Germanic Languages and Literatures

Defining the word human may seem like a simple task. The cultural history of the word human is anything but simple, however. “Human” is not simply an alternate word for an individual of the species Homo sapiens. Rather, the word human, like the word animal, has been applied, culturally and historically, to different extents to individuals of the species Homo sapiens depending on factors like race, gender, ethnicity, disability, social class, and bodily conformity. In the West, human has been used to signify a masculine, able-bodied ideal that is set apart from all other animals (including many Homo sapiens) to the detriment of both human and nonhuman animals. Unpacking the cultural meanings of the word human is essential if we are to understand the ways it has been used to sort and oppress humans and animals alike. In this project, I examine what it means to be human in contemporary German literature and how the cultural meanings of “human” and “nonhuman” are tied up with gendered cultural notions of ability and disability. I analyze three novels: Die Mansarde by Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer published in 1969, Der Mensch erscheint im Holozan by Swiss author Max Frisch published in 1979, and Etuden im Schnee by Japanese-German author Yoko Tawada in 2014. In my analysis of Die Mansarde, I elucidate the ways that human status and belonging for a woman in the mid-twentieth Century in Austria are inevitably tied up with her ability to listen, empathize, and serve. My analysis of Der Mensch erscheint im Holozan highlights the harmful effects of a Western masculine able-bodied human norm for an elderly man with dementia and draws attention to the agency and abilities of other living and nonliving beings within the story. And finally, my analysis of Etuden im Schnee demonstrates the fluid and culturally determined nature of the category of human by focusing on EIS's supplantation of the traditional human subject with three, active, differently abled polar bears in n (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, English

This dissertation investigates the writing practices of disability service transcribers, professional speech-to-text writers who translate sound into written text as a form of communication access. Scholars across the fields of disability studies, digital media studies, and communication studies have documented transcription as a complex rhetorical practice; however, the strategies speech-to-text writers use when composing in real-time environments, and the composing methodologies and technologies that underlie them, remain severely understudied. This lack of knowledge is significant because it constrains advocacy for disabled people and their allies in naming and understanding specific forms of real-time transcription that best increase access to spaces that depend upon sound to convey meaning. This lack also puts educators and their institutions at a disadvantage when working to make classrooms more accessible for disabled students, faculty, and staff. I intervene by applying a disability-studies lens to original composition-based research to ask: “How do different speech-to-text writers write, and why do they write the way they do?” To answer this question, this study is divided into two phases of qualitative and quantitative data collection: (1) a survey of speech-to-text writers working at a large, Midwestern university; and (2) a comparative survey of English-speaking speech-to-text writers across the United States and Canada. Collected qualitative data are coded and analyzed following Adele Clarke's (2005) methods for situational analysis, and qualitative data are analyzed following Cindy Johanek's (2000) adapted methodological model for mixed-methods research, also known as the “contextualist research paradigm” (p. 27). This study's most important findings reveal several major methodologies of transcription are currently in practice among professionals, and their differences tend to be hotly contested. Data show a speech-to-text writer's chosen method (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2017, Popular Culture

During the over fifty-year history of The X-Men comic books and the numerous stories told within the various series, the mutants have been intentionally written as metaphors for how ethnic, racial, sexual, religious, and cultural minorities are treated in the United States. During that same time, the writers also unintentionally mirror deaf individuals and Deaf Culture in their portrayal of mutants and X-Men. Considering the vast number of stories in existence, I focus on the early works of Stan Lee, Grant Morrison's time as author of New X-Men, Joss Whedon's time as author of Astonishing X-Men, and Matt Fraction's time as author of Uncanny X-Men. In this thesis, I perform a close reading of these four authors' works and compare them to the history of the deaf and Deaf in America. In this close reading, I found three recurring themes within The X-Men comics that paralleled Deaf Culture: Geography, Colonization, and Culture. Both groups' origins lie in the residential schools that were founded to provide a supportive educational environment. From this environment, a culture developed and spread as students graduated. These same schools and cultures came under similar attacks from the dominant culture. They survived the attacks and have grown stronger since. Throughout, I use theorists such as Gramsci and Althusser alongside Deaf Studies scholars such as Lennard Davis and Douglas Baynton to analyze these themes, parallels, and events. These parallels potentially allow readers to be more accepting and understanding of Deaf Culture because they introduce Deaf Culture to the reader in the familiar setting of the superhero comic narrative.

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2016, Sociology

Previous social science research on profound short stature has primarily centered studies on Achondroplasia – with limited attention being given to other conditions which result in profound short stature such as Osteogenesis Imperfecta, Growth Hormone Deficiency, and other conditions which may be placed under the generic label “Failure to Thrive.” This thesis is the first attempt to engage in an interdisciplinary analysis of new diagnostic conditions associated with profound short stature. Employing a grounded theory approach, this study draws from multiple sources of data, including insider research; and seeks to answer the primary research question: what can parents of children with profound short stature teach us about their children's experiences in the post-genomic era? Results of this study include the complicated, ongoing process of diagnosing, the infantilization, dehumanization and violence experienced by children with profound short stature, barriers in education and their psychosocial effects, and the diversity of identities adopted by parents in describing their children. In conclusion, recognizing the variety of diagnoses which underlies the community of children with profound short stature is a key step in developing a more holistic perspective that integrates interconnected social, psychological, ethical, medical, disability and embodied issues.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2011, English

My dissertation examines the ways in which composition pedagogies have, both in theory and in practice, systematically worked to exclude individuals with disabilities. Persisting in composition studies is the ideological belief that traditional writing and intelligence are somehow inherently linked, that traditional literacy is central to defining one's intellectual worth. This privileging of composing as print-based, I contend, masks the notion that writing is simply one among many systems of making and conveying meaning, that among our readers are those who cannot always access the messages delivered within print-based texts. I argue that disability studies can enable us to reconceive the rhetorical triangle and what it means to compose. Disability studies allows us to perceive the ways in which traditional writing—and composition studies' investment in traditional writing—normalizes and has been normalized by our understanding of “the” rhetorical triangle. But disability studies also allows us to regard the ways in which multimodal composing normalizes and has been normalized by our understanding of “the” rhetorical triangle. In order to create the inclusive, radically welcoming pedagogy that so many teacher-scholars strive for, I suggest that we disable composition studies—what we think we know about composers, composing, and composition(s). Disabling Composition presents three case studies in which we can re/vision this disabling move. In the first case study, I interrogate new media conceptions of synaesthesia, which, in current scholarly literature, has become synonymous with multimodal composing and has been separated from its original, pathological position as a sensory impairment. This configuration of synaesthesia as a non-severe, non-pathological heuristic, I argue, embodies what I term the “rhetoric of shininess”—a concept that sounds wonderfully robust and inclusive in theory, but is often empty and exclusionary in practice. In the second case study, (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2003, English

My dissertation argues that Disabled people have a culture and that “disability” is a cultural experience. Scholars in the emerging field of Disability Studies have made the distinction between the “medical model” of disability that focuses on bodily materiality/impairment and a “social constructionist model” where identity is culturally constructed. One place where these two models converge is at the point of cure. This is where I enter, as I argue that cure is a socially constructed concept. Though my recurring theme in this dissertation revolves around the concept of cure, I have chosen frameworks that critique disability and the construction of cure from a position of marginality, i.e. the construction of disability as both a minority group and a minority discourse. I investigate the concept of cure in some prominent sites where theories of science and culture and their impact on disability are examined — in twentieth-century fiction, film, memoir, and performance. I argue that cure is a scientific construction applied to medical impairment, but that disability is a cultural experience and a potential identity, independent of cure. My argument that medical cure is a specific construction applied to disabled bodies and identities has implications for other fields besides disability — fields that I draw upon: medicine, sociology, and queer studies — in the ways that both disability and medical cure are configured. Theorizing cure as a cultural concept in literature and film changes our understanding of disabled bodies and thus of how we read and view them. By looking at disability from a constructionist viewpoint, I hope that we understand not only the way(s) that disability is positioned in relation to a dominant discourse of medical cure, but also the constructedness of medical cure itself.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2010, American Culture Studies/Ethnic Studies

This dissertation explores representations of Asperger's syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. Specifically, it textually analyzes cultural representations with the goal of identifying specific narratives that have become dominant in the public sphere. Beginning in 2001, with Wired magazine's article by Steve Silberman entitled “The Geek Syndrome” as the starting point, this dissertation demonstrates how certain values have been linked to Asperger's syndrome: namely the association between this disorder and hyper-intelligent, socially awkward personas. Narratives about Asperger's have taken to medicalizing not only genius (as figures such as Newton and Einstein receive speculative posthumous diagnoses) but also to medicalizing a particular brand of new economy, information-age genius. The types of individuals often suggested as representative Asperger's subjects can be stereotyped as the casual term “geek syndrome” suggests: technologically savvy, successful “nerds.” On the surface, increased public awareness of Asperger's syndrome combined with the representation has created positive momentum for acceptance of high functioning autism. In a cultural moment that suggests “geek chic,” Asperger's syndrome has undergone a critical shift in value that seems unimaginable even 10 years ago. This shift has worked to undo some of the stigma attached to this specific form of autism. The proto-typical Aspergian persona represented dominantly in the media is often both intelligent and successful. At the same time, these personas are also so often masculine, middle/upper class and white. These representations are problematic in the way that they uphold traditional normativity in terms of gender, race and class, as well as reifying stigma toward other points on the autistic spectrum.

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2024, English

This thesis aims to reexamine the works of Virginia Woolf and other Stephen family members through the lens of the supercrip concept first coined by crip theorists such as Alison Kafer and Eli Clare. Woolf has often been framed as a resourceful writer who converted the symptoms of her mental illness into sources of creative inspiration for her work. However, her life was also plagued by self-imposed, constant pressures to read and write in the face of the difficulties brought on by her symptoms. Letters between her father Leslie Stephen and Charles Darwin suggest that Leslie may have seen his literary talent as a way to justify his own disabled existence as a cyclothymic. This thesis traces how Leslie's supercrip-infused, evolutionary ideology was transmitted into three of his disabled descendants: his first daughter Laura, his nephew Jem, and his third daughter Virginia. All three of these Stephen family members were subjected to lofty expectations for their reading and writing ability. By exploring the lives of Leslie, Jem, Laura, and Virginia, it is possible to observe the damaging effects of Darwinian theories on Victorian people with disabilities and see how the supercrip stereotype informs Woolf's contributions to literary modernism.

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2024, Educational Leadership

In this self-study, I propose a curriculum fragment methodology to work toward a greater understanding of the boundaries (Herdandez-Saca et al., 2023) between special education and disability studies that strengthens both teacher education and disability studies in education (DSE). Specifically, I engage in critical reflection on my teaching practices (Freire, 1998) to explore the possibilities for an educator working in the field of special education with a DSE disposition to engage boundary work as a teacher educator in the tensions between special education and disability studies. In this study, I use curriculum fragments (Poetter & Googins, 2015) to frame a methodology as supported by the curriculum studies traditions of currere (Pinar, 1975), Teacher Lore (Schubert, 1989), and narrative points-of-entry (Schultz et al., 2010). My aim is to excavate my experiences as an educator and professional working with disabled students and adults labeled with multiple and intellectual disabilities and my current experiences as a teacher educator by leveraging curriculum fragments that flow freely through Pinar's (1975) four stages of currere and Martin Heidegger's hermeneutic circle (2008) to facilitate my journey for a narrative. The culmination of this curriculum fragment methodology leads to reimagined possibilities in the boundaries that ultimately culminate with Pinar's (1975) synthetical stage presented in curriculum fragments that interlace the past, present, and future to enhance my teaching practices.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

Classroom-based simulations act as both reflections and deflections of reality. Nonetheless, their purpose is to enculturate students into a professional community through an experiential learning activity that asks students to adopt the mindset, mannerisms, and expertise of a professional. As such, students are molded into professionals through these experiences, and once they enter the workplace, they take part in shaping it, helping to subsequently craft the reality mirrored in future simulations. In other words, simulations create a feedback loop between the simulation and reality, each always shaping and reflecting a version of each other. Because of this, instructors and researchers need to take seriously not only the pedagogical implications of simulations, but also the sociopolitical. Guided by the methodological approach of abductive analysis (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014), this dissertation, through a mixed-methods case study of the pseudonymous Simulation for Raising Interprofessional Aptitude (STRIA) Program, examines how interprofessional healthcare students—social work students, in particular—are trained, through simulation, to provide patient-centered care in a simulated hospital setting. Specifically, building upon rhetorical theory, technical and professional communication, and critical disability studies, this study asks: How do interprofessional healthcare students work across divisions (in knowledge, experience, and language), together and with patients, to enact patient-centered care? How can rhetorical theory be put into practice to help interprofessional healthcare students prepare for working in unpredictable environments? How might pre-professional healthcare training, specifically simulation-based learning, respond to humanistic critiques about the efficacy and ethics of simulations? And what can rhetoricians learn from conducting in-situ research in complex workplace simulations? Key findings from this project offer rhetoric resea (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, English

Afrophantasm is both a rhetorical framework and a lens considering how the invisibility of black disability can be used and understood in both positive and/or negative ways. As a reconsideration of W.E.B. Du Bois's seminal idea of double conscious “two-ness” in The Souls of Black Folk, Afrophantasm instead represents a “threeness” by positioning a person's self-state in a trifecta of Blackness, American status, and embodiment through the lens of ability. Further, it theorizes how an environment can produce or amplify a black disabled spectral state created through stigma and ignorance, either by erasing the acknowledgment of this multi-marginalization or refocusing it to leverage its perceived disadvantages into a state of empowerment or self-recognition. By considering the idea of the rhetorical in relation to this theory, its application is expanded through a variety of examples, including cultural rhetoric (via nommo or West African oral stylistic practice), visual rhetoric (and the question of photographic disabled representations), as well as in embodied rhetoric (through the interrogation of black genetics or cybernetics), to name a few. When he coined Afrofuturism in 1993, Mark Dery wrote that "African Americans…inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies" (181). Through a complex nexus of art, music, literature, and more, the genre exists as a universe progressively centered on black lives and experiences juxtaposed against a world built to erase them. Yet, when it comes to the subaltern realm of Blackness and disability woven together, those most in need of a reprieve are instead assaulted with a litany of new shiny digital tools of discrimination, as the famed “digital divide” (highlighting an assumed lesser black digital literacy vs. white internet competence) turns corporeal (open full item for complete abstract)