Cassandra Evans, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at the City Univesity of New York's School of Professional Studies, will discuss excerpts from dissertation research, specifically the chapter"Occupying Time, Places and Spaces, Peer Work" from Asylum to Community and In Between: Examining the post-Deinstitutionalization Experiences of Individuals with Mental Disabilities in Suffolk County, New York and discuss how this is shaping a new work in progress: Five wives (a novel regarding disability justice and intersectionality).
My current work of fiction (Five wives) is in nascent stages and is being shaped by themes emergent from fieldwork I did for my dissertation. This work is also supported by the CUNY Faculty Fellowship Publication Program under mentor and author Bridgett M. Davis at Baruch College. Years after enthnographic studies I conducted with people on Long Island, New York, most of whom transitioned out of one of four New York State psychiatric asylums in the 70s, 80s and 90s, I am thinking about the lands those spaces inhabited along with lived experiences of indigenous people of the northern California region. I continued to find similar narratives in these two spaces--East and West--as well as shared experiences of settler colonialism, environmental racism, ableism and sanism. Simultaneously, discussions and submissions graduate students in my "Disability and Narratives" class continue to share with me, led me, or more so repositioned me to this project.
Set near Maidu First Nation lands of Northern California and Shinnecock of New York, Five wives is a historical novel illustrating rejection of people with disabilities from the ‘60s through 2000s. Characters’ experience marginalization toward children, indigenous people, and immigrants whose disability, gender, or non-citizenship deem them as “cause for exclusion.” Embodied intersectional biases toward sexual nonconformity, neurodivergence, and disability uncover how justice is skewed by various power systems aimed at silencing or erasing variance (Crenshaw 2016). Brother and sister main characters endure abuse, defective labels, gaslighting, and forced rehabilitation as they reveal universal truths about ableism, institutionalization, and trauma.
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