Care at the End of the World, Book Talk by Dr. Jina Kim, Thurs 2/26

Announcement flyer for a talk by Jina B. Kim on infrastructure in Crip-of-Color writing.

The Nest Collab: A Disability Justice and Chronic Illness Project, supported by the Mellon Foundation, invites you to join us for:

Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing

In this talk, Jina B. Kim will discuss her new book, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke UP 2025). Care at the End of the World demonstrates why we need radical disability politics and aesthetics for navigating contemporary crises of care. It brings a disability lens to bear on feminist, queer, and crip-of-color writing following major US welfare reform, which passed in 1996.

Looking to authors such as Octavia Butler, Jesmyn Ward, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Aurora Levins Morales, Kim examines how this body of literature grapples with the disabling effects of state austerity measures and interrupts dominant narratives about who deserves care. She calls forward the critiques and possibilities in their literary representations of infrastructure, honoring the imaginative work that these writers do to envision alternative infrastructural arrangements in a world that refuses to support them.   

JINA B. KIM is a scholar of feminist disability studies and queer of color critique. She is an associate professor of English and the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Smith College. Jina's work has appeared in Signs, Social Text, GLQ, American Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Disability Studies Quarterly, and The Asian American Literary Review.

4:00PM | Thursday, Feb. 26, 2026 | Hart Hall 3201 | Flyer

Access notes:

  • ASL & CART (live captioning) provided
  • Please mask (masks will be provided)
  • Please refrain from wearing strong fragrances in order to be respectful of those with allergies and environmental sensitivities
  • For more access info: tinyurl.com/CareAtTheEnd

Questions? Email Julia Havard

Co-sponsors:

The Nest Collab: A Disability Justice and Chronic Illness Project
Supported by the Mellon Foundation

Davis Humanities Institute

UCLA's "Deep Medicine and Care for Anomalous, Chronically Ill, and Disabled Body-Minds" project, part of the multi-campus UC grant, "Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice."

Department of American Studies

Department of Asian American Studies

Department of English

Graduate Group in Cultural Studies