Out of breath! All the ‘time’: a cri(p)oetic exploration of ‘undefined’ dis/ability in the ableist world/academia

This paper confronts a dual failure in management and organization studies, which includes the inability of typical academic prose to articulate ‘undefined’ experiences of disability and the systemic silencing of racial-colonial debilitation. Through autobiographical cri(p)oetry, I explore the uneasiness of my partial hearing impairment while witnessing ongoing mass debilitation of faraway ‘others’. I develop cri(p)oetry as a crippled, critical, and creative method, weaving Southern poetic forms (mushaira) with feminist hysteric and collage writing. This exploration unfolds through five cri(p)oems that trace a journey from the internal borderlands of a body that escapes categorization, through the ableist frenzy of academia, to the violent, mass production of dis/ability. By knitting Lal Ded’s ontology of ‘generative nothingness’ to Puar’s critique of debilitation, this inquiry works towards an epistemic undoing as a practice of making something of the ‘undefined’, and a call to breathe in the borderlands of solidarity.