Disability Worlds / Disability Futures

Abstract

This chapter addresses accessible futures for the ever-expanding disability demographic and its social and political importance. Demographers helped the authors understand the epistemology of numbers governing efforts to track the always unstable category of disability. Their measurements inform the emergence of disabled people as the largest minority in America with rights to resources. The authors track the disability vote and the emergence in 2016 of activist groups, mobilized to make disability count in electoral and presidential campaigns. Finally, they returned to families who initially helped them understand how they were reshaping daily life and kinship imaginaries with their disabled children, now adults, many living at home as their support systems collapsed during COVID-19. The chapter considers how meaningful disability futures are both enhanced and challenged in public domains as well as intimate circles of crip kinship, including the authors' own.