Film scholar Pooja Rangan will be sharing with us a draft version of a chapter for the upcoming volume she is co-editing, Thinking with an Accent. The chapter is entitled "Becoming Accented, Becoming Disabled." Christian Whitworth (PhD candidate in film and media studies) will be offering a response. Speaking with an accent is routinely framed as a stigmatizing impairment or defect—a “handicap.” What can disability justice teach us about this deficit view of becoming accented? Thinking in tandem with disability scholars and activists, Professor Rangan traces a range of conservative and radical ways of understanding the work that accents do, and imagines coalitional strategies for multiplying minoritarian expertise, refusal, and resistance.

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Pooja Rangan is associate professor of English in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Amherst College, and currently a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellow at New York University. She is the author of Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Duke UP 2017), and her current projects revolve around documentary listening, accent, disability, and abolition.

Christian Whitworth is a PhD candidate in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University, specializing in experimental cinema, archival (re)performance, and psychoanalytic theories and histories. He is currently at work on a dissertation entitled “Lettrism’s Language Loss and the Disarticulation of the Avant-Garde.”