It is well established that violence and oppression towards vulnerable and marginalised communities are intensified and compounded during times of social upheaval, and the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated disablist and ableist violence against disabled people. During the first year of the pandemic, we have been confronted with instances of violence meted out to disabled subjects. In this article, we provide a theorisation of such violence. Based on an assemblage of our collective readings of Butler, Campbell and Young, as well as our own observations and experiences, we suggest that added anxieties currently confronting people’s fragile corporeal embodiment are licensing abled subjects to violate disabled subjects to put them back in their place. Through an excavation of ‘Norms, Binaries, and Anxieties’, ‘Abjection, Substitutability, and Disavowal’, and ‘Ableism and (Un)grievability’, we trace the social contours of disablist and ableist violence, both within and beyond the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and provide a way of imagining otherwise to resist this violence.

The position of disabled people within criminal justice frameworks and scholarship is one of ambivalence, which leaves disabled people in the simultaneous and contradictory position of centrality and marginality. While disabled people are over-represented within the criminal justice system (as offenders, victims, and witnesses), their voices are often marginalized or silenced. So too, while disabled people are over-represented within the criminal justice system, they remain under-explored in policy, practice, research, and scholarship. Aligning with the shift to queer and queering criminology, in this article we deploy the lens of ‘crip’ and ‘cripping’ to facilitate a more critical engagement with the concerns of disabled people, along with the mechanisms by which abledness informs criminal justice encounters.

The experiences of crip and mad people—as well as the disciplinary homes of crip theory and mad studies—have rarely been brought together in any synthesised manner. In this article, I bring crip theory and mad studies together to explore the similarities, intersections, and points of departure. The article starts by exploring the similar life experiences between crip and mad bodies, including: familial isolation; shame, guilt, and essentialism; stereotypes and discrimination; experiences and rates of violence; the power of diagnostic labels; and, passing and ‘coming out’. The discussion then moves to explore the theoretical overlaps between crip theory and mad studies, including: (strategic) essentialism vs constructionism; opposition to norms; subversion and transgression as political tools; and, the problematisation of binaries. The article then meditates on the question of combining these two schools of thought to help forge a collective politics, and speculates about the political methodologies of cripping and maddening dialogues.

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In this article, I ask the question: when does research end? I am motivated to engage with this question because I still labour over my doctoral research that I completed a few years ago. Feelings of guilt, shame, and above all, abjection, continue to haunt my subject position of researcher and academic. I seek to trouble the idea that research has clear beginning, middle, and end points, and I reflect on the politics, labour and emotion involved in conducting research, particularly when it involves understandings and experiences of violence. I expose how theoretical and pragmatic decisions, as well as incidents and accidents, leave mnemic traces on our bodies. I demonstrate how personal, theoretical and methodological decisions are complexly intertwined in research, and I argue that it is incumbent upon researchers to think through what they research, why they do it, its effects, and consequences – for researcher, researched, and society.

While there is a paucity of research pertaining to the phenomenon of disablist violence, one key feature has emerged: it is widely under-reported and under-recorded. The reasons for this are diverse: many are representative of reporting issues attributable to all forms of (hate) crime, and others are unique to the individual and social conditions of living with a disability (Sin 2013). This article provides a conceptual and contextual overview of disablist violence before proceeding to a critical literature review of the reasons why the phenomenon is largely under-reported. Against this backdrop, we offer a critical examination of the various policing strategies necessary for addressing the problem of under-reporting of disablist violence.

Background Whereas experience and cognitive maturity drives moral judgement development in most young adults, medical students show slowing, regression, or segmentation in moral development during their clinical years of training. The aim of this study was to explore the moral development of medical students during clinical training. Methods A cross-sectional sample of medical students from three clinical years of training were interviewed in groups or individually at an Australian medical school in 2018. Thematic analysis identified three themes which were then mapped against the stages and dimensions of Self-authorship Theory. Results Thirty five medical students from years 3–5 participated in 11 interviews and 6 focus groups. Students shared the impacts of their clinical experiences as they identified with their seniors and increasingly understood the clinical context. Their accounts revealed themes of early confusion followed by defensiveness characterised by desensitization and justification. As students approached graduation, some were planning how they would make moral choices in their future practice. These themes were mapped to the stages of self-authorship: External Formulas, Crossroads and Self-authorship. Conclusions Medical students recognise, reconcile and understand moral decisions within clinical settings to successfully reach or approach self-authorship. Curriculum and support during clinical training should match and support this progress.

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