Jina B. Kim

She is the author of Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke University Press 2025). This book demonstrates why we need radical disability politics and aesthetics for navigating contemporary crises of care. It develops an explicitly intersectional disability framework, or “crip-of-color critique,” in order to interrupt dominant narratives about who deserves support. 

Turning to the literary afterlives of major US welfare reform in 1996, Care at the End of the World considers feminist- and queer-of-color literature that grapples with the disabling effects of anti-welfare policy. By bringing a disability lens to works by contemporary American authors (including Audre Lorde, Jesmyn Ward, Karen Tei Yamashita, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Aurora Levins Morales, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha) it calls forward the critiques and possibilities in their literary representations of infrastructure—systems of education, sanitation, transportation, and health/care. Overall, this book examines and honors the imaginative work that disabled, feminist, and queer-of-color writers do to envision alternate infrastructural arrangements in a world and nation that has refused to support us

An award-winning scholar, Jina’s talks and publications address topics such as self-care, care and racial capitalism, queer kinship networks, anti-work disability politics, disability justice politics and writing, and contemporary feminist-of-color literature and culture. Her writing has appeared in Signs, Social Text, GLQ, American Quarterly, MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States), South Atlantic Quarterly, Disability Studies Quarterly, Lateral, and The Asian American Literary Review. 

She is the recipient of a Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Institute of Citizens and Scholars (formerly Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), a Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America Visiting Faculty Fellowship at Brown University, and the Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars from the Society of Disability Studies. 

For more information, see Jina’s personal website.