Creating a Disabled Counterpublic: Collective Worldmaking Enacted Through Alternative Communication Practices

This essay explores the collective worldmaking practices of an online community created for and around chronic illness and disability, hosted on the social media platform Discord. By employing digital ethnographic methods, I analyze alternative communication practices common to the group as resistance to dominant societal norms. Drawing from public sphere theory, I argued that, through the collective generation of shared normative understandings, this group constitutes an enclaved disabled counterpublic in which new forms of accessibility and citizenship are (re)imagined. I identify the group's creative communication practices centering around alternative norms of disclosure, epistemology, and temporality. Consequently, this essay demonstrates how such communication practices operate as a kind of disabled resistance, explaining how disabled collectives resist violence from hegemonic structures and elaborate shared worlds through communicative action. To this end, I suggest that this Discord server further provides understandings for how disabled counterpublics creatively operate in and imagine futures outside of neoliberal societies.