If you were building a world from scratch, what would you do with disability? This book explores representations of disability in speculative young adult literature published in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada from 1987-2024. Key texts include Isobelle Carmody’s Obernewtyn novels, Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra by Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, and The Spirit Bares Its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White. Drawing from literary, queer, and critical disability studies, Crip Worldbuilding interrogates key tropes and disability metanarratives, such as miracle cures, blind prophets and disability hierarchy, and protagonist exceptionality. 

The concept of speculative worldbuilding is reconsidered as a form of accessible (or hostile) architecture. In doing so, fictional worlds become environments to which models of disability may be applied. Kavanagh-Ryan asks: how does speculative fiction for young adults imagine crip futures? What can the tropes and narrative expectations of the genre tell us about current and future ways of being crip in the world?

Kit Kavanagh-Ryan is Lecturer of Information Studies at Charles Sturt University, Australia. When not falling over, they think and write about the weird and lovely ways bodies and minds work together. While falling over, they’re still doing that, just slower. A librarian and early career researcher with a background in literary and disability studies, Kit’s research interests relate disability in children’s and young adult literature, disability in speculative fiction, historical representations of disability in literature for children, and intersections of disability studies and librarianship.