About Deaf Crip Mad Faculty and Staff Association

The Deaf Crip Mad Faculty and Staff Association (DCMFSA) is an advocacy coalition made up of faculty and staff at Sacramento State. We seek to support a range of communities including Blind, Deaf, Hard of Hearing, Visible and Invisible Disabilities, Dynamic Disabilities, Cognitive Disabilities, Temporary and Permanent Disabilities, Chronic Illness, Neurodivergence, Injury, Immunocompromised, and Mental and Psychological Health and Disability.

Equal Opportunity and Excellence in Education and Employment

All University programs and activities are open and available to all regardless of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin.

Guiding Statement:

The guiding statement of the Deaf Crip Mad Faculty and Staff Association (DCMFSA) is to improve the equity of experience and inclusion for faculty and staff with disabilities at Sacramento State, the CSU system, and the broader community. Additionally, the Association works to empower, support, and embolden faculty and staff. Through community building that focuses on education, advocacy, and activism we seek to disrupt abled norms by drawing from Deafness, Cripness, Madness, etc., frameworks which address audism, ableism, sanism, etc. We draw from anti-racism, inclusive, and queer frameworks in our intersectional approach. And we are not on a binary with how we check things off for our names or identity to fit in. As student enrollment becomes more diverse, a diversified faculty and staff brings new perspectives that inform the curriculum and educational environment, provides a variety of perspectives in the classroom, and enriches the academic experience of students, staff, and faculty.

Why Deaf Crip Mad?

Similar to the titles of other EAGs, our new EAG pursues a re-claiming of derogatory categories of identification. In a similar vein as the name Chicanx/Latinx (in which the "x" draws upon Nahuatl inheritance yet is a more recent generational reclamation -- versus Chicano/Latino/a or Chican@/Latin@), there is a seminal disability justice model in which etymology is made central to our name. Similarly, "Queer and Trans," both are radically reclaimed terms. The phrasing "queer" was once derogatory, and the shortening of "Trans" is partly slang yet removes itself from academic rhetoric. For us, our EAG name makes visible what has always been made to be invisible. Disability in public was guided in this very state by "ugly laws" and here formed (across our country) a discourse and knowledge from the mid to late nineteenth century that still is seeped into our language today. Even the acronym prods at a history of possession and power.