*dear elia* & *Care at the End of the World*: New Disability Studies Books in Convo

In the spirit of re-orienting Asian American Studies, this roundtable will discuss what an Asian American feminist disability politics of care looks like under conditions of U.S. institutional and infrastructural violence. It will examine in particular the neoliberal university and the retraction of the U.S. welfare state, turning a disability lens onto systems of state care that are, in fact, killing us. Together, we will discuss two new books that grapple with the question of infrastructural support: Mimi Khúc’s *dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss* (Duke UP, 2024) and Jina B. Kim’s *Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip of Color Writing* (Duke UP, 2025). *dear elia* explores mental health at the intersections of race, ableism, and the university through a pedagogy of unwellness: the recognition that we are all differentially unwell. Unwellness through this lens excavates the structures of violence that striate university life, and then offers ways of divesting from those structures and new possibilities for collective care. *Care at the End of the World* details how feminist- and queer-of-color writers produced a disability aesthetics of care and dependency in response to anti-welfare state narratives, such as the welfare queen, undocumented immigrant, and disabled non-worker, and argues that they do so through their representations of infrastructure: welfare, sanitation, transit, and healthcare. Each participant (Jina B. Kim, Mimi Khúc, James Kyung-Jin Lee, and Natalia Duong) will put the two books in conversation, elaborating on the lessons offered for navigating a time of increasing state repression, right-wing attacks on higher education, and U.S. military violence abroad.