About the Project

Our name is inspired by many creatures' practices of making nests — safe, comfortable spaces built with bits of often-undervalued things, but that are gathered with care and woven together in the dream of making a home. It is also inspired by the many nests that disabled and chronically ill people create for ourselves. These are beds, couches, and other sites of rest and recovery that we have crafted into spaces of dreaming, laughing, crafting, protesting, and more. We hope our project will be a "nest" that safeguards and nurtures the insights, wisdom, and expertise of disability and chronic illness justice work.

Over the coming months, we will be building out our website and sharing some of the projects we have been dreaming and fostering together. These include a resource guide for disabled and chronically ill scholars navigating the academic job market, a support group for disabled and chronically ill artists to share crip hacks, strategies from university students and teachers building more accessible and compassionate classrooms, and others. We are excited to share more with you soon!

About the Team

  • Ryan Lee Cartwright

    Co-Director

    Ryan Lee Cartwright co-directs the Nest Collab on the UC Davis side. His research focuses on disability, gender, and sexuality on the social and spatial margins. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on a wide range of topics, including disability studies, queer and trans history, the 1990s, research methodologies, social welfare, and landscapes and places.

  • A woman with dark, shoulder length hair wearing a cream colored sweater and sunglasses smiles up a camera as if it were a friend. Behind her is the skyline of Hong Kong, many skyscrapers encircling a bay under a blue sky, hazy in the afternoon light.

    Kalindi Vora

    Co-Director

    Kalindi Vora co-directs the Nest Collective collab on the Yale side. She is a writer, researcher and educator on topics connecting health, science, technology and social justice. With two decades of experience writing about India and the US, she works between academic disciplines and public interest to explore pressing topics in medicine, technology and the sciences.

  • A woman in her early 30s (Kelly) is facing the camera and smiling. She has medium-tan skin, dark brown eyes, and shoulder-length dark brown hair. She is in front of a solid blue background and is wearing a white sweater with navy embroidery.

    Kelly Diaz

    Research Program Manager

    Dr. Kelly Diaz (she/her) is the Research Program Manager for The Nest Collab at Yale University. She is a qualitative social scientist with a Ph.D. in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining The Nest Collab, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the Healthy, Equitable, and Responsive Democracy (HEARD) Initiative at Swarthmore College. Kelly also has a Master's of International Affairs from Penn State with a concentration in Human Rights. 

  • Julia, a white nonbinary femme with wavy brown hair framing their face. They wear a black button-down and dangly earrings and smile cheekily at the camera against a burnt orange background.

    Julia Havard

    Postdoctoral Fellow

    Julia Havard, PhD (they/them) is a writer, educator, access worker, and artist. They received their PhD from UC Berkeley in Performance Studies, focusing on queer disability arts and culture. Their freelance practice, Fracture Access Consulting, supports educators, artists, and organizations in cultivating spaces of disability belonging and building frameworks for access artistry. They are a practicing dance and ceramic artist with a deep and guiding love of rocks, dogs, and snacks.

  • A white nonbinary femme from the chest up looking at the camera. They have platinum blonde hair, black wire-rimmed glasses, two nostril piercings and a septum piercing. They are smiling gently in a t-shirt with the words "I KNOW NOTHING!!!!" printed.

    Emalee / Love

    Graduate Student Researcher

    Emalee/Love (they/them) is a queer nonbinary disabled artist, academic, and activist. Love studies the ways in which disabled folks creatively navigate the current oppressive food system in order to feed themselves. They suggest that these creative choices may act as a blueprint for creating a more sustainable and accessible food future. Their passions include community care, fiber arts, frogs, and rock hunting. They can usually be found in a bed-nest reading, crocheting, or cuddling their cats.  

  • A black-and-white headshot of a young adult. A snapback hat, worn backwards, conceals most of their hair. Side-swept bangs partly shadow their face. Boxed in by dark-framed glasses are crow’s feet, brought out by a smile.

    Kelly Kagawa

    Researcher

    Kelly K. (they/them) was a PhD student in Comparative Literature at UC Davis for just over two years, specializing in Critical Theory, and focused on the lives and works of French philosopher of death Maurice Blanchot and of the Austrian scholar Ludwig Wittgenstein. During K.’s undergraduate studies, which were also completed at Davis, they received the Chancellor’s Award for their research in Francophone linguistics. After developing an interest in enzyme kinetics, K. completed a minor in Nutrition Science. They are interested in the possibility or impossibility of simulating, representing, and attesting to somatic and social experiences, and of the state of the individual vis-à-vis the community when deprived of such experiences. 

  • A South Asian American woman wearing large glasses and a cozy pink turtleneck, smiling in front of a stained glass window.

    Niv Karthikeyan

    Graduate Student Researcher

    Niv (she/her) is a teacher, writer, caregiver, and sometimes artist who studies and lives with chronic pain. She currently works as an interdisciplinary historian and PhD candidate in the History of Science & Medicine and Ethnicity, Race & Migration programs at Yale University, where she studies South Asian im/migrant women’s experiences of (often undiagnosed and undertreated) chronic illness. Both Niv and her research are shaped by her background in immigrants’ rights organizing, feminist SA advocacy, and South Asian American community archiving. Her work remains rooted in her commitments to community.

  • Kenya smiling brightly at the camera. Kenya is a legally blind light-skinned tone Woman of African Descent. She is wearing a nude-colored shirt, a turquoise necklace, and has long blondish-brown hair that is flowing from her right side.

    Kenya J. Loudd

    Kenya J. Loudd is a joint doctoral candidate at Yale University in the departments of the History of Science and Medicine and Black Studies and proudly identifies as a legally blind Woman of African descent. Her current dissertation project examines segregated institutions that served deaf and blind African Americans in the Southern United States from the late Nineteenth Century through the 1970s. She organizes the Annual Symposium for Disability and Accessibility at Yale, is the producer of the documentary film  “Our Calculus: Factoring in Disability at Yale”, and is committed to the empowerment of People with Disabilities through accessible space and place.

  • Audrey Asare Nannor

    Undergraduate Student Researcher

    Audrey Asare Nannor (she/her) is a Yale undergraduate student working as a research assistant for The Nest Collab. She is a NYC Bronx native and continuously striving to use her educational pursuits to better her community. She is deeply interested and an advocate of sustainable urban development policies to promote health and wellbeing especially in underserved areas facing pollution and limited medical resources. She has also worked in many non-profit educational programs in administrative roles aiming to reframe pedagogy to be accessible, relevant and personal for Black and Brown communities in New York City. And excitingly, Audrey loves to travel around the world with her friends and create digital archives of her many other hobbies. 

  • Carlo Sariego, wearing a black corduroy shirt, standing in front of lush foliage in New Haven, Connecticut.

    Carlo Sariego

    Graduate Student Researcher

    Carlo is an interdisciplinary sociologist and PhD candidate in Sociology and Gender Studies at Yale University. Their work bridges disability studies, feminist science and technology studies, and transgender studies. Using qualitative and queer/feminist methods, they examine how fluctuating bodies and shifting borders shape social life in the U.S. and transnationally. Alongside their scholarship, they work to create accessible ways of navigating academic and professional life, fostering more inclusive and responsive research environments. 

  • A person with dark, curly hair is facing the camera, smiling. He is wearing gray pants and a short-sleeve purple button-up. He is leaning on a white egg-shaped sculpture in a park-like setting with tall trees, scattered leaves, and a paved walkway.

    Noah Sanchez

    Undergraduate Student Researcher

    Noah Sanchez (he/him/any) is a researcher and community educator from Fresno, California. He is currently pursuing his B.A. in Chicanx Studies (minors in Medical Humanities and Public Health Sciences) at the University of California, Davis. His research explores the connections between geography, health, science and technology, and social justice in the San Joaquin Valley of California. In addition to his research with The Nest Collab, Noah is affiliated with Dr. Natalia Caporale's (UC Davis) Equity in STEM Education Research Group as an undergraduate student researcher and serves as the director of COLLECTIVE: Transfer and Non-Traditional Student Empowerment, a student-initiated and -run community program focused on holistically supporting, educating, engaging, and empowering transfer, re-entry, system-impacted, and formerly-incarcerated students in and around the UCD campus. Beyond academia, Noah enjoys watching horror movies, supporting local drag, dancing cumbia, and discovering new recipes to make alongside friends and family.