D’Arcee Charington Neal    

Assistant Professor of English, Rhetoric and Composition at Fairfield University

D’Arcee Charington Neal is a fourth-year doctoral candidate at The Ohio State University in English and Disability Studies, where he is coining the theory of Afrophantasm or the rhetorical applications of invisibility through Afrofuturism and black disability culture. With a double master’s in Creative Writing and Rhetorical Composition, he is writing and composing an audio novel and digital dissertation where his research is focused on recognizing historical and future black disabled people, as unseen agents of stigma he calls spectres. Believing that this association between race and disability can be weaponized through posthumanist applications of embodied culture, he believes that Afrophantasm can change how people both understand and experience disability culture. Further, he believes that the resulting black future can and should be both accessible and in Wakanda, forever. D’Arcee is also the recipient of numerous public research awards and scholarships including, 1st place in the 2021 Graduate Hayes Forum, a 2020 Best Digital Media Graduate Scholarship, and NEH, Sweetland Digital Rhetoric, and Black Quantum Futurist Fellowships, as well as 2020 Disability Studies award for Best Disability Scholarship, and the Comcast/Universal Tony Coelho Digital Media Award.

Keynote materials: 

Janelle Monáe – Tightrope [feat. Big Boi] (Video) – original video with no closed captions provided

Accessible formats: 

• Video – original video with lyrics side-by-side
• Video – lyrics only with white letters on a black background 
• Website – lyrics with audio recording

Game of Thrones S4: Epic Tyrion Speech During Trial – YouTube (automated closed captions provided)

“You So Black” by Theresa tha SONGBIRD (closed captions provided)

Jimmy’s Drake’s Rap On Degrassi – YouTube (automated closed captions)