Dr. Ajitpaul Mangat, assistant professor of English at Niagara University, presented research from his current book project, “Forms of Affiliation: Disability Life Writing and the Socialization of Care,” at the Communities of Care Symposium 2025, April 24-25 in Buffalo, N.Y. The event brought together community members, students, faculty, and others to share their work on care and caring communities.
Dr. Mangat’s presentation, "Collaborations of Care: On Essex Hemphill’s ‘Brotherhood,’” focused on the work of the Black gay poet in relation to the AIDS activism of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) during the late-1980s and early-1990s. Dr. Mangat suggested that Hemphill carried forward ACT UP’s early focus of advocating for a universal system of health insurance and for care that exists outside the form of the family by creating a "brotherhood" based not on biological kinship, but rather on other forms of sociality, like collegiality and professional respect. Dr. Mangat focused on Hemphill’s collaborations with other Black gay artists with AIDS and concluded that such an extensive network of affiliations between “brothers” offered a model for social inclusion through the invention of new forms of belonging.
“I am really excited to be working on Hemphill at this time as a new collection of his poetry was just released and an event about his work is being organized at The Phillips Collection in D.C.,” said Dr. Mangat.
Dr. Mangat also invited two of his students, Sarah Laugher and Alyssa Carnovale, to the symposium. Both students excelled in his ENG201 course, which considers literature that represents disability and its intersections with other identities, like race and gender.
Laugher, a junior education major from Niagara Falls, Ontario, said what she learned about sharing research and accepting feedback at the symposium increased her confidence in presenting her own research at Niagara University’s Undergraduate Research Conference on May 2. Laugher’s project, "Music is Alive: Hozier's Music as a Catalyst for Activism and Political Change,” gave an example of the way art can inspire positive political change. The research “was inspired by Dr. Mangat's topic of the “power(lessness) of art,” she said.
Dr. Mangat is a member of the advisory board of the Communities of Care project, an interdisciplinary research project at the University at Buffalo that seeks to better understand and address issues faced by caregivers and those with disabilities. In addition to his upcoming book, which considers how disability life writing imagines the socialization of care through the formalization of networked affiliations that counter the neoliberal privatization of care within the enclosure of the family, he is also currently co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies that will offer a critical reassessment of David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s foundational concept of “narrative prosthesis” after 25 years. His scholarship appears or is forthcoming in the edited collections Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction, Neurodiversity on Television and Care and Disability, as well as the Journal of Popular Music Studies.