The Graduate tarot card
The Graduate
By Anna Landre, Madeleine Gibbons-Shapiro, & the Georgetown University Disability Studies Class of 2021

To commemorate and reflect upon our college graduation, members of the Georgetown University Disability Studies Program Class of 2021 created this tarot card, The Graduate. This card is a collective, community-built representation of our feelings as we leave college, and our Disability Studies community, during such a strange and stressful time.
In an hour-long session, we (Anna and Madeleine) gathered the hopes, fears, and knowledge of our classmates using mad-libs style prompts, and we then pieced the responses together to make the card’s description in real-time. Meanwhile, our illustrator Kat Woodward watched this process and drew the card as responses flowed in. We made final edits after the session. This exercise was facilitated and inspired by the work of our dear friend and mentor Dr. Mimi Khúc, who published her own tarot deck inspired by the need to decolonize mental health and highlight the Asian American experience in The Asian American Literary Review’s Open in Emergency project.
As students of Disability Studies, we have learned to reflect upon and question the world as it exists, and imagine radical changes for ourselves and those around us. Our time as undergraduates, defined in part by a raging global pandemic, has altered our senses of community, scholarship, and identity in ways that are often difficult to articulate. As we prepare to enter the vast world of post-grad unknown, we take this moment to share, honestly, our feelings of fear, excitement, responsibility, and uncertainty in anticipation of the years to come. We hope you find meaning in The Graduate, wherever you may be on your life’s journey,
With love and in solidarity,
The Georgetown University Disability Studies Class of 2021
Categories