I share the following links and resources as an introduction to contemporary writing and analysis by influential voices within Critical Disability Studies and the Disability Justice movement.
See also: Disability Justice: Resources for Educators & Organizers. – KMR
Critical Essays:
“To Survive the Trumpocalypse, We Need Wild Disability Justice Dreams.” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Truthout (May 20 2018)
“Disabled People Will Die Under Trump: An Emergency Plea to Allies.” by Carolyn Zaikowski. (Nov 18 2016)
“Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” by Jasbir Puar. The New Inquiry (Sep 15 2017)
“The normalization of disability as an empowered status purportedly recognized by the state is produced through the creation and sustaining of debilitation on a mass scale.”
“The Age of Loneliness Is Killing Us.” by George Manbiot. The Guardian. (Oct 14 2014).
“Social isolation is as potent a cause of early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day; loneliness, research suggests, is twice as deadly as obesity. Dementia, high blood pressure, alcoholism and accidents – all these, like depression, paranoia, anxiety and suicide, become more prevalent when connections are cut. We cannot cope alone.”
“Dear Abled Friends: I Am Not Your Inspiration Porn.” by Karrie Higgins. Everyday Feminism. (Oct 5 2015)
“Disability Rights Are Conspicuously Absent From The Women’s March Platform.” by Emily Ladau. (Jan 16 2017).
See also Disability March (https://disabilitymarch.com/), a virtual contingent to the Jan 2017 Women’s March on Washington.
“The Right Not to Work: Power and Disability.” by Sunny Taylor (Mar 2004)
“You are SO Brave: Disability Studies vs Disability Justice at #SF41” by Krish Bhatt. (Mar 8 2016) (http://bcrw.barnard.edu/you-are-so-brave-disability-studies-vs-disability-justice-at-sf41/)
Blogs & News Sites Centering Disability
Leaving Evidence is a blog Mia Mingus, “a writer, educator and community organizer for disability justice and transformative justice.” She is a “queer physically disabled korean woman transracial and transnational adoptee from the Caribbean.”
“Reflections on an Opening: Disability Justice and Creating Collective Access.” (Aug 23 2010) A reflection for the 2010 U.S. Social Forum, published by INCITE
“Finding Each Other: Building Legacies of Belonging.” Keynote speech at KQTcon 2018, first national LGBTQ Korean conference in the U.S. (Apr 7 2018)
Medical Industrial Complex Visual
“Changing the Framework: How our communities can go beyond access to wholeness
Crutches & Spice, a blog by Imani Barbarin, a Black woman with Cerebral Palsy who writes about science fiction and memoir.
Power Not Pity, a “podcast for disabled people of color everywhere…Through storytelling, commentary and analysis, the podcast aims to amplify the lived experiences and perspectives of disabled people.”
Still My Revolution, a blog by A. J. Withers, “a disabled, queer and trans anti-poverty activist living in Toronto.”
Interviews (videos):
“Beyond Disability Rights; Disability Justice: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.” The Laura Flanders Show. (Jun 30 2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_sw6Hjtfg8
“Mia Mingus on Disability Justice (interview).” Equitable Education. (Nov 30 2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cJkUazW-jw
“Disability Justice Activists Look at “Ways to Maintain Ableism” and Counter “How Our Bodies Experience Trauma in the Medical-Industrial Complex.” Democracy Now! (Jun 23 2010) https://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/23/disability_justice_activists_look_at_ways
Includes interview with Stacey Milbern and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha during the 2010 US Social Forum in Detroit, MI.
Academic Texts in Disability Studies:
Dan Goodley, Rebecca Lawthom & Katherine Runswick-Cole (2014) “Dis/ability and austerity: beyond work and slow death,” Disability & Society, 29:6, 980-984. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2014.920125.
Dolmage, Jay Timothy. Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9708722.
Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana Univeristy Press, 2013. http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=806824
Kim, Jina B. “Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique: Thinking with Minich’s “Enabling Whom?”,” Lateral 6.1 (2017).
McRuer, Robert. Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance. New York, NY: NYU Press, 2018.
McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: NYU Press, 2006.
Mitchell, David T. The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2015.
Puar, Jasbir. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. (https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-right-to-maim)
Sandahl, Carrie. “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer?: Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance,” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 9, nos. 1-2 (2003): 25–26.
Schalk, Sami. “Coming to Claim Crip: Disidentification with/in Disability Studies.” Disability Studies Quarterly. Vol. 33, No. 2. (2013).
Disability Activist Organizations:
Disability Justice Collective (https://www.facebook.com/DJCollective)
A national collective centering the lives and leadership of disabled people of color, trans, queer, poverty class folks and all brilliance from the margins
Disability Visibility Project (https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/)
DVP is “an online community dedicated to recording, amplifying, and sharing disability media and culture.” Founded & directed by Alice Wong, a disability activist, media maker, and consultant. Includes podcast with episodes on:
“Disability Justice and Community Organizing”
“Labor, Care Work, and Disabled Queer Femmes.”
Wong is also a co-partner in #CriptheVote movement encouraging political participation of people with disabilities. See also Wong’s article, “My Medicaid, My Life”
Harriet Tubman Collective (https://harriettubmancollective.tumblr.com/)
See also Collective’s “Disability Solidarity: Completing the Vision for Black Lives.” Written as a constructive critique of the Black Lives Matter policy platform (as released August 1, 2016).
Invisible Disability Project (https://www.invisibledisabilityproject.org/)
Krip Hop Nation (http://www.poormagazine.org/krip_hop) is a project featuring people with disabilities inside and outside the music industry, locally and globally.
Sins Invalid (http://sinsinvalid.org/) is “a performance project on disability and sexuality that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and queer and gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized from social discourse.”
Other organizations working on health care access & environmental justice:
Health Justice Commons (http://www.collabchange.org/health-justice-commons-link/). See their core principles in “Health Justice for Change-Makers and Healers”
ACT UP (http://www.actupny.org/), known for their direct actions during the height of the AIDS crisis.
Breast Cancer Action (https://www.bcaction.org/), a grassroots organization led by and supporting women living with breast cancer. Founded in 1990 by Elenore Pred, Susan Claymon, and Linda Reyes, it sought to address the root causes and environmental factors behind breast cancer incidents.
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