Wednesday, March 31 & Thursday, April 1 at 6-8PM
Sick, mad, neurodivergent, crip, and disabled – we are everywhere, and yet we remain at the margins even in the very spaces designed to subvert, disrupt, and protest. In poetry, music, visual art, literature, and film, we often appear only as monsters, beggars, or magical sages – if we are present at all. Yet disabled people at the margins of the margins have always been at the forefront of movements for justice and freedom, building networks of care and solidarity, and creating social and cultural transformations that enable us to experience rest and practice active love on the front lines and at home. Disability Justice is a radically intersectional framework necessary to sharpen our political analysis, clarify our policy demands, and shape our everyday activism and organizing practice. During the global COVID-19 pandemic, Disability Justice offers urgent and vital interventions for addressing and ending the myriad harms of race science/eugenics, the medical/carceral industrial complex, and capitalist oppression.
Disability Justice is a radically intersectional framework necessary to sharpen our political analysis, clarify our policy demands, and shape our everyday activism and organizing practice. During the global COVID-19 pandemic, Disability Justice offers urgent and vital interventions for addressing and ending the myriad harms of race science/eugenics, the medical/carceral industrial complex, and capitalist oppression.
March 31, 2021, 6:00-8:00 p.m.
Workshop 1: Participants will examine interpersonal, systemic, structural, and institutional ableism and its intersections with gender based oppressions, capitalism, settler-colonialism, and white supremacy, and to explore the core principles and practices of Disability Justice as created by organizers, cultural workers, and advocates with disabled queer and trans and BIPOC communities.
April 1, 2021, 6-8 pm
Workshop 2: Participants will have the opportunity to explore everyday ableism in their own lives and experiences, and to develop key skills and strategies for disrupting ableism and practicing disability justice in the arts, creative, and cultural communities.
Note: Closed Captioning will be provided. ASL interpretation is available upon request. Please request ASL interpretation at least 2 weeks before the event by emailing [email protected].
ABOUT LYDIA X. Z. BROWN
Lydia X. Z. Brown is a community builder and organizer, writer, advocate, educator, strategist, lawyer, and cultural worker dreaming of disability justice and collective liberation. Their work focuses on addressing and ending interpersonal, structural, systemic, and institutional violence targeting disabled people at the margins of the margins – especially surveillance, criminalization, and incarceration at the intersections of disability, queerness, race, gender, faith, language, and nation. Currently, they are creating art and written offerings for their own tarot deck, titled Disability Justice Wisdom Tarot.
Lydia is Director of Policy, Advocacy, & External Affairs for the Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network, as well as founder and volunteer director of the Fund for Community Reparations for Autistic People of Color’s Interdependence, Survival, & Empowerment, which is grounded in redistributive justice, mutual aid, and cultivation of generative economies. They are also Policy Counsel for the Privacy & Data Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, where they co-lead a project on disability and algorithmic/artificial intelligence discrimination. Lydia has taught as adjunct faculty at Tufts University and Georgetown University, where their courses center queer and trans disabled people of color’s work and perspectives. They also co-edited the path-breaking anthology All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism with E. Ashkenazy and Morénike Giwa Onaiwu.
Lydia is nonbinary, queer, and ace, and an East Asian, Chinese American survivor of transracial and transnational adoption. Often, their most important work in their communities has no title, job description, or funding, and probably never will.
[Photo: Black and white image of Lydia X. Z. Brown, a young East Asian person with glasses, smiling and laughing, looking slightly away from the camera. Photo by Colin Pieters.]