(Dis)courses: Interdisciplinary Disability Dialogues, Spring 2022 – Resource Guide

This webpage provides a variety of resources—including a selection of books and articles, guides and monographs, websites and blogs, and multimedia content—centering disability and disabled voices and perspectives, to accompany the Spring 2022 (Dis)courses: Interdisciplinary Disability Dialogues series. This guide is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather representative.

Contents:

About the Series

Hosted by the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach (OIPO) at the Burton Blatt Institute and Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, the Spring 2022 series, “(Dis)courses: Interdisciplinary Disability Dialogues,” included four exciting conversations with luminaries who are engaged variously with many forms of innovative and intersectional Disability cultural work. For more information, visit the series landing page. A PDF copy of the series event poster is available online. The original poster for the series was designed by Prof. Emily Vey Duke.

About the Presenters

  • Shayda Kafai – Shayda Kafai (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Ethnic and Women’s Studies department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and author of Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice & Art Activism of Sins Invalid. As a queer, disabled, Mad femme of colour, she commits to practising the many ways we can reclaim our bodyminds from systems of oppression. To support this work as an educator-scholar, Shayda applies disability justice and collective care practices in the spaces she cultivates. Shayda’s writing and speaking presentations focus on intersectional body politics, particularly on how bodies are constructed and how they hold the capacity for rebellion. From discussions of madness and disability to femme politics and crip art, Shayda works to reframe our most disempowered bodyminds as vehicles of change-making. In honour of self-care and her communities, Shayda is also an artmaker and co-founder of CripFemmeCrafts with her wife, Amy. They make art that empowers all our bodyminds, particularly centring the magic and joy-making that comes from the wisdom and beauty of disabled, Fat bodyminds of colour. Follow Shayda on Instagram or visit her personal website at: https://www.shaydakafai.com/.
  • Naomi Ortiz – Naomi Ortiz is a Poet, Writer, Facilitator, and Visual Artist whose intersectional work focuses on self-care for activists, disability justice, climate action, and relationship with place. Ortiz is the author of Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice (Reclamation Press), a non-fiction book for diverse communities on dealing with the risks of burnout. They are a 2021-2022 Border Narrative Grant Awardee for their multidisciplinary project, “Complicating Conversations.” Ortiz is a 2019 Zoeglossia Poetry Fellow whose poems have been nominated for Best of the Internet and listed on Entropy’s “Best of 2020-2021: Favorite Poems Published online.” They emphasize interdependence, inclusion, and spiritual growth in their poetry, writing, and artwork, which can be found in numerous print and on-line publications, anthologies, and art shows. Ortiz is a Disabled, Mestiza living in the Arizona U.S./Mexico borderlands.
  • Clark A. Pomerleau – Clark A. Pomerleau is an associate professor and associate chairperson of the History Department at the University of North Texas. His scholarship analyzes social justice alternatives to mainstream U.S. society and includes the book, Califia Women: Feminist Education against Sexism, Classism, and Racism (U. Texas, 2013), chapters and articles on LGBTQ+ history, feminist praxis, and trans-inclusion, and a biography in process about Helen Knothe Nearing’s spiritual and practical role in the back-to-the-land movement titled A Consecrated Life in Her Times. Pomerleau also publishes poetry, including the chapbook Better Living through Cats (Finishing Line Press, 2021) that tackles depression and anxiety and the full-length book about growing into elder care, Every Day, They Became Part of Him (Finishing Line Press, 2023). His most recent awards are a 2021 Faculty Research Leave, the 2020 UNT President’s Council Service Award, and nomination for outstanding accessible online teaching.
  • Joseph A. Stramando – Dr. Stramondo (he/him/his) is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs at San Diego State University. He holds graduate degrees in both philosophy and public policy studies and his current research focuses on the intersection of biomedical ethics and philosophy of disability. Namely, he is concerned with how bioethics can be reframed by centering the lived experiences of disability as a crucial source of moral knowledge that should guide clinical practice, biomedical research, and health policy. He has published scholarship on topics ranging from informed consent procedures to reproductive ethics to pandemic triage protocols to assistive neurotechnology. His work appears in venues such as The Hastings Center Report, Social Theory and Practice, the Kennedy Institute for Ethics Journal, Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, Utilitas, The International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, and more. He is devoting most of his present research effort to developing a co-authored book manuscript, under contract with Routledge, that will address the ways in which the field of bioethics fails to address the moral salience of the social categories of gender, race, disability, and sexuality. In addition to his teaching and research, Dr. Stramondo is also currently serving as the co-President of the Society for Disability Studies. Prof. Stramondo can be reached by email at jstramondo@sdsu.edu. You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter.

Blogs, Blog Posts, and Mass Media

Books, Book Chapters, and Articles

  • Berne, P., & Lamm, N. (2022). Learning from our survival: Patty Berne and Nomy Lamm (Sins Invalid), in conversation. In M. Charne & T. Sellar (Eds.), Disability Dramaturgies [Special Issue]. Theater, 52(2), 21–31. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/01610775-9662194. “Patty Berne (executive director/artistic director) and Nomy Lamm (creative director) discuss the work of their performance collective and disability justice advocacy group, Sins Invalid. They address their company’s attempts to implement the principles of disability justice within their own collaborative processes and how theaters might cultivate a culture grounded in care work. Reflecting on the lack of support for queer, POC, and disabled artists in US commercial theater, they discuss the ways that Sins Invalid’s work challenges those institutional paradigms. Finally, they consider what the company—and theater in general—has learned from the COVID-19 pandemic: namely, the challenges and possibilities of producing work online and that addressing accessibility presents rich opportunities for artistic discovery.”
  • Berne, P., Levins Morales, A., Langstaff, D., & Sins Invalid. (2018, Spring/Summer). Ten principles of Disability Justice. In N. Havlin & J. M. Báez (Eds.), Beauty [Feature Issue]. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 46(1&2), 227-230. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.2018.0003. “From within Sins Invalid, where we incubate both the framework and practice of Disability Justice, this burgeoning framework has ten (10) principles, each offering new opportunities for movement builders” (p. 227).
  • Boda, P. A (2022). Identity making as a colonization process, and the power of Disability Justice to cultivate intersectional disobedience. Education Sciences, 12(7), 462. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci12070462. “Intersectionality has been used to describe the products of difference but scholars who work intersectionally in the tradition of Disability Justice have argued that attention should focus on the process of identity making—those processes by which some Lives–Hopes–Dreams are positioned as more valuable and Whole because of our societies’ commitments to racial capitalist coloniality. This work uses intersectionality as critical social theory, combined with broader cultural analyses of colonization as a process that did not stop within the creation of the Modern Western world, to visibilize identities often explicitly erased: students labeled with disabilities. Through excavating group-made artifacts from a larger research study, I show how intersectionally-disobedient grammars can serve to illuminate complex identity making beyond juxtaposed colonialities of power, and, therein, I situate this bricolage approach as an embodiment toward Disability Justice.”
  • Dolmage, J. T. (2017). Academic ableism: Disability and higher education [Corporealities: Discourses of Disability]. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9708722. “Academic Ableism brings together disability studies and institutional critique to recognize the ways that disability is composed in and by higher education, and rewrites the spaces, times, and economies of disability in higher education to place disability front and center.”
  • Evans, H. D. (2017). Un/covering: Making disability identity legible. Disability Studies Quarterly, 37(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v37i1.5556. “This article examines one aspect of disability identity among people with non-apparent or ‘invisible’ disabilities: the decision to emphasize, remind others about, or openly acknowledge impairment in social settings….[which Evans] call[s]… “un/covering,” and situate[s] this concept in the sociological and Disability Studies literature on disability stigma, passing, and covering.”
  • Kafai, S. (2021). Crip kinship: The Disability Justice & art activism of Sins Invalid. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press. “Crip Kinship investigates the revolutionary survival teachings that Disabled Queer of Color communities offer to all our bodyminds. Sins Invalid is a performance project that centers a Disability Justice framework.”
  • Kuppers, P.  (2022). Eco soma: Pain and joy in speculative performance encounters [Art After Nature Series]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. “Kuppers illuminates ecopoetic disability culture perspectives, contending that disabled people and their co-conspirators make art to live in a changing world, in contact with feminist, queer, trans, racialized, and Indigenous art projects. By offering new ways to think, frame, and feel ‘environments,’ Kuppers focuses on art-based methods of envisioning change and argues that disability can offer imaginative ways toward living well and with agency in change, unrest, and challenge.” NOTE: This text is also available via Open Access on the University of Minnesota Press website. As noted on the press’s website, “Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.”
  • Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. (2018). Care work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press. Care Work “explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centres the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all.”
  • Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. (2022). The future is disabled: Prophecies, love notes and mourning songs. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press. “Building on the work of her game-changing book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other – and the rest of the world – alive during Trump, fascism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Other subjects include crip interdependence, care and mutual aid in real life, disabled community building, and disabled art practice as survival and joy.”
  • Li, L., Lourdes Donato-Sapp, H., Erevelles, N., Torres, L. E., & Waitoller, F. (2022). A kitchen-table talk against ableism: Disability justice for collective liberation. Equity & Excellence in Education. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2021.2047417. “Residing in a fundamentally ableist society while disability justice tends to be rendered invisible in many movements for equity and collective liberation, we aim to challenge the existing knowledge of disability and discuss how these understandings play out in education, policy, and other public spaces. In this kitchen-table talk, we begin by reflecting on our own positionalities in relation to disability to re/imagine alternative definitions of disability justice. We explore the ways language is used to reclaim disability pride and radically disrupt normative stories about disability and other marginalized identities. Being an ally requires centering the voices and lived experiences of disabled people at the intersections of differences, particularly those who are politically and socially alienated and erased.”
  • Lindemann Nelson, H. (2001). Damaged identities, narrative repair. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. -“Hilde Lindemann Nelson focuses on the stories of groups of people—including Gypsies, mothers, nurses, and transsexuals—whose identities have been defined by those with the power to speak for them and to constrain the scope of their actions. By placing their stories side by side with narratives about the groups in question, Nelson arrives at some important insights regarding the nature of identity.” NOTE: An earlier version of this text is also available.
  • Montague-Asp, H., Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, L., Shlasko, D., & Logan Siegel, L. (2022). Ableism and Disability Justice. In M., Adams, L. A. Bell, D. J. Goodman & D. Shlasko, with R. R. Briggs & R. Pacheco (Eds.), Teaching for diversity and social justice (4th ed.). (pp. 303-344). New York: Routledge. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003005759. “This chapter offers a framework for understanding and resisting ableism that is informed by the disability justice movement, by emerging disability identity communities, and by the authors’ lived experiences as chronically ill and disabled activists, writers, cultural workers, and educators. It explores the sometimes contradictory implications of different ways of understanding disability (the medical model, the social model, the disability justice model) and outlines key historical legacies of ableism including the relationships between disability and slavery, colonialism, capitalism, and medical science. It describes and analyzes current manifestations of ableism along with examples of organizing for justice in the areas of healthcare, employment, community life, policing, education, and media. The chapter concludes with a sample curriculum for a workshop on ableism and disability justice, together with reflections on integrating disability justice into pedagogy and facilitation.”
  • Moore, L. (2014). Droolicious. In C. Wood (Ed.), Criptiques (pp. 25-28). (A PDF version of this book is available for free online). Criptiques is an anthology of disabled writers exploring the provocative aspects of disability. In this essay, Leroy Moore discusses a song he wrote, Droolicious, and ableist discourse about mainstream, non-disabled aversion and discomfort around disabled people who may drool, “…flip[ing] it by using a cultural vehicle, poetry and song, switching what people are used to seeing as a negative and giving it a new window” (p. 27).
  • Ortiz, N. (2018). Sustaining spirit: Self-care for social justice. Berkeley: Reclamation Press. “Offers powerful, thoughtful, transformative insight into self-care, weaving together personal experiences in class, race and disability advocacy into informative advice on dealing with the risks of burnout.”
  • O’Toole, C. J. (2013). Disclosing our relationships to disabilities: An invitation for Disability Studies scholars. In J. M. Ostrove & J. Rinaldi (Eds.), Self-reflection as scholarly praxis [Special issue]. Disability Studies Quarterly, 33(2). DOI: https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v33i2.3708. “…address[es] the question of public nondisclosure of one’s relationship to disability within Disability Studies.”
  • O’Toole, C. J. (2019). Fading Scars: My Queer Disability History (2nd ed.). Berkeley, CA: Reclamation Press. “Fading Scars distills 40 years of activism in disability, queer, parenting communities. You’ve never read anything like it. Funny and engaging, Corbett pulls the curtains back on the humor and pathos of living as a disabled queer in a world that doesn’t welcome either with open arms.”
  • Pressley, A., & Cokley, R. (2021). There is no justice that neglects disability. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 20(1), 2–4. DOI: https://doi.org/10.48558/F3MT-ZT59. “Achieving diversity, equity, and inclusion means putting disability justice in every policy discussion and making it part of the continuing struggle for civil rights.” From a special supplement of Stanford Social Innovation Review, Centering Disability.
  • Silvermint, D. (2018). Passing as privileged. Ergo, 5(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/ergo.12405314.0005.001 “This paper rejects sweeping verdicts about passing as privileged, or attempts by members of oppressed, stigmatized, or discriminated-against groups to improve their lives by being misidentified as members of an advantaged group. Not only do many familiar arguments rely on problematic assumptions about authenticity and resistance, but they strain to accommodate the diverse identities, circumstances, and individual differences that ought to be affecting our verdicts.”
  • Sins Invalid (n.d.). Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People A Disability Justice Primer (2nd. ed.). “The Second Edition of Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People (digital version) is available now with full visual layout, or as a text-only version! This Disability Justice Primer, based on the work of Patty Berne and Sins Invalid, offers concrete suggestions for moving beyond the socialization of ableism, such as mobilizing against police violence, how to commit to mixed ability organizing, and access suggestions for events. Skin, Tooth, and Bone offers analysis, history and context for the growing Disability Justice Movement. The Second Edition includes the addition of a new section on Audism and Deafhood written and edited by members of the D/deaf community, and a Call to Action from Survivors of Environmental Injury, as well as disability justice timelines, an extensive glossary, and a resource list for learning more.”
  • Wong, A. (Ed.). (2018). Resistance and hope: Essays by disabled people. Disability Visibility Project. Also available via Open Access. Essays by disabled writers, activists, and artists. This is “crip wisdom for the people.” Includes links to plain language summary, discussion guide, and other relevant resources.
  • Wong, A. (Ed.). (2020). Disability visibility: First person stories from the 21st century. New York: Vintage Books. “This anthology gives a glimpse of the vast richness and complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community.”
  • Yoshino, K. (2006). Covering: The hidden assault on our civil rights. New York: Random House. “Kenji Yoshino argues that the demand to cover can pose a hidden threat to our civil rights. Though we have come to some consensus against penalizing people for differences based on race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, and disability, we still routinely deny equal treatment to people who refuse to downplay differences along these lines.”
  • Wiener, D. R. (2021). Dis/Ability and Critical Cultural Studies. Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Communication. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.1006. “While there are many contestations surrounding the significance, meanings, and interpretations of dis/ability in the field of critical cultural studies, the author presents a variety of foundational as well as emergent concepts, structures, and histories in order to situate these debates. The 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 2020, increasingly frequent criticisms of the ‘sea of whiteness’ in disability critique, and an attendant call for equitable attention to intersectional theorization and practice, accompanied by a variety of frameworks, are employed to introduce the relevance of these contestations as well as to equip readers with opportunities to engage and study further.”

Guidebooks and Monographs

  • Cripping Pandemic Learning: Collaborative Academic Resource Document – collaborative Google document asking for contributions of “peer-reviewed articles on universal design, online teaching, online assessment, and/or academic ableism (or other relevant categories) that you think other folks should read.”
  • Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, L., envisioned by Park Milbern, S. & Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. (2021). Disability Justice: An audit tool. “‘Disability Justice: An Audit Tool’ is aimed at helping Black, Indigenous and POC-led organizations (that are not primarily focused around disability) examine where they’re at in practicing disability justice, and where they want to learn and grow. It includes questions for self-assessment, links to access tools, organizational stories and more.”
  • Sins Invalid (n.d.). Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People A Disability Justice Primer (2nd. ed.) “The Second Edition of Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People (digital version) is available now with full visual layout, or as a text-only version! This Disability Justice Primer, based in the work of Patty Berne and Sins Invalid, offers concrete suggestions for moving beyond the socialization of ableism, such as mobilizing against police violence, how to commit to mixed ability organizing, and access suggestions for events. Skin, Tooth, and Bone offers analysis, history and context for the growing Disability Justice Movement. The Second Edition includes the addition of a new section on Audism and Deafhood written and edited by members of the D/deaf community, and a Call to Action from Survivors of Environmental Injury, as well as disability justice timelines, an extensive glossary, and a resource list for learning more.”

Multimedia

Organizations and Projects

  • Disability Justice Initiative – “We promote policies to ensure disabled people of color and those most marginalized by ableism and other forms of oppression can participate in the economy and democracy.”
  • Disability Visibility Project – “The Disability Visibility Project is an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture.”
  • Krip Hop Nation – “Krip-Hop Nation’s mission is to educate the music, media industries and general public about the talents, history, rights and marketability of Hip-Hop artists and other musicians with disabilities.”
  • Sins Invalid – “Sins Invalid is a disability justice based performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and LGBTQ / gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized.”

Periodicals

Podcasts and Podcast Episodes

  • Bethany Stevens: Sex and Disability Expert and Activist – “In this podcast, Bethany Stevens is interviewed. Stevens is a queer sexologist and sociology doctoral student in Sociology at Georgia State University. In this episode she talks about a range of subjects about her current research and the subject of pleasure politics for the disabled.”
  • Disability Visibility Podcast – “This is life from a disabled lens. Disability Visibility is a podcast hosted by San Francisco night owl Alice Wong featuring conversations on politics, culture, and media with disabled people. If you’re interested in disability rights, social justice, and intersectionality, this show is for you. It’s time to hear more disabled people in podcasting and radio.”

Resources Shared by Presenters

  • The Nap Ministry – “The Nap Ministry was founded in 2016 by Tricia Hersey and is an organization that examines the liberating power of naps.”
  • Sick Woman Theory by Johanna Hedva – “Sick Woman Theory is an insistence that most modes of political protest are internalized, lived, embodied, suffering, and no doubt invisible. Sick Woman Theory redefines existence in a body as something that is primarily and always vulnerable” (p. 9).
  • The Spoon Theory – The personal story and analogy of what it is like to live with a chronic illness, with a particular focus on prioritizing needs versus available energies.
  • Time and Again: Old Women and Care Workers Navigating Time, Relationality, and Power in Dementia Units by Hailee Marie Yoshizaki-Gibbons – In this thesis, the author coins the term dementia time, “[when]…old women with dementia and their caregivers disrupt…normative, dominant, and linear approaches to temporality. They do this by slowing institutional time to ‘make time’ for connectivity, engaging in circular and repetitive forms of relationship building, and existing together.”
  • Halberstam, J. (2005). Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies. In In A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives [Sexual Cultures Series] (pp. 1-21). New York: New York University Press.

Websites

  • Bookshare – “Bookshare® is an ebook library that makes reading easier. People with reading barriers can customize their experience and read in ways that work for them.”
  • Disability Demands Justice – Leaders from across the disability community share their views on disability and why an intersectional approach is needed.
  • Fireweed Collective – “Fireweed Collective offers mental health education and mutual aid through a Healing Justice and Disability Justice lens. We support the emotional wellness of all people and center QTBIPOC folks in our internal leadership, programs, and resources.”
  • Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Writer, Disability/Transformative Justice Worker – “Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled femme writer, organizer, performance artist and educator of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent.”
  • Project LETS – History of Disability Justice – Provides introductory readings and videos, curricula, and other resources on the subject of disability justice.

Updated 8/24/2022