Disability (and) Care in Crisis: Disability Consciousness on the Frontlines of Gentrification and Drug Wars

• In Event: Disability Consciousness, Imaginaries, and Struggles: Transnational Narratives of Becoming and Remaining Disabled

Abstract

In this presentation, I examine the emergence of revolutionary disability consciousness in anti-gentrification and activist harm reduction work in Toronto’s “downtown east end,” a stigmatized inner-city neighbourhood. Drawing on three years of research with Toronto service providers and anti-poverty activists, I use Rachel Gorman’s (2016) disability/disablement dialectic as an analytic to historicize and materialize the terrain of radical disability struggles and demonstrate the centrality of disabled people on the frontlines of urban anti-gentrification and harm reduction struggles. This analysis also expands understandings of disability that exceed mainstream disability movements and helps develop a revolutionary disability futurity.

Presenter

• Mary Jean Hande, Mount Saint Vincent University