Critical Disability Studies Caucus: The Pedagogy of Disability Justice: Building Support for Multiply-Marginalized Disabled People in Precarious Times

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Professional Development Format

Abstract

Practices that generate support for multiply-marginalized people who exist outside of “mainstream” disability organizations are under-examined. Some of these practices are dictated by emergency and involve protest and furious appeals to ableist power structures and the public in an effort to prevent cuts to funding or resources that will harm multiply-marginalized disabled people. Other practices are quiet and counter-publican, dedicated to healing and reparation. Still other practices draw on crip aesthetic strategies to embed the felt experience of disability and racial, sexual, gendered, and class marginalization within works of narrative, poetic, and visual art.

This workshop seeks to explore cross-disciplinary practices for generating what the Disability Justice Collective calls “a movement-building framework that would center the lives, needs, and organizing strategies of disabled queer and trans and/or Black and brown people marginalized from mainstream disability rights organizing’s white-dominated, single-issue focus” (Piepzna-Samarasinha 5). The workshop’s exchanges will seek to focus on and circulate the pedagogical strategies and practices of multiply-marginalized people outside of, but also within, the academy, whose margins – like the margins of the U.S. society writ large – are full of precarity, vulnerability, and the exploitation of contingent and apprentice labor. Given that Hawaiʻi is the site of the 2019 annual meeting of the American Studies Association, the pedagogical practices and activist approaches of disabled Hawaiʻians and Pacific Islanders deserve particular attention in this conversation. Questions the workshop might consider include: How is the need for self- and other-care in multiply-marginalized communities balanced with the activist impulse to confront oppressive structures? What teaching practices have been most effective in bringing about change in those structures? What can the academy do to better center the knowledge of queer, trans, Black, and brown people in building support for justice for disabled people, and especially for the most marginalized?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Andrew Harnish, Quinnipiac University

Panelists

• Lydia X.Z. Brown, Activist

• Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Performance Artist

• Margaret Price, The Ohio State University

• Samantha D Schalk, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Sushil K Oswal, University of Washington-Tacoma

• Jessica Horvath Williams, University of California-Los Angeles

• Vivian Delchamps, University of California-Los Angeles