Access-Washing American Empire within and beyond Academia

• In Event: Cultivating resistance from within and beyond Palestine: Reflections on mass impairment, carcerality, and access-washing (HYBRID)

Abstract

This paper will discuss access-washing as it relates to U.S. universities’ investments in empire (and as part of that, Israeli settler-colonialism). Within disability studies and disability rights frameworks, access is imagined as an uncontested good and the presumed goal of institutional or policy change. The framework of access-washing shows how settler states and institutions (like universities) mobilize liberal notions of accessibility to fortify their investments in U.S. empire and its disabling war economy. As a counter to liberal conceptions of disability and accessibility advanced by universities, I’ll also discuss how organizers in anti-imperialist, pro-Palestine campus-based movements practice, model, or approach a sense of collective access (Mingus, 2010).

Author

• LJ Jaffee