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

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

In addition to directly funding the genocide, mass disablement, and displacement of Palestinians, American empire invests significant time and resources into the fascist, authoritarian, and ableist repression of discourse on Palestine within U.S. borders. Grounded in anti-colonial, anti-imperialist feminist transnational disability studies (Erevelles, 2011; Puar, 2017), this panel will show that by focusing exclusively on access and inclusion, disability studies and disability rights frameworks have been complicit with Israel’s relentless, U.S.-backed occupation and attempt at annihilation of Palestine (Ben-Moshe & Harris, 2024; Jaffee, 2016; Jaffee & Sheehi, 2024; Puar, 2017; Snounu, Smith, & Bishop, 2019). The panel will offer a framework that helps us connect knowledges and practices (abolition, accessibility, militarization, carcerality) produced in and through US empire to analyze (and act on) the normalization of mass disablement in Palestine.

Building off of last year's ASA panel Shake the Ground, Crack the Foundation: Mad Studies and Revolution, we utilize Liat Ben-Moshe’s and Jina B. Kim’s “crip of color critique” to “argue that further investments in the state maintain the status quo at the expense of transformation and liberation for all.” We expand it transnationally to not only critique liberal identitarian approaches and celebrations of disability but demonstrate what such discourses do for the continued colonization of Palestine.

The papers in the panel will address the following questions: How can anti-imperialist knowledges on ‘mass impairment’ in Palestine inform our struggles to materially undermine or destabilize imperialism within U.S. borders? How does anti-imperialist knowledge birthed from theorists who explore mass impairment in Palestine critique the ways colonialism currently operates in US-based disability health research (e.g. the NIH)?
In what ways is ‘accessibility’ for disabled people in the US and Israel used to justify and advance institutional complicity in a disabling war economy? Specifically, how are U.S. universities’ investments in empire (and as part of that, Israeli settler-colonialism) fortified through practices of what LJ Jaffee calls access washing? And lastly, how does futurity, and the attempt to thwart it for Palestinians, play a key role in the Israeli regime of settler colonialism, occupation and militarized and administrative violence through carcerality (“political prisoners” and the collapsed lines between those terms)? From within Palestine, how do carceral eugenics (as Jess Whatcott refers to it) serve as disabling structures of biopolitical control, and what forms of resistance exist that promote Palestinian futurity (e.g. sperm smuggling)? How is disablement a core feature of carcerality in Palestine and in and via US Empire?

References
Ben-Moshe & Harris (2024). Pathologizing Palestinian Resistance. Death Panel Podcast.
Erevelles, N. (2011). Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic. Palgrave.
Jaffee & Sheehi (2024). Disrupting Fixity: Palestine as Central to Decolonial Disability Justice. Review of Disability Studies.
Jaffee, L. (2016). Disrupting Global Disability Frameworks: Settler Colonialism and the Geopolitics of Disability in Palestine/Israel. Disability & Society, 31(1), 116-130.
Puar, J. (2017). The Right to Maim. Duke University Press.
Snounu, Smith, & Bishop (2019). Disability, the Politics of Maiming, and Higher Education in Palestine. Disability Studies Quarterly.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Resisting Carceral Eugenics and Forging Palestinian Futures - Liat Ben-Moshe, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Toward a Political Model of Disability: A reflection on Colonialism in Disability Health Research - Sabrina Ali Jamal-Eddine, University of Illinois At Chicago

• Access-Washing American Empire within and beyond Academia - LJ Jaffee

Chair

• Sabrina Ali Jamal-Eddine, University of Illinois At Chicago

Comment

• Lara Sheehi

Biographical Information

Liat Ben-Moshe is an activist-scholar working at the intersection of incarceration, abolition and disability/madness. She is an Associate Professor of Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago, author of Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (2020) and co-editor of Disability Incarcerated (2014). https://www.liatbenmoshe.com/

L.J. Jaffee is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar with the Critical Design Lab in the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University. Previously, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Educational Studies at Colgate University for four years. Her work explores the intersections of critical university studies, critical disability studies, women’s and gender studies, and American studies. During her postdoctoral scholarship, she is revising her dissertation into a book titled, Access-Washing: U.S. Empire, Universities, and the Campus Movements Refusing a Disabling War Economy. Her work appears in Disability Studies Quarterly, Critical Education, Disability & Society, The Berkeley Review of Education, Disability and the Global South, and Review of Disability Studies, among others. She received her PhD from Syracuse University in Cultural Foundations of Education, with concentrations in women’s and gender studies and disability studies. She has been involved in Palestine solidarity work and community organizing in central New York for the past decade. She previously worked as a labor organizer supporting student workers building unions in higher education.

Sabrina Ali Jamal-Eddine, PhD BSN RN (she/her) is a disabled Lebanese health humanities nurse scientist, disability justice scholar-activist, and spoken word poet. Dr. Jamal-Eddine completed her PhD in Nursing and certificate in Disability Ethics from University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) where her research explored the use of spoken word poetry as a form of critical narrative pedagogy to educate nursing students about disability, ableism, and disability justice. She is now a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Disability and Human Development at UIC where she seeks to dismantle ableism in nursing education and practice through anti-colonial pedagogic strategies and community-based interventions rooted in the lived experiences of multiply marginalized disabled people. She is also a 2024-25 Emerge Disability Justice Fellow through Paul K. Longmore’s Institute on Disability where her project centered the creation of spoken word poetry on how colonial, imperialist practices of mass disablement in Palestine are issues of ableism that impede disability liberation everywhere.