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2021 - 2022 Disability Justice as Feminist Practice

Disability Justice & Feminist Practice

2021 - 2022 Theme

Student Interviews with
Disability Justice leaders in Chicago.

 

The question now is what next. 

Or, to give that inquiry its full breadth and potential, we might quote Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha when she asks,

 “How do we move together as people with mixed abilities, multiracial, multi-gendered, mixed class, across the orientation spectrum—where no body/mind is left behind?”

This challenge can be found in Piepzna-Samarasinha’s influential Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice.

Dreaming, imagining, envisioning are all key themes within disability justice literature. Probably because, for many of us, the answer to how we move together—how we leave, truly, no body or mind behind—has been for so long and with such regret that our world simply isn’t built for it. 

The ongoing inequity of global healthcare does little to interrupt that belief. 

At the same time, we are all witness and party to radical and rapid change across customs, communities, and institutions that seemed immovable in recent memory. 

This year, we focus on disability justice as feminist praxis because this community—our Northwestern, local, and national community—has in common that we have experienced the world as otherwise. 

The ‘otherwise’ we seek is to leave no body or mind, including our own, behind, by pursuing what is possible without dishonoring our grief or dismissing our trauma. 

We are titling this year’s theme Disability Justice & Feminist Practice to acknowledge that disability justice is built from and requires the tools of resistance forged in feminist practice to keep us from conflating our dreams with that entrepreneurial spirit that craves better faster stronger reproduction. 

The collective decision of the Women’s Center staff to select Disability Justice & Feminist Practice as our theme for 2021 - 2022 owes much to the rich conversations that have been taking place at Northwestern in this remote year plus. If we did not before, we now see the crucial role to be played by robust and inclusive mental health options for staff, students, and faculty and literacy around mental health for all. The HR WELL and AccessibleNU offices have become lifelines for many and Alternative Work Strategies have moved rapidly into the mainstream. The Office of Civil Rights and Title IX Compliance concluded their sexual assault awareness month of Envisioning Harm Free Communities programming with disability rights activist Lydia X.Z. Brown, who encouraged us to see and understand the connections between ableism and other forms of oppression. The Queertopia keynote on Trans/Queer/Crip-of-Color Care with Hil Malatino and Jina B. Kim left us with so many important questions, among them: how to recognize the potential for abuse within progressive communities and how barriers of likability and sympathy hinder access to care. We were led here also by the wisdom of our student advisory board and by our unfinished conversations around mutual aid.

If mutual aid is the way, perhaps the feminist anti-ableist future is the where to. 

We will engage disability justice and feminist practice through a fall quarter book discussion group led once again by Njoki and Melisa and open to folks in every role at the university. 

In the winter we will host our annual deep-dive Symposium during Women’s History Month. 

In the spring Sarah will be offering the Linzer-Grant funded Feminism and Social Change course within Gender and Sexuality Studies, with a focus on local disability rights movements. While the course is designed for undergraduates, we will be hosting guest speakers in open and accessible forums to engage more broadly with our campus community. 

There are a number of initiatives at the Women’s Center not bound to the annual theme—ongoing programs, affinity groups, advocacy work. We do not ask these important services and spaces to sway to the rhythm of our annual theme, but we hope to be in dialogue with the full range of our community about the tangible moves toward greater accessibility we are empowered to take. 

Please join us in these conversations. 

If you do not feel directly impacted by disability, we hope an emphasis on universal accessibility and health justice calls you in as a pandemic survivor renewed in your relationship to well-being as not only an ally, but as a body in need. If the word “feminist’ is not one you use to self-identify, we hope that this emphasis on feminist practice as the fostering of abundance and liberation will cast that term in a more favorable light for you, even if you chose not to take it as your own. 

We are excited to move together with you.

Get Involved

Check out our accessible storytime, featuring Aaron Slater, Illustrator by Andrea Beaty and Just Ask! Be Different, Be Brave, Be You by Sonia Sotomayor.

Check our events page for programming.

Subscribe to our newsletter for monthly reflections on the intersections of our theme and other calls for social justice.