CSJ 101 Round-Up: Disability Justice and Access Matters!

A graphic for our first CSJ Disability Justice + Access Matters event, “CSJ 101: Disability Justice at UMBC + Beyond”

For more information on disability services at UMBC, including how to get accommodations and reporting issues of inaccessibility, please see our previous post outlining these resources.

This October, as we begin to recognize National Disability Awareness Month, we here in the Women’s Center are excited to relaunch Critical Social Justice with the theme of Disability Justice + Access Matters!

Our goal is for our conversations to build a vision of a world where all bodies are valued and essential, and where we acknowledge and affirm that other identities intersect, creating a unique lived experience.  A society built on global capitalism, colonialism, and the multiple oppression of disabled people asserts everyday that people’s bodies are “expendable.”  However, we work to challenge that idea and honor that everyone has inherent worth independent of their productivity or labor.  As we attempt to “return to normal,” we have to reconsider who “normal” serves and take into account the lessons learned from how we have lived and survived through the pandemic.  What can we do, and what should we do, to carry forward the practices of accessibility?  

To kick off a year of Critical Social Justice events, we began with CSJ 101: Disability Justice at UMBC + Beyond.  Leading this workshop was the Women’s Center’s own, Amelia Meman, who described for participants the current state of the disability rights movement and what disability justice means as a more radical concept.

Participants started by discussing a few definitions of disability justice and the ways it resonated with each individual.  A few examples were intersectionality and the myth of a “neutral body”.  The conversation then moved into highlighting some important founders of the disability justice movement, which included:

• Patty Berne: co-founder and artistic director of Sins Invalid, a radical crip artist and activist group prioritizing queer people of color with disabilities
• Mia Mingus: writer, educator, and trainer for transformative justice and disability justice
• Stacey Park Milbern: a Bay Area-based organizer and disability justice thought leader
• Leroy Moore Jr.: a Black artist, writer, poet, activist, feminist, founder of Krip Hop, and co-founder of Sins Invalid

These four figures (and several other queer and disabled activists) developed the idea of disability justice which prioritized the needs of disabled people located at the intersection of multiple identities, and thus, experience layered oppression. With this established, the discussion then illustrated a vision for disability justice (originally developed by Sins Invalid), where we recognize that: 

• All bodies are considered unique and essential.
• All bodies have strengths and needs that must be met.
• Each and every person is powerful, not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them.
• All bodies are confined by ability, race, gender, sexuality, class, nation state, religion, and more, and we cannot separate them.

With the main founders and principles laid out, the group thought about how we do disability justice, starting with revisiting how we think about disability.  The medical model of disability “others” people’s bodies by viewing them as something to be rehabilitated, fixed, or cured.  Meanwhile, the social model was established to assert that disability is something born from people with impairments interacting with a society that doesn’t account for accessibility or justice in communication, interpersonal relationships, the political world, or in physical infrastructure.  It is the social model which has provided the foundation for the disability justice movement, the idea that disability isn’t related to personal deficit, but that it is the result of an inaccessible society that “disables”.  

Next, Amelia led the group through a few ways that allies and others with positional power can do the work to practice and leverage disability justice.  This included accepting feedback and changing as necessary, learning about disability justice, considering how to use positional power to create intentional accessibility, making content and spaces accessible, and finally listening and centering disabled people’s experiences.

To wrap up CSJ 101, the group discussed their experiences with disability and access at UMBC and off-campus. Some of the experiences named by those in attendance were*:

• “I often experience the physical campus as inaccessible.”
• “Accessibility routes can be confusing and accommodations are limited for some.”
• “Ableist implicit biases inform us all. We are all unlearning ableism.”
• “I have had frustrating experiences of inconsistent communication and support.”
• “I feel like there is a general lack of understanding, compassion, and humility on the part of UMBC faculty, staff, and other students when it comes to disability access and equity, and in working with disabled students.”
• “The pandemic has made UMBC consider and vastly improve digital and remote accessibility. The hope is that these practices should not end with the effort to “return to normal,” especially since many disabled community members have required and asked for these services for a long time.”
• “We should question the nature of medicalization, and what is considered the “normal” expectation of how a person’s body should look and function in and out of the classroom.”

Just as CSJ 101 participants were left with these questions, we also urge readers and our community members to consider: “What does disability justice mean to you?” and “How will you incorporate disability justice into your life?”  Even if it is through small practices such as changing vocabulary or practicing online accessibility, consider what you can do personally and in coordination with any positions of privilege to be in solidarity with the disabled community on and off-campus.  

If you are interested, you can access a recording of the CSJ 101: Disability Justice at UMBC + Beyond.  We also invite you to join us in our learning by attending our upcoming Critical Social Justice: Disability Justice and Access Matters events.  Check out our myUMBC page and follow along by subscribing to this blog!

*Considering this was an event with a small subset of UMBC community members, these themes and personal experiences should be viewed as individual opinions. In other words, many others experiencing impairments may not share the same opinion that this campus feels inaccessible.

For those who are experiencing some level of inaccessibility or ableism, it is important to know that there are resources and offices at our UMBC with the express purpose of assisting to resolve these issues. For more information on student accommodations, please check out the Office of Student Disability Services. For more on UMBC faculty, staff, and visitor accommodations/access needs OR to make a report of an inaccessibility, please check out the Office of Accessibility and Disability Services. If you believe you are being treated unfairly because of your disability and/or impairments (or any other aspect of your social identities), please consider working with the Office of Equity and Inclusion to make a report (anonymous reporting options are also available).

• More Information about CSJ 101 Round-Up: Disability Justice and Access Matters!