Disability Justice & Access-Centered Pedagogy in the Pandemic

Last spring, school went virtual for everyone from kindergarteners to grad students. Some college students had no safe place to go to. Parents and caregivers working in and outside the home have had to contend with competing and sometimes impossible demands on money, time, and energy. Some teachers, faculty, and staff have been pressured to return to in-person teaching in unsafe conditions. Many students have been craving in-person learning and community. Everyone has felt the demands to rush, and above all, to perform and achieve despite the collective trauma and mass death of the pandemic. And still the pandemic has hit disabled people at the margins of the margins the hardest, depriving us of resources, support, and care. This fireside chat between two leading scholar-activists will explore what access-centered pedagogy, rooted in disability justice, can offer us all.

We will provide ASL interpretation and CART captioning for this event, which participants will be able to join by video or phone.

A fireside chat with invited speakers

• Aimi Hamraie is associate professor of Medicine, Health, & Society and American Studies at Vanderbilt University, where they direct the Critical Design Lab. Hamraie is author of Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (2017). They are co-founder of the Nashville Disability Justice Collective and Nashville Mutual Aid Collective.

• Mimi Khúc is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell and Scholar/Artist/Activist in Residence in Disability Studies at Georgetown University. She is the managing editor of The Asian American Literary Review and guest editor of Open in Emergency: A Special Issue on Asian American Mental Health. She is very slowly working on several book projects, including a manifesto on contingency in Asian American studies and essays on mental health, the arts, and the university. But mostly she spends her time baking, as access and care for herself and loved ones.

Please note that after registering on EventBrite, you will also receive instructions for receiving a Zoom link. AWN will host this event on Zoom as well as livestream to Facebook.

[Photo: Event banner shows a photo of open books arranged in a circle. There are photos of two people. The first person is Aimi Hamraie, an olive-skinned, transmasculine-presenting Iranian person with short, dark curly hair and rectangular glasses, smiles at the camera. They wear a blue collared shirt and blue and green checkered blazer. Behind them is a blurry green tree background. The second person is Mimi Khúc, a young Southeast Asian person with short black hair faced away from the camera, speaking into a microphone. She has a tattoo of a treble clef behind her ear. Her photo is by Tommy Piantone. The corner shows the AWN logo - a large "a" with a dragonfly on it, and the words awnnetwork.org.]