Join us for a panel discussion with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Sami Schalk on crip justice today (with ASL and live transcription)
About this Event
In the face of ongoing police brutality against disabled Brown and Black queer and trans folks, how can we think about intersections of disability justice and #BlackLivesMatter? As the pandemic wears on, what are the care- and community-centered responses to COVID-19 and able-bodied white supremacy? What is the place of pleasure and desire in the long history of disability justice organizing? This panel discussion will explore disability justice approaches to working toward and imagining otherwise.
Cosponsored by Wesleyan University’s Departments of American Studies; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Accessibility Services
LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA is a queer disabled nonbinary femme writer, performance artist, freedom dreamer, and disability and transformative justice movement worker of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Roma ascent. She is the Lambda Award winning author or co-editor of nine books, including Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement; Tonguebreaker; Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice; Bridge of Flowers; Bodymap; Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home; and The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. A lead artist with Sins Invalid since 2009, they are on the organizing team for the Disability and Intersectionality Summit and the 2020 winner of the Lambda Literary Foundation's Jean Cordova Prize for career achievement in Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction.
SAMI SCHALK is an assistant professor of Gender & Women's Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on disability, race, and gender in contemporary American literature and culture. Schalk's first book, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, & Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction (Duke UP 2018), explores how black women writers use non-realist genres to reimagine the possibilities and limits of bodyminds, challenging our understanding of the meanings of disability, race, and gender. Schalk's next project focuses on disability politics in black activism in the post-Civil Rights era. She identifies as a fat, black, queer, femme, disabled cis-gendered woman. She can be found on Twitter as @drsamischalk and on her website, samischalk.com.