Imagining Disabled Futures Through Disability Justice
The journey towards a safe and accepting future for all is one that has started in the Western world though painfully slowly and with many steps back. One community for whom a future is less often discussed and even less so defended is the disabled community. This conference will address how disabled futures are often forgotten and denied, and how we can challenge what ableism has told us about disabled life.
Assuring a future to disabled people starts now, with deconstructing the lie we have been told which is that a good future is one where disability doesn’t exist, for the truth, which is that a world where disabled futures are cultivated is the only way for us all to thrive.
This seminar will also explore the intersections between disability and race as well as queerness, addressing how all three of these liberation movements are linked. These communities cannot reach freedom independently and therefore, they must fight alongside each other.
(An alternate version of this seminar called Imagining Disabled Futures through Disability Justice and Allyship is also available)
Making Survival Accessible: Covid-19, climate change, and disability
As we are still living through a global pandemic which started massively impacting North America a little over two years ago, the world has had many chances to adapt its strategy to actually help the more vulnerable, however, it has not been done adequately and our society is going back to its inaccessible ways. The habit of leaving behind and marginalizing disabled people during worldwide crises is one that has been seen many times, notably during natural disasters.
This seminar will present the ways in which the effects and our response to the COVID-19 pandemic are sadly way too similar to the way climate change impacts the life of people with disabilities, including our ways of addressing the latter matter.
This seminar will also shed light on why it is crucial to use an intersectional approach to the disabled life experience if we desire to understand the true consequences of COVID-19, climate change, as well as mobilities and thus make survival accessible to all.