Antiracism & Social Justice Resources

Please note that as of January 2023, this guide is no longer being updated. Email library@simmons.edu for further information. This guide is intended to provide some general information about anti-oppression, diversity, and inclusion as well as information and resources for the social justice issues key to the Simmons University community. This guide is by no means exhaustive, but rather serves as a starting place for finding information from a variety of sources. It will continue to develop in response to evolving anti-oppression issues and community needs.

Do you find yourself avoiding conversations on disabilities? Worried you'll offend a disabled friend? A disability rights activist shares ways to be a better ally and to destigmatize disability in America.

Featuring Elliott Fukui and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. In response to heightened levels of abuse and violence experienced by disabled people, disability justice organizers have developed tremendous knowledge and creative approaches to care, safety, and preventing and stopping violence without relying on the state. How do disability justice strategies and knowledge inform transformative justice practices? In this video, disability justice and transformative justice organizers Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarsinha and Elliott Fukui explore some of the intersections of these movements. Leah and Elliott will expand this conversation during an online event on April 10, 2020. Learn more and join the conversation here: http://bcrw.barnard.edu/event/moving-at-the-speed-of-trust-disability-and-transformative-justice/ This video is part of the Building Accountable Communities video series. The Building Accountable Communities Project promotes non-punitive responses to harm by developing resources for transformative justice practitioners and organizing convenings and workshops that educate the public. Created by Project Nia and the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Video produced by Mariame Kaba, Dean Spade, and Hope Dector.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Elliott Fukui Live transcript (PDF): http://bcrw.barnard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Moving-at-the-Speed-of-Trust-live-transcript.pdf We are working on a word-for-word transcript that will be posted here when it becomes available. Slide deck (PDF) by Elliott and Leah featuring important definitions, notes, and frameworks for today’s conversation: http://bcrw.barnard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Moving-at-the-Speed-of-Trust.pdf During the event, you can send questions for the Q&A by emailing bcrw@barnard.edu or via Twitter @bcrwtweets #TransformingHarm On the screen: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Elliott Fukui (speakers) Darryn Hollifield and Natalie Cuddy (ASL) Hope Dector (introduction) RELATED LINKS Other events from the Building Accountable Communities Project: - Transforming Harm: Experiments in Accountability – featuring Stas Schmiedt and Lea Roth, moderated by Mariame Kaba: https://bcrw.barnard.edu/event/transforming-harm-experiments-in-accountability/ - Building Accountable Communities – featuring Kiyomi Fujikawa and Shannon Perez-Darby, moderated by Mariame Kaba: http://bcrw.barnard.edu/event/building-accountable-communities/ Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, edited by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Ejeris Dixon: https://www.akpress.org/beyond-survival.html Elliott Fukui – madqueer.org Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha – BrownStarGirl.org Sins Invalid - Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People: https://www.flipcause.com/secure/reward_step2/OTMxNQ==/20602 Event Description: “Disabled folks have never been able to rely on the systems that are in place or those systems have been incredibly harmful to us.” – Elliott Fukui In response to heightened levels of abuse and violence experienced by people with disabilities, disability justice organizers have developed tremendous knowledge and creative approaches to care, safety, and preventing and stopping violence without relying on the state. How do disability justice strategies and knowledge inform transformative justice practices? How are disability justice and transformative justice interconnected? “What would our transformative justice work look like if we put everyone’s access needs at the center?” – Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, in “Cripping TJ,” an essay in the groundbreaking new collection Beyond Survival co-edited with Ejeris Dixon How is anti-ableism essential to transformative justice? How do we start with the shared values of self-determination and the belief that no one is disposable to build capacity for personal and societal transformation?

Special Thanks: Pamela Rae Schuller @PamelaComedy Eman Rimawi @Eman_Rimawi Credits: https://www.buzzfeed.com/bfmp/videos/57021 Check out more awesome videos at BuzzFeedVideo! https://bit.ly/YTbuzzfeedvideo https://bit.ly/YTbuzzfeedblue1 https://bit.ly/YTbuzzfeedviolet GET MORE BUZZFEED: https://www.buzzfeed.com https://www.buzzfeed.com/videos https://www.youtube.com/buzzfeedvideo https://www.youtube.com/asis https://www.youtube.com/buzzfeedblue https://www.youtube.com/buzzfeedviolet https://www.youtube.com/perolike https://www.youtube.com/ladylike BuzzFeedVideo BuzzFeed Motion Picture’s flagship channel. Sometimes funny, sometimes serious, always shareable. New videos posted daily! Love BuzzFeed? Get the merch! BUY NOW: https://goo.gl/gQKF8m MUSIC First Day Of Summer_NoVox Licensed via Warner Chappell Production Music Inc. Walking On The Sun_Full Licensed via Warner Chappell Production Music Inc. Bliss Beach_Full Licensed via Warner Chappell Production Music Inc. VIDEO Abstract blue bokeh and blurred colorful nature background bouybin/Getty Images EXTERNAL CREDITS Pamela Rae Schuller @PamelaComedy + Eman Rimawi @Eman_Rimawi

#DemocracyNowDemocracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on nearly 1,400 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream 8-...

"Violence in the lives of women with disabilities is not a new problem, but it is a problem about which little has been written. This gap in our knowledge needs to be addressed, as women with disabilities are valuable members of our society whose experiences need to be made known. Without such knowledge, political action for social justice and for the prevention of violence is impossible. Contributors to Not a New Problem examine the experiences of Canadian women with disabilities, the need for improved access to services and the ways this violence is exacerbated by and intersects with gender, sexuality, indigeneity, race, ethnicity and class"--

"Provides a collection of both personal narratives and critical analyses of mental illness in the LIS field, exploring intersections with labor, culture, stigma, race, ability, identity, and gender"--

Forbidden Signs explores American culture from the mid-nineteenth century to 1920 through the lens of one striking episode: the campaign led by Alexander Graham Bell and other prominent Americans to suppress the use of sign language among deaf people. The ensuing debate over sign language invoked such fundamental questions as what distinguished Americans from non-Americans, civilized people from "savages," humans from animals, men from women, the natural from the unnatural, and the normal from the abnormal. An advocate of the return to sign language, Baynton found that although the grounds of the debate have shifted, educators still base decisions on many of the same metaphors and images that led to the misguided efforts to eradicate sign language.

"A groundbreaking collection of first-person writing on the joys and challenges of the modern disability experience: Disability Visibility brings together the voices of activists, authors, lawyers, politicians, artists, and everyday people whose daily lives are, in the words of playwright Neil Marcus, "an art ... an ingenious way to live." According to the last census, one in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some are visible, some are hidden--but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Now, just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, activist Alice Wong brings together an urgent, galvanizing collection of personal essays by contemporary disabled writers. There is Harriet McBryde Johnson's "Unspeakable Conversations," which describes her famous debate with Princeton philosopher Peter Singer over her own personhood. There is columnist s. e. smith's celebratory review of a work of theater by disabled performers. There are original pieces by up-and-coming authors like Keah Brown and Haben Girma. There are blog posts, manifestos, eulogies, and testimonies to Congress. Taken together, this anthology gives a glimpse of the vast richness and complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community. It invites readers to question their own assumptions and understandings. It celebrates and documents disability culture in the now. It looks to the future and past with hope and love."--

"Politics of (En)closure: Deinstitutionalization, Disability, and Prison Abolition argues that a complex understanding of disability is fundamental to an understanding of decarceration. Many argue that the rise of deinstitutionalization led directly to the rise of imprisonment. Liat Ben-Moshe complicates this narrative by looking closely at how people of color and disabled people are pathologized as well as how profit plays a roll in caring for "disposable" populations in nursing homes, rehab facilities, prisons, etc. Ben-Moshe puts forth a theory of carceral abolition as a way to understand the failed utopian dream of deinstitutionalization and how to move forward"--

Broadly attentive to the political and economic shifts of the last several decades, Robert McRuer asks how disability activists, artists and social movements generate change and resist the dominant forms of globalization in an age of austerity, or "crip times." Throughout "Crip Times", McRuer considers how transnational queer disability theory and culture-activism, blogs, art, photography, literature, and performance-provide important and generative sites for both contesting austerity politics and imagining alternatives. The book engages various cultural flashpoints, including the spectacle surrounding the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games; the murder trial of South African Paralympian Oscar Pistorius; the photography of Brazilian artist Livia Radwanski which documents the gentrification of Colonia Roma in Mexico City; the defiance of Chilean students demanding a free and accessible education for all; the sculpture and performance of UK artist Liz Crow; and the problematic rhetoric of "aspiration" dependent upon both able-bodied and disabled figurations that emerged in Thatcher's England. "Crip Times" asserts that disabled people themselves are demanding that disability be central to our understanding of political economy and uneven development and suggests that, in some locations, their demand for disability justice is starting to register. Ultimately, McRuer argues that a politics of austerity will always generate the compulsion to fortify borders and to separate a narrowly defined "us" in need of protection from "them."

Academic Ableism brings together disability studies and institutional critique to recognize the ways that disability is composed in and by higher education, and rewrites the spaces, times, and economies of disability in higher education to place disability front and center. For too long, argues Jay Timothy Dolmage, disability has been constructed as the antithesis of higher education, often positioned as a distraction, a drain, a problem to be solved. The ethic of higher education encourages students and teachers alike to accentuate ability, valorize perfection, and stigmatize anything that hints at intellectual, mental, or physical weakness, even as we gesture toward the value of diversity and innovation. Examining everything from campus accommodation processes, to architecture, to popular films about college life, Dolmage argues that disability is central to higher education, and that building more inclusive schools allows better education for all.

ableism, type of discrimination in which able-bodied individuals are viewed as normal and superior to those with a disability, resulting in prejudice toward the latter. The modern concept of ableism emerged in the 1960s and ’70s, when disability activists placed disability in a political context. Discrimination against disabled persons occurs in countries worldwide and may be reflected in individual, societal, and institutional attitudes and norms and in the arrangement or dynamics of certain environments. Indeed, interpretations of ableism are based on perspectives of what constitutes normal ability, which often gives shape to beliefs and norms and to physical and social

Recent coverage in higher education newspapers and social media platforms implies that chronic conditions, illnesses and disabilities are becoming more prominent amongst academics. Changes to fundi...

The Americans with Disabilities Act created regulations for the accessibility of buildings and services for individuals with disabilities, but libraries still have a deficit in information highligh...

Rachel Blick, MA , Matthew Franklin, BA, David Ellsworth, MPH, Susan Havercamp, PhD, Barbara Kornblau, JD, OTR/L, FAOTA, The Ohio State University Nisonger Center, UCEDD, Florida A&M University

a Media Study (2013-2015) and Overview David M. Perry, PhD Lawrence Carter-Long March 2016

Ableism (/ˈeɪbəlɪzəm/; also known as ablism, disablism (British English), anapirophobia, anapirism, and disability discrimination) is discrimination and social prejudice against people with disabilities or who are perceived to be disabled. Ableism characterizes people as defined by their disabilities and inferior to the non-disabled.[1] On this basis, people are assigned or denied certain perceived abilities, skills, or character orientations.

The Icarus Project (2002-2020) was a network of peer-support groups and media projects with the stated aim of changing the social stigmas regarding mental health.[1]

In 2011–12, about 3 in 10 state and federal prisoners and 4 in 10 local jail inmates reported having at least one disability.

A powerful five-point guide to undoing and unlearning ableism in our organizations, the social justice space, and the nonprofit and philanthropy sectors.

“I want to create a world that is reflective of all of us,” the disability activist said.

COVID-19 continues to spread, and the colleges and universities that are opting for remote learning are doing a terrible job of implementing it.

A year after many campuses transitioned to remote instruction, blind students continue to encounter barriers that undermine their learning.

Nearly every element of our workday is designed for neurotypical employees, leaving out millions of talented people. It’s time to rethink how we work.

"My work of challenging my students' internalized ableism has allowed me to gradually accept my own disability."

Language has long been used to dehumanize or marginalize people with disabilities. Ableist language shows up in different ways: as metaphors, jokes, or euphemisms. While ableism exists beyond the words we use, in structures and policies, our vocabularies can help us how we think and behave with people around us. We spoke to four disability rights activists to know why our words matter, how they influence our biases, thoughts, and behaviors and what we can do to check them.