Dis/ability Rights, Justice & Countering Ableism

Disability exists regardless of whether a doctor has confirmed its existence. Yet in the American workplace, employees are not disabled, or entitled to reasonab

"Depending on the statistics you read, approximately one-third of the inmates in U.S. jails and prisons have some sort of mental disability. It has become cliche to say that our jails and prisons have become de facto mental institutions. How did we reach this point? Representing People with Mental Disabilities: A Practical Guide for Criminal Defense Lawyers takes a look at the challenges and opportunities that are presented in these types of cases. For criminal defense lawyers of all types, clients with mental disabilities are a part of their practice. This ranges from the white-collar criminal defense lawyer who represents an executive charged with tax evasion who functions in spite of a variety of conditions which he keeps hidden, to the public defender assigned as standby or advisory counsel for the defendant who wants to represent himself at trial, to the sole practitioner representing the man with Asperger's charged with possession of child pornography on his computer. Representing People with Mental Disabilities is easy-to-read and easy-to-navigate. It is intended that you can throw the book in your briefcase on the way to the courthouse, or load it on your tablet and turn to the appropriate chapter or chapters when needed. If you want to learn more about a topic, the Suggested Works section at the end of the book contains titles of books and articles as well as websites. Additionally, many chapters contain the statement at the end, "Complete citations are available from the author/authors upon request." The accompanying website has motions and pleadings which you can adapt to your jurisdiction." --

"A manifesto exploding what we think we know about disability, and arguing that disabled people are the real experts when it comes to technology and disability. When bioethicist and professor Ashley Shew became a self-described "hard-of-hearing chemo-brained amputee with Crohn's disease and tinnitus," there was no returning to "normal." Suddenly well-meaning people called her an "inspiration" while grocery shopping, or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don't want what the abled assume they want--nor are they generally asked. Why do abled people frame disability as an individual problem that calls for technological solutions, rather than a social one? In a warm, feisty, opinionated voice and vibrant prose, Shew shows how we can create better narratives and more accessible futures by drawing from the insights of the cross-disability community. For the future is surely disabled--whether through changing climate, new diseases, or even through space travel. It's time we looked closely at how we all think about disability technologies and learn to envision disabilities not as liabilities, but as skill sets enabling all of us to navigate a challenging world." --

Visible protests reflect both continuity and change. This Element illustrates how protest around longstanding issues and grievances is punctuated by movement dynamics as well as broader cultural and institutional environments. The disability movement is an example of how activist networks and groups strategically adapt to opportunity and threat, linking protest waves to the development of issue politics. The Element examines sixty years of protest across numerous issue areas that matter for disability including social welfare, discrimination, transportation, healthcare, and media portrayals. Situating visible protest in this way provides a more nuanced picture of cycles of contention as they relate to political and organizational processes, strategies and tactics, and short-and-long-term outcomes. It also provides clues about why protest ebbs and flows, when and how protest matters, who it matters for, and for what.

This book examines how those with disabilities, and in particular, the Deaf and hard-of-hearing, are impacted by the influence language and culture in policing, criminal law, and corrections. Frequently left out of policy making and research, almost no resources exist that can inform and aid law enforcement, legal, and correctional officials on culturally competent interactions with the Deaf and hard-of-hearing. As a result, this group is at a distinct disadvantage when dealing with law enforcement or the courts as well as being vastly underserved, which often lead to negative outcomes for the Deaf suspect/defendant/inmate as they attempt to interact with law enforcement and navigate the legal system. In a step-by-step presentation from arrest to incarceration each chapter will discuss a specific part of the legal system. As well as providing information on the topic, this book can serve as an important resource to the myriad of issues and difficulties that may be experiences by the Deaf suspect, defendant, or inmate, as well as by law enforcement officers, attorneys, and correctional officers. To illustrate these issues, previous cases of Deaf suspects, defendants, and inmates will be presented and discussed to clarify key issues and to provide a perspective of the problem. Each chapter dealing with these issues will also provide suggestions for more culturally competent interactions between the Deaf community and the legal system.

The much-anticipated follow up to the groundbreaking anthology Disability Visibility: another revolutionary collection of first-person writing on the joys and challenges of the modern disability experience, and intimacy in all its myriad forms. What is intimacy? More than sex, more than romantic love, the pieces in this stunning and illuminating new anthology offer broader and more inclusive definitions of what it can mean to be intimate with another person. Explorations of caregiving, community, access, and friendship offer us alternative ways of thinking about the connections we form with others--a vital reimagining in an era when forced physical distance is at times a necessary norm. But don't worry: there's still sex to consider--and the numerous ways sexual liberation intersects with disability justice. Plunge between these pages and you'll also find disabled sexual discovery, disabled love stories, and disabled joy. These twenty-five stunning original pieces--plus other modern classics on the subject, all carefully curated by acclaimed activist Alice Wong--include essays, photo essays, poetry, drama, and erotica: a full spectrum of the dreams, fantasies, and deeply personal realities of a wide range of beautiful bodies and minds. Disability Intimacy will free your thinking, invigorate your spirit, and delight your desires

"A People's Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice explains the history and theories behind abolition and disability justice in a way that is easy to understand for those new to these concepts yet also gives insights that will be useful to seasoned activists. The book uses extensive research and professional and lived experience to illuminate the way the State uses disability and its power to disable to incarcerate multiply marginalized disabled people, especially those who are queer, trans, Black, or Indigenous. Because disabled people are much more likely than nondisabled people to be locked up in prisons, jails, and other sites of incarceration, abolitionists, and others critical of carceral systems must incorporate a disability justice perspective into our work. A People's Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice gives personal and policy examples of how and why disabled people are disproportionately caught up in the carceral net, and how we can use this information to work toward prison and police abolition more effectively. This book includes practical tools and strategies that will be useful for anyone who cares about disability justice or abolition and explains why we can't have one without the other"--Amazon.com.

"In Judging Insanity, Punishing Difference, Chloe Deambrogio explores how developments in the field of forensic psychiatry shaped American courts' assessments of defendants' mental health and criminal responsibility over the course of the 20th century. During this period, new psychiatric notions of the mind and its readability, legal doctrines of insanity and diminished culpability, and cultural stereotypes about race and gender shaped the ways in which legal professionals, mental health experts, and lay witnesses approached mental disability evidence, especially in cases carrying the death penalty. Using Texas as a case-study, Deambrogio examines how these medical, legal, and cultural trends shaped psycho-legal debates in state criminal courts, while shedding light on the ways in which experts and lay actors' interpretations of 'pathological' mental states influenced trial verdicts in capital cases. She shows that despite mounting pressures from advocates of the 'rehabilitative penology', Texas courts maintained a punitive approach towards defendants allegedly affected by severe mental disabilities, while allowing for moralized views about personalities, habits, and lifestyle to influence psycho-legal assessments, in potentially prejudicial ways"--

"Struggle and Solidarity presents seven key pieces of federal legislation and demonstrates how public policies--even when not explicitly mental health related--can shape social determinants and improve mental health"--

Nothing About Us Without Us

Autistics for Autistics Ontario (A4A) is Canada’s national autistic self-advocacy organization. We are an international affiliate of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN). We are an autistic-led organization. We work in partnership with other disability groups to educate the public and transform Canada’s autism policies from a charity perspective to a RIGHTS perspective. Along with our Parent Alliance, we advocate for our federal, provincial and territorial governments to consult directly with autistic people when developing the policies that affect our lives.

To ensure that people with disabilities are treated as equals and that they are given the same decisions, choices, rights, responsibilities, and chances to speak up to empower themselves; opportunities to make new friends, and to learn from their mistakes.

Content about autism by autistic and neurodivergent people. A resource for autistic adults, parents of autistic children, educators, and physicians.

Listen, and you will hear it: the tangible dread of Autistic individuals around the globe. April is Autism Awareness Month, which kicked off with Autism Awareness Week. Circulating across Twitter and other social media platform there were puzzle piece symbols and tragedy tropes about Autistic individuals needing to be “cured.' When it comes to the podcasting industry, I know the feeling all too well. I was diagnosed six years ago, and it took a long to accept that I am not broken, and that I am actually a 'whole' person. I am not a puzzle or a mystery, or even

Support our work: https://democracynow.org/giveCivil rights leader Bishop William Barber joins us to discuss his calls for more awareness and justice for dis...

Imagining anti-ableist liberation beyond the rubrics of access and inclusion In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. In Crip Negativity , J. Logan Smilges shows us what's gone wrong and what we can do to fix it. Leveling a strong critique of the category of disability and liberal disability politics, Smilges asks and imagines what horizons might exist for the liberation of those oppressed by ableism-beyond access and inclusion. Inspired by models of negativity in queer studies, Black studies, and crip theory, Smilges proposes that bad crip feelings might help all of us to care gently for one another, even as we demand more from the world than we currently believe to be possible. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

By Rebecca Potance (Follow us on LinkedIn) If you or a loved one suffer from clinical depression, I recommend watching the 2011 film “Melancholia.” The first part of the movie features a recently m…

“We are already working with more people with disabilities than we think,” says Ben Lumicao, an in-house counsel in Chicago with a visible disability (cerebral palsy). More than a quarter of Americans have a disability of some kind, but only 30% of those fall into the “visible” spectrum Lumicao describes. That’s an arresting thought for […]

People with disabilities represent over 1 billion people across the planet and around 27 percent of the U.S. population . Disability Pride Month is observed every July to commemorate the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in July of 1990. The first Disability Pride Day , or Disabili

"In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled - and what if that's not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it's possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation? Building on the work of their game-changing book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other - and the rest of the world - alive during Trump, fascism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Other subjects include crip interdependence, care and mutual aid in real life, disabled community building, and disabled art practice as survival and joy. Written over the course of two years of disabled isolation during the pandemic, this is a book of love letters to other disabled QTBIPOC (and those concerned about disability justice, the care crisis, and surviving the apocalypse); honour songs for kin who are gone; recipes for survival; questions and real talk about care, organizing, disabled families, and kin networks and communities; and wild brown disabled femme joy in the face of death. With passion and power, The Future Is Disabled remembers our dead and insists on our future." --

"This book explores how being "disabled" originates in the physical world, social representations and rules, and historical power relations-the interplay of which render bodies "normal" or not. Scholars and researchers will find that this book provides new avenues for thinking about dis/ability. A wider audience will find it accessible and informative"--

"In 1938 the Fair Labor Standards Act authorized the use of subminimum wages for workers with disabilities. While some states have banned their use, it remains legal federally. The program known as 14(c) has a long history of poor oversight and abuse. While disability rights have grown in the United States, this issue lags decades behind"--

By Minh N. Vu Seyfarth Synopsis: SCOTUS grants certiorari on an ADA Title III case for the first time in 18 years to resolve a circuit split on whether an

A recent survey by the New Jersey State Bar Association revealed that more than two-thirds of the lawyers who responded reported feeling anxious within the past two weeks. The survey also revealed that 68% of lawyers surveyed experienced anxiety during that time period, while 56% reported a high prevalence of alcohol misuse. Even more concerning, […]

President Biden has declared an end to the COVID-19 national emergency, but people living with long COVID say the pandemic is far from over. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found nearly one in five people infected with COVID-19 go on to experience symptoms of long COVID. We speak to science writer Ryan Prior about the movement to expand research and resources for those with long COVID, and his own experience living with the chronic illness. Prior is the author of The Long Haul and writes the “Patient Revolution” for Psychology Today.

In a statement to HR Dive, Achilles International denied the allegations, saying they were previously dismissed by a state agency.

a blog by Mia Mingus

A study was conducted that examined readily available syllabi from library and information sciences graduate programs to discover what their instructors taught library graduate students about accessibility and disability through an analysis of the structure and topics of their syllabi. Of the 149 courses identified, 77 syllabi were available to examine. Findings include a lack of consistency and accuracy across syllabi structure, as well as components like poor citations, an emphasis on digital accessibility above all other types as a topic, and a lack of learning assessment on the topics of accessibility and disability. This syllabi analysis indicates that while accessibility and disability is being taught in library and information science programs, it is relatively spotty in terms of diversity of content, with a generally narrow focus on digital objects and web materials, as well as generally poor syllabus design which sends the message that accessibility and disability issues are generally unimportant.

Read more about US Domestic News Roundup: U.S. Supreme Court backs deaf student who sued Michigan school district; Arkansas enacts law restricting school bathroom use by transgender people and more on Devdiscourse

Disability Justice In the Age of Mass Incarceration: Perspectives on Race, Disability, Law & Accountability Summer 2016 Contact Information Talila A. Lewis ---.---.---- (voice/text)* ---.---.---- (videophone) talila.a.lewis@gmail.com (e-mail) *also available for video- & text-based real-t...