How to Deal with a Bully: Debility, Non-Production, and Radical Care

This article examines how resistance toward capitalism's temporal bullying is performed in contemporary art and activism. It addresses the relationship between creativity, institutions, and empowerment. Building on the conceptual work of Croatian artist Mladen Stilinović (1947–2016), the article explores several aesthetic presentations of resistive temporalities we identify as non-production. The case studies of non-production herein marshaled affirm a performance of resistance that centers discussion of radicality in self-consciously interdependent care networks, ostensibly available to all disabled and nondisabled individuals. This care ethic claps back at the idea of self-optimization and fiduciary endurance amidst economic regimes of exploitation as virtuous. In the place of 'wellness,' this article affirms new directions in care and mutual aid, as premised on queer, crip, and feminist portrayals of disability praxis and pedagogy.

An exploration of learning-at-home experiences among families and children of color labeled with disabilities during COVID-19: A narrative inquiry

We are living in this historical moment of a COVID-19 global crisis that is continuing to impact marginalized families in our very own communities. Students of color, especially those who are already on the margins, and experience inequities in the classroom and in the community, have been further impacted by the quarantine as the educational system had not prioritized how to support students who face certain vulnerabilities due to lack of government funding, the historical oppressive tendency for schools to function within a medical model of standardization, along with the commodification of learning. Given the novelty of COVID-19 research, the full impact on these communities is yet to be fully known. Some students of color labeled with disabilities are faced with deeper struggles exacerbated by the pandemic's impact, while others may have improved performance during distance learning due to the removal of inherent bias in the classroom or the traditional inequities that may be perpetuated in a traditional school environment. Within a DisCrit theoretical framework that centers and celebrates the intersectional identities of these families and children, this study is about exploring the unique experiences of public, private and charter school students and their families in the San Francisco Bay area. Centering the narratives of families of color and their children labeled with learning disabilities is one way to shift the voice of power and dominant narratives, and to begin to understand their lived experiences as a way to decenter and dismantle white privilege, ableism and heteronormative supremacy. This qualitative narrative inquiry based study centers and celebrates the lived experiences of six families and their children of color labeled with learning disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic-fueled remote learning crisis. The thematic findings from this study can inform policymakers and other stakeholders on how to best support these communities, advocate for school-based rights within a constructivist lens, and contribute to the dearth in scholarly research that supports disability justice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Locating Disability Within a Health Justice Framework.

This Article explores the connections between disability and health justice in service of further tethering the two theories and practices. The author contends that disability should shift from marker of health inequity alone to critical demographic in the analytical and practical application of health justice. This theoretical move creates a more robust understanding of the harms of health injustice, its complexities, and, remedially, reveals underexplored legal and policy pathways to promote health justice.

Reimagining Classroom Participation in the Era of Disability Justice and COVID-19

This essay argues that the emphasis on spoken contributions in English and other humanities courses can exclude disabled students. The COVID-19 pandemic's necessitation of online learning has forced instructors to offer students multiple entry points for conversation—not only through spoken dialogue but also text threads, anonymous polls, and communal annotation assignments. Instructors' shifts in participation guidelines both before and at the height of the pandemic reveal faculty members' adoption of a disability justice pedagogy that privileges flexibility. Drawing on these transformations, the author offers pragmatic suggestions for how to value course contributions beyond students' capacity to voice their reflections aloud. The relinquishment of rigid academic expectations for participation makes space not just for students with disabilities but also for other minority populations, including women students, nonbinary students, first-generation students, and students of color who contribute their expertise in more capacious ways than the standard, discussion-based classroom allows. To conclude, the author considers how instructors might replicate accessible online tools—from Zoom chats to asynchronous platforms—in the return to face-to-face teaching. These new and primarily virtual forms of engagement reframe participation not as individual contributions to conversation, but as ongoing work intended for the purpose of community growth and collective care. [ FROM AUTHOR]

Long COVID and chronic pain: overlapping racial inequalities

The American Public Health Association (APHA) and prominent U.S. health organizations have acknowledged racism as a central cause of health inequality. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. confronts an additional public health crisis: mass impairment from Long COVID. Occupational segregation and institutionalized racism have made working-class Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) more likely to experience Long COVID. Medical gatekeepers also prevent equal access to health: BIPOC face more obstacles in their search for disability accommodations and social support. To provide health equity to the Long COVID community, Disability Studies must confront racialize understandings of chronic pain and the consequences of these meanings by centering the lived experiences of BIPOC living with chronic pain.

What's Love Got to Do with It? An Argument Against Institutionalizing People with Severe Physical Disabilities

This article, based on the author's experience, takes a critical look at the basis for the bias toward nursing home placement for people with severe physical disabilities. The author writes that the roots of such institutional bias lie in anti-Black racism and ableism. She lists parallels in the federal responses to Hurricane Katrina and the COVID-19 pandemic as examples of a "politics of disposability" for vulnerable and invisible communities. She longs to end her fear of being placed in a nursing home, and places hope in the work of disabled activists and allies committed to the community presence and participation of disabled people.

Pivotal care practices: Care ethics in inclusive arts-based research with people labelled/with intellectual disability during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this article, we aim to illustrate how inclusive research can be situated as a form of care work. We do this through addressing tensions and possibilities arising in an ongoing arts-based community-research project - DiStory, Then and Now. We discuss the design of the project along with critical, philosophical, and ethical foundations that drive decision-making and shifts in methodology in response to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. We argue that understanding inclusive research as care work is vital, particularly in pandemic times where complex socio-political contexts threaten the social survival of individuals and communities that have traditionally been excluded from knowledge creation projects. Our efforts to counter epistemic violence through practices of care are critically considered alongside tensions emerging in connection with physical contact restrictions combined with technology barriers experienced by many of our group members.

Sending Care from Afar: Pandemic Postcards and Disability Dramaturgy

Jessica Watkin works out her definition of Disability Dramaturgy and explains her artistic practice, which is rooted in personal care rather than professional extraction. As a Blind/Disabled artist, Watkin describes her relationship to Blind artist Alex Bulmer. Watkin reflects on the role of care in Bulmer’s Pandemic Postcards project, a series of twenty-one video “postcards” by Disabled artists around the world, hosted by the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto, Ontario. Watkin discusses the originating gesture of the project, a series of posts on Bulmer’s Facebook page titled Postcards from my Balcony, begun in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Toronto. As emanations of a care-based writing practice, these entirely textual “postcards” include image descriptions, written messages, and voice memos.

Learning from Our Survival: Patty Berne and Nomy Lamm (Sins Invalid), In Conversation

Patty Berne (executive director/artistic director) and Nomy Lamm (creative director) discuss the work of their performance collective and disability justice advocacy group, Sins Invalid. They address their company’s attempts to implement the principles of disability justice within their own collaborative processes and how theaters might cultivate a culture grounded in care work. Reflecting on the lack of support for queer, POC, and disabled artists in US commercial theater, they discuss the ways that Sins Invalid’s work challenges those institutional paradigms. Finally, they consider what the company—and theater in general—has learned from the COVID-19 pandemic: namely, the challenges and possibilities of producing work online and that addressing accessibility presents rich opportunities for artistic discovery.

Care Work and Social Justice in Creative Arts Therapy: Putting Queer Performance Theory and Disability Justice in Conversation with Drama Therapy

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased existing health disparities for the LGBTQIA2S+ community, reducing (or eliminating) access to healthcare through traditional pathways and increasing the value and necessity of community care. Putting queer performance theory in conversation with disability justice frameworks allows for exploration of how the creative arts therapies – and drama therapy specifically – can adapt to meet the emerging needs of marginalized populations. Situating drama therapy within a queer disability justice lens can support drama therapists in reclaiming the most revolutionary aspects of drama therapy theory and principles. Contrasting clinical and community-based approaches to drama therapy via autoethnography, limitations of the medical model of mental healthcare are interrogated while offering examples of alternative approaches to providing care rooted in activism and community organizing.

Cyborg oracles: insights for counseling psychology from the disability justice movement post COVID

The COVID pandemic has allowed transformative change that has otherwise faced resistance, and counseling psychology can use the pandemic as a time of reflection and change. Counseling psychology needs to incorporate insights from the disability justice community to create a more liberated world. The manuscript begins with a brief overview of disability justice principles and the relative lack of attention to disability in counseling psychology. An overview of three areas for change is presented: 1) expanding pathways to connection and recognizing humanity's interdependence, 2) redefining resilience and ensuring that we add ongoing transformative justice to our resilience practice, and 3) persistent access. Finally, the manuscript ends with a conclusion that discusses the importance of fully practicing disability justice, which includes understanding that it will be messy, imperfect, and takes practice. This manuscript is a roadmap to create a more just set of practitioners, teachers, researchers, and social justice advocates, among the many other roles that counseling psychologists take on.

Pandemic Possibilities in Crip Time: Disrupting Social Work Field Education

COVID-19 allows for new possibilities of entry into social work education by reconceptualizing professional time. Prior to the pandemic, students were often required to engage in learning at prescribed times, which did not consider the realities of disabled, queer, racialized, and othered "students." As a result of digital classroom learning and field practicums, COVID-19 has allowed for a queering of previously restrictive notions of time. Kafer (2013) called this flexible approach to time and its resultant expectations crip time. Building on Kafer's crip time, which centres disabled bodyminds above normative structures of time, we suggest that remote placement offers social work education an opportunity to explore new and radical approaches to recentring learning and justice within field practicums. Approaching student practicums from a disability-justice perspective, we argue, allows for more accessibility while challenging notions of professionalism and traditional student-supervisor dichotomies. Weaving together story and theory, we share the tensions elicited by applying crip time and critical approaches to professionalism within our research-based social work practicum. We share our experiences and offer a queered lens through which the social work practicum can be re-envisioned as a site of radical social work values, including disability justice.

Disability, communication, and life itself in the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this article we offer an analysis of a deeply problematic and troubling dual aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic: how disability is being understood within normative accounts of health and medicine to frame, interpret, and respond to its spread and implications; what are the terms of inclusion and exclusion in altered social life in the COVID crisis; and how people with disabilities fare. We find disturbing indications of disablism and oppressive biopolitics in the 'enforcing of normalcy' that frames and dominates COVID reconstruction of social life - a situation that we suggest needs urgent deciphering, critique, and intervention.

COVID-19 and the need for disability conscious medical education, training, and practice.

The COVID-19 era exposes what was already a crisis in the medical profession: structural racism, ageism, sexism, classism, and ableism resulting in healthcare disparities for Persons with Disabilities (PWD). Early research highlights these disparities, but we do not yet know the full impact of this pandemic on PWD. Over the last 20 years, many medical schools have attempted to develop disability competency trainings, but discrimination and inequities remain, resulting in a pervasive distrust of medicine by the disability community at large. In this commentary, we suggest that disability competency is insufficient because the healthcare disparities experienced by PWD are not simply a matter of individual biases, but structural and systemic factors requiring a culture shift in the healthcare professions. Recognizing that disability is a form of diversity that is experienced alongside other systemic disadvantages like social class, race, age, sex, gender identity, and geographic location, we explore the transformative potential of disability conscious medical education, training, and practice that draws on insights from intersectional disability justice activism. Disability conscious medicine is a novel approach, which improves upon competency programs by utilizing disability studies and the principles of disability justice to guide us in the critique of norms, traditions, and institutions to more fully promote the respect, beneficence, and justice that patients deserve.