Cripping and queering gender-based violence prevention: bridging disability justice, queer joy, and consent education.

Although frequently relegated to the periphery in conversations about gender-based violence prevention, the disabling impacts of traumatised subjectivity both affect survivors' abilities to fully participate in sex and contribute to survivors being more than twice as likely to be sexually (re)victimised compared to peers without trauma histories. In this paper, we seek to crip and queer approaches to gender-based violence prevention, particularly consent education, by learning from 2SLGBTQ+ and disabled trauma survivors' affective experiences of queer, crip sexual joy and the radically messy ways in which they establish their own care networks for deeply pleasurable sex through the principles of disability justice. Refusing pathologising understandings of survivors as those who need to be cured, we highlight traumatised subjectivity as emblematic of the ambiguity and ambivalence inherent in sex as well as the possibilities for caring, consensual sex that moves beyond the concept of consent employed in colonial, neoliberal capitalist societies' binary (Yes/No) consent laws. Drawing on the work of crip and queer theorists such as Mia Mingus, Alison Kafer, Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha, and J. Logan Smilges, we reveal how disability justice principles, such as interdependence, collective access, and access intimacy, offer transformative understandings for anti-violence efforts.

Reflections on How What We Say, Do, and Acknowledge as Intellectual and Developmental Disability Researchers Matters.

This article highlights reflections by the author on the importance of considering what we say, do and acknowledge in intellectual and developmental disability research. The goal is to advance thinking that can lead to personal and collective change in our approaches to truly share power and elevate the expertise of people with lived experience with intellectual and developmental disabilities in the movement for equity, inclusion, and disability justice. Implications for inclusive research, policy, and practice are discussed as is the need to engage in personal reflection and build new partnerships for collective change.

Imagining Neurodivergent Futures from the Belly of the Identity Machine: Neurodiversity, Biosociality, and Strategic Essentialism.

Several critiques have emerged of the neurodiversity paradigm and of claims made by activists in the Neurodiversity Movement. These critiques include concerns that the Neurodiveristiy movement downplays the differences between Autistic people. In this article, I argue that the neurodiversity paradigm is a strategically adopted response to current realities. Sometimes, it is strategically necessary to appeal to existing narratives about Autism, or to emphasize solidarity within the Autistic community over the autism spectrum's internal diversity. At times, this can lead activists to neglect a more nuanced articulation of the Neurodiversity paradigm, which allows for the diversity of our community while still calling for solidarity in the face of shared experiences of discrimination. I compare this strategy with strategies of strategic essentialism utilized in the Indigenous Rights movement in Canada. I also explore the ways in which discourses of ableism and racism have historically been intertwined. Both Autistic people and Indigenous people represent diverse communities that must grapple with externally imposed identities to access legal rights, and both identities have been denigrated as mentally inferior by non-Autistic and colonial powers. I conclude that it is sometimes necessary to employ these types of strategies to secure needed resources and protections. I call for both scholars and advocates to take a more intersectional approach to understanding how strategic essentialism is being deployed within the Neurodiversity Movement.

What is the debate that this article addresses?: I address current debates about the usefulness of understandings of autism forwarded within the Neurodiversity Movement, which portray autistic people as a unified group who are biologically different from non-Autistic people. This can downplay the diversity of the Autistic community. The Neurodiversity Movement is a social movement that supports the rights of people with neurological and cognitive differences such as autism. It is based on the belief that differences in the ways our minds work are a natural part of human diversity, and that there is not a single correct way for human minds to function. Some Neurodiversity advocates see value in emphasizing ways in which we are similar to each other. What does the article propose?: I argue that some of the work done in anti-colonial and indigenous movements can be applied to the current debate within autism studies. Neurodiversity advocates would also benefit by clarifying where we are making arguments strategically to support advocacy goals. I argue that frameworks that present neurodiversity as comparable with biodiversity provide a starting place for further developing theory. Theories of neurodiversity need to allow for some understanding of biologically based differences, but without downplaying the importance of social factors in constructing autism, and without flattening out the diversity of our community. I also argue that seeing how autism intersects with other forms of difference, such as race, gender, and sexuality, is important for understanding discrimination against autistic people. What are some of the points of connection between the neurodiversity movement and other movements?: I draw connections between the Indigenous rights movement and the Neurodiversity Movement. Indigenous people also have to navigate legal frameworks that reduce many different cultures and languages into one identity group. In a similar way, Autistic people often have to navigate supports and services through medical diagnosis, which can lump a diverse community into a single group. There is also a connection in the ways in which indigenous people have been denigrated by colonial powers as mentally inferior, and the ways in which Autistic people, and especially Autistic people with higher support needs, have been denigrated. Why is this topic important?: The way that neurodiversity has been discussed in academic literature hasn't always accurately reflected the way it is discussed by activists. Sometimes, activists say things that don't fully match up with their underlying theoretical views because they need to appeal to existing narratives about autism, or because they want to build solidarity within the Autistic community. Also, the voices of those who experience multiple types of discrimination have often been overlooked. More discussion of how discrimination against disabled people relates to discrimination based on things like race and gender would make it easier for academic writers to understand the complexity of the Neurodiversity Movement. It would also make it easier for Neurodiversity advocates to understand the ways that prejudice against disabled people works in our society and highlight opportunities to build alliances with other movements.

Mindshift in autism: a call to professionals in research, clinical, and educational settings.

Autistic people often have poor outcomes over the life course, including in health, education, employment, and community inclusion. Many professionals working with Autistic adults in research, clinical, and educational settings devote their careers to trying to improve such outcomes. However, we maintain that real progress cannot happen without a fundamental mindshift. The status quo for professionals is to view autism as an illness. Instead, the neurodiversity movement encourages us to value and embrace autism as an aspect of human diversity and asks us to view Autistic people as a marginalized group that experiences significant disparities. While some professionals may be adopting language and concepts from the neurodiversity movement, we argue that making this mindshift fundamentally changes our practice across research, clinical, and educational settings. In this perspective, we call on professionals to embrace this mindshift to reduce discrimination and stigma, halt the spread of harmful ideologies, and help Autistic adults live fulfilling lives.

Toward Equity in Research on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.

Lack of diversity in IDD research is typically conceptualized only in terms of (1) recruitment of samples that do not appropriately represent the sociodemographics of the population, or (2) the limited number of researchers from historically marginalized backgrounds. Critically, the field also suffers from over-reliance on perspectives and social systems of dominant culture-both in how disability is regarded and in relation to other dimensions of identity and culture. These lenses lead to research findings that reinforce, rather than reduce, social inequities. We propose a framework that minimizes reliance on diagnostic categories, shifts from deficit- to person-centered models, acknowledges people's multiple identities, and includes self-advocates and diverse communities as partners in the research enterprise. The systems change necessary to support this framework is described.

A call to action for disability and rehabilitation research using a DisCrit and Disability Justice framework.

PURPOSE: Disability and ableism exist within a societal context that does not ignore the many facets of a person's identity, however often our disability research does not recognize how experiences vary based on the intersecting identities individuals hold. This article utilizes Intersectionality, Dis/ability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit), and Disability Justice to identify ways for rehabilitation researchers to adapt their research practices for maximum inclusivity and representation. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Using these three frameworks, we have developed a call to action including recommendations for rehabilitation researchers to consider as they design and implement research projects. RESULTS: Incorporating these frameworks provides an opportunity to reimagine current research practices. CONCLUSIONS: An accessible approach can help researchers better understand and report on the nuances of intersecting identities on the lives of disabled people.Implications For RehabilitationDisability identity and ableism must be viewed intersectionally, and disability related research must attend to the many facets of a person's identity.Intersectionality, DisCrit, and Disability Justice provide useful frameworks through which we can conduct more inclusive and accessible disability research.We present a call-to-action including seven general considerations that researchers can implement to guide the development of intersectional and inclusive disability research.

Louisiana's "Medically Futile" Unborn Child List: Ethical Lessons at the Post-Dobbs Intersection of Reproductive and Disability Justice.

Ableist attitudes and structures are increasingly recognized across all sectors of health care delivery. After Dobbs, novel questions arose in the United States concerning how to protect reproductive autonomy while avoiding discrimination against and devaluation of disabled persons. In this essay, we examine the Louisiana Department of Health's emergency declaration, "List of Conditions That Shall Deem an Unborn Child 'Medically Futile,'" issued August 1, 2022. We raise a number of medical, ethical, and public health concerns that lead us to argue that the declaration should be rescinded. Analysis of this ethically objectionable declaration provides valuable lessons about how to uphold both reproductive and disability justice in a post-Dobbs landscape.

Expanding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to Disability: Opportunities for Biological Psychiatry.

Given its subject matter, biological psychiatry is uniquely poised to lead STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives related to disability. Drawing on literatures in science, philosophy, psychiatry, and disability studies, we outline how that leadership might be undertaken. We first review existing opportunities for the advancement of DEI in biological psychiatry around axes of gender and race. We then explore the expansion of biological psychiatry's DEI efforts to disability, especially along the lines of representation and access, community accountability, first-person testimony, and revised theoretical frameworks for pathology. We close with concrete recommendations for scholarship and practice going forward. By tackling head-on the challenge of disability inclusion, biological psychiatry has the opportunity to be a force of transformation in the biological sciences and beyond.

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.

Implications of internalised ableism for the health and wellbeing of disabled young people.

When conceptualising health and wellbeing among disabled people, the experience of internalised ableism must be considered. In this article, we argue that internalised ableism is indeed a health and wellbeing issue that materialises in numerous complex psychological, social and physical consequences. For theoretical grounding, we utilise critical disability studies, feminist theorising about solidarity and disability activists' concept of 'disability justice'. We draw on data from focus-group interviews with disabled young people, comprising ten men and eleven women, with different impairment types. The focus-group discussions revolve around various aspects of their wellbeing and participation in society, and possible and actual threats to the wellbeing of disabled children and young people in general. The analysis reflects various negative effects of internalised ableism on the identity, health and wellbeing of disabled young people. Family support, access to safer spaces and positive peer interactions are factors defining how internalised ableism develops, is maintained or defied. Peer support and solidarity are strong indicators of promoting healing from internalised ableism. We argue that disability scholars need to address the health and wellbeing of disabled people in an ableist world.

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.

"Give Us the Chance to Be Part of You, We Want Our Voices to Be Heard": Assistive Technology as a Mediator of Participation in (Formal and Informal) Citizenship Activities for Persons with Disabilities Who Are Slum Dwellers in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

The importance of assistive technology (AT) is gaining recognition, with the World Health Organisation (WHO) set to publish a Global Report in 2022. Yet little is understood about access for the poorest, or the potential of AT to enable this group to participate in the activities of citizenship; both formal and informal. The aim of this qualitative study was to explore AT as mediator of participation in citizenship for persons with disabilities who live in two informal settlements in Freetown, Sierra Leone (SL). The paper presents evidence from 16 participant and 5 stakeholder interviews; 5 focus groups and 4 events; combining this with the findings of a house-to-house AT survey; and two national studies-a country capacity assessment and an informal markets deep-dive. Despite citizenship activities being valued, a lack of AT was consistently reported and hindered participation. Stigma was also found to be a major barrier. AT access for the poorest must be addressed if citizenship participation for persons with disabilities is a genuine global intention and disability justice is to become a reality.

Moving toward disability justice: Introduction to "lesbian lives, disabled lives".

This essay introduces the special issue of Journal of Lesbian Studies on "Lesbian Lives, Disabled Lives" by describing the work of disability activism and Disability Justice within a contemporary cultural context that overlaps with lesbian and queer activism and lesbian studies.

The politics of mad femme disclosure.

This essay imagines mad femme politics as an intervention and as a strategy that moves disabled, chronically ill, and mad educators and learners toward collective access and liberation. Using personal narrative, femme theory, and mad studies as reference points, the essay explores how a queering of tenderness and vulnerability can empower and embolden the process of disclosure.

Care haunts, hurts, heals: The promiscuous poetics of queer crip Mad care.

Care is a dirty word for many in our communities. "Caregiving" has become a euphemism for often-indifferent, under-funded labor that is done to our bodies to (barely) enable our continued survival. Care is a dirty word in many of our leftist-feminist communities. Care work is a classification of highly gendered and racialized labor that remains largely unpaid, underpaid, and deeply devalued. Care is a dirty word in our Mad, disability, queer activist communities. "Taken into care" often refers to indefinite confinement, forced extraction from communities and families, and the removal of one's right to self-determination. Is care even worth reclaiming? In this creative duo-ethnography, a Mad fat femme and a crip ill non-binary queerdo wander through various moments when care has most impacted our lives, our relationships, and our communities. We have each held one another with care on the precipice of dying. Our bodies have shouldered the love-labor of care in the most intimate, exigent, and banal of moments: consensual and playful medication reminders, postsurgery tampon changing, literally squeezing out another's breath to stay alive-and then repeating-hundreds of times an evening. We have also experienced care that was much too careful, and anything but full of care. We have shared care promiscuously with our crip and Mad (arts) communities in ways that have been life affirming, life changing, sometimes life making, other times life threatening. Through this wandering with ideas, moments, and communities, we reflect upon multiple dimensions of Mad, queer, crip care. Whom is the caring for? What is our care about? And how can our care be given or giving, taken or shared, offered, enabled, and co-created with flourish?

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.

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.