Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
A study guide of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s 2018 book ‘Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice.’
Praxis
Disability justice must be part of the fight for social justice. This section will give you some questions to reflect upon alone or discuss with others to help you put these ideas into practice. Before you start, however, one warm-up activity: Piepzna-Samarasinha––a queer, disabled, femme-of-color––uses terms like ‘able-bodied’ and ‘disabled people’ in her book, which are not recommended by some disability justice advocates. Before proceeding, visit the Disability Language Study Guide made by the National Center on Disability and Journalism to see what terms they recommend using instead and why.
How does disability show up in your life or your loved one’s lives? If it does not, think about times when you have been sick for a day or two such that it impacted how you went about your day.
Have you or someone you know ever wanted to participate in something, such as a protest or workshop, but been unable to because your accessibility needs were not met? What could have been done to meet those needs?
If you are part of an organization, what does your organization do to make their work and content accessible?
Think about the buildings or paths you use frequently. The next time you are there, keep an eye out for things that might not be friendly to people who are disabled (e.g., no ramp, poorly paved sidewalk). Who can you work with to make sure the issue is real and address the problem?
Identify organizations in your local area doing disability justice work. Explore their resources and identify the following:
What is their vision?
How do they define disability justice?
What policies do they support?
How do they advocate for those policies?
What work do they do beyond advocating for policy, if any?
If you cannot identify local organizations for question five, visit Sins Invalid and Project LETS
When creating a care web there are questions you should keep in mind. For instance, what is the goal of your care web? Who needs care and what kind of care? What are the best practices that allow people receiving care to receive care well?
Below is a list of things Radical in Progress is doing or is planning to do to make sure our work is accessible.
Design our website such that it is accessible, meaning using easy-to-read fonts like Open Sans and ensuring the color contrast on our graphics is easy on the eye
Put closed captions under every TikTok (learn more here)
Put image descriptions and fill in the alt text under every graphic we post to social media (learn more here)
Further reading
At the time of publication, the musician and now filmmaker Sia released her movie Music, which has been criticized by people in the disabled community as being ableist. Learn more about that here.