Intro
hi, i am so glad you’re here. whether out of curiosity, need, pure interest, or a desire to have words to describe your lived experience, i hope this is a handy tool for your surviving late stage capitalism in a climate catastrophe-filled, transphobic, anti-Black, colonial, and ableist world.
as someone raised culturally as a new yorker and boricua, i have had the pleasure of being brought up in community. i come from these cultures that love hard and work harder and they do it as a community. individualism as a social strategy is a failure and i hope this small contribution helps bring us closer to building a toolkit that moves us beyond survival to something more akin to thriving in community.
a small statement about these definitions
Some of these definitions come directly from their creators, some of the bigger concepts and ideas involve some of my translation. The thing about theory is that it breathes and shifts. Theory is cultural and contextual — informed by lived experience. There may be some moments where you think: “i did not arrive at the same destination when I read this.” and that is expected. If anything seems out of place, totally wrong, or misguided, i welcome feedback.
about mav
given that interpretation is based often on the person I would like to give you a brief intro to me.
i am a disabled, non-binary, parent, daughter, sister, and community member. i spent a lot of my youth split between Virginia and New York and i think the southern and NY influence combined to make a kind, firm, artistic ass bitch.
i am a child of a disabled parent, a first generation college student, an almost PhD, and a lifelong interdisciplinary learner. i am late diagnosed autistic and ADHD and was actually reading Puar's The Right to Maim the semester i got tested; it started a rigourous relationship with disability studies and epistemology. my lived experience as a fat, puerto rican, chronically ill, patient, has always shaped my interest in disability justice.
My academic background covers sociology, art history, Black studies, Indigenous studies, Latin American studies, disability studies, gender studies, queer studies, and more. i am a lover and community member at my core. a healer and a culture worker.
i hope i continue to have the privilege to do this work alongside yall.
in community, mav
A
Ableism
A system of beliefs, institutions, designs, and social habits that treats able-bodied and neurotypical functioning as the expected human norm and measures worth through independence, productivity, speed, rationality, self-control, and physical capacity. Ableism is not only prejudice against disabled people; it also organizes schools, workplaces, health care, architecture, welfare systems, family expectations, and public time around certain bodyminds. Disability justice situates ableism alongside white supremacy, capitalism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy rather than treating it as an isolated bias.
Access
The material, sensory, communicative, temporal, social, and political conditions that allow someone to enter, participate in, understand, use, or belong in a space, relationship, institution, or activity. Access is more than a ramp, caption, interpreter, or accommodation, although all of those may be essential. It is the relationship between a bodymind and an environment—and it changes as people, contexts, technologies, and needs change.
Access intimacy
Mia Mingus’s term for the feeling of being understood in one’s access needs: the relief of not having to repeatedly justify, translate, minimize, or teach others about one’s bodymind. It can occur instantly or be built over time through attention, trust, memory, consent, and relation. Access intimacy is not simply “help” or a technical accommodation; it preserves agency and dignity rather than positioning the disabled person as a burden or the helper as a benefactor. Mingus later describes access intimacy as “interdependence in action.”
Accommodation
A modification to an environment, policy, communication method, schedule, or task that enables access for a disabled person. In law and institutions, accommodation is often treated as an individualized exception. Disability justice critiques this narrow approach when it makes people repeatedly disclose, request, and defend their needs rather than designing environments around collective access from the outset.
Anti-capitalist politic
A Disability Justice principle that recognizes how capitalism ties human worth to productivity, employability, extraction, and accumulation. Disabled bodyminds expose the violence of these norms because many people cannot or do not conform to standardized expectations for labor, speed, output, or availability. An anti-capitalist disability politics does not mean disabled people are incapable of work; it means survival, dignity, and belonging must not depend on proving economic usefulness.
Asylum / institution
Historically and contemporarily, a site that segregates people classified as disabled, mentally ill, intellectually disabled, “unfit,” dangerous, dependent, or otherwise socially unwanted. Disability abolitionist scholarship emphasizes that institutions are not merely failed care settings; they are technologies of confinement, classification, and social control. Their harms cannot be solved only through more humane administration.
B
Biopolitics
A term associated with Michel Foucault for modern forms of power that govern populations through life itself: health, reproduction, hygiene, risk, medicine, sexuality, race, disability, capacity, and death. Biopolitics concerns how states and institutions decide which lives are to be optimized, managed, protected, normalized, abandoned, or rendered expendable.
Bodymind
A concept used by disability, feminist, and queer scholars to refuse the artificial division between body and mind. Pain affects thought; trauma affects physical sensation; psychiatric disability is embodied; mobility, fatigue, cognition, sensory experience, and emotion are intertwined. “Bodymind” prevents theories from treating physical disability as separate from mental life or mental disability as disembodied.
Bodyminds
Sami Schalk’s pluralized formulation foregrounds the fact that bodies and minds are intertwined and socially interpreted through race, gender, disability, sexuality, and class. The term resists treating disability as a single, static medical fact. It is especially useful for analyzing how Black women’s embodiment is marked as excessive, dangerous, pathological, resilient, or superhuman.
C
Care work
A disability justice framework and practice in which access, support, and survival are understood as collective and political rather than privatized burdens. Care work includes the visible and invisible labor that makes life possible: rides, meals, medication support, child care, emotional presence, access planning, communication, advocacy, financial support, rest, and accompaniment. In Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s formulation, care is not an afterthought to politics; it is part of the material infrastructure through which disabled people and communities remain alive, connected, and able to organize.
Care web
A disability justice term for a network of reciprocal support through which people share the work of survival: food, rides, money, medication pickups, emotional presence, communication, childcare, access planning, accompaniment, and practical assistance. Care webs are the relational form of care work: they distribute support rather than privatizing it inside a household, romantic partnership, medical system, or heroic individual caregiver. Ideally, they respect consent, acknowledge uneven capacity, resist coercion, and avoid turning care into debt, charity, or control.
Carceral ableism
The use of disability classifications, medicalization, treatment, surveillance, risk assessment, institutionalization, policing, and confinement to regulate people deemed incapable, dangerous, disordered, dependent, or noncompliant. It describes how prisons, psychiatric facilities, schools, hospitals, nursing homes, shelters, immigration detention, and child welfare systems may manage disability through control rather than support.
Collective access
A Disability Justice principle and practice in which communities jointly build the conditions for participation. Rather than treating access as a special favor for an individual, collective access anticipates varied needs through flexible pacing, captions, breaks, seating, scent awareness, remote options, food, transportation, communication practices, financial support, and a culture where needs may be expressed without shame.
Collective liberation
A Disability Justice principle asserting that no bodymind can be left behind. Liberation is not achieved when the most privileged disabled people gain limited inclusion; it requires transformation of the conditions that harm people across race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, and relation to the state.
Colonial disability
The production, interpretation, and governance of disability through colonial and settler-colonial power. Colonial disability includes imposed diagnostic categories, segregated education, medical intervention, land dispossession, environmental damage, racial science, institutionalization, labor extraction, and the suppression of Indigenous ways of understanding difference, kinship, capacity, and care.
Compulsory able-bodiedness
Robert McRuer’s term for the social system that makes able-bodiedness appear natural, invisible, desirable, and mandatory. Like compulsory heterosexuality, it creates the illusion of free choice while making deviation costly. It does not only stigmatize disabled people; it disciplines everyone to perform capacity, productivity, independence, and bodily normalcy.
Crip
A reclaimed term derived from “cripple.” Its use is political, cultural, and theoretical rather than diagnostic. Like “queer,” it can signal resistance to respectability, normalcy, cure imperatives, able-bodiedness, and assimilation. It should not be imposed on people who do not use it for themselves.
Crip / disabled love
Not a single stable scholarly term or one universally shared experience. Instead, crip/disabled love is a political and cultural claim: disabled people’s erotic, romantic, familial, platonic, and communal relations contest ableist assumptions that disabled people are asexual, undesirable, childlike, dependent in ways that preclude agency, or incapable of intimate reciprocity. The term can name disabled people loving each other, disabled people being loved without normalization, and the practices of access, consent, care, communication, and adaptation through which disabled intimacy is made possible. It should not romanticize disability or treat every care relationship as loving; it is most useful when it keeps desire, agency, access, and power in view together.
Crip time
A disability justice and crip theory concept that recognizes disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent, and mad people may experience time differently because of pain, fatigue, medication, access barriers, transit, care schedules, equipment, sensory needs, fluctuating capacity, or institutional demands. Crip time is not merely being late. It is a reorganization of time away from ableist productivity and toward bodymind reality.
Cripistemology
A framework for understanding disability as a source of knowledge. It examines how disabled people know the world through pain, access negotiation, bodily difference, interdependence, technology, institutional encounters, and lived expertise. Cripistemology challenges the assumption that professional or medical knowledge is more objective than disabled people’s own accounts.
Cripping
A critical practice that exposes able-bodied norms as constructed rather than natural. To “crip” an institution, text, policy, image, or space is to ask how it assumes able-bodiedness, whose bodyminds it privileges, and what alternative forms of relation, time, access, or desire become imaginable when those assumptions are disrupted.
Cure ideology
The belief that disability, chronic illness, neurodivergence, bodily difference, or atypical embodiment is inherently a problem to be eliminated, corrected, normalized, or prevented. Critiques of cure ideology do not require rejecting all treatment, pain relief, medication, or medical intervention. They reject the claim that a disabled life has less value unless it moves toward nondisabled normativity.
D
Debility
Jasbir Puar’s term for the widespread, ongoing injury, exhaustion, and diminished capacity produced by political and economic systems. Debility is not identical to disability. It highlights how war, occupation, racism, poverty, labor exploitation, environmental toxicity, incarceration, and neglect wear down populations, often without granting them the recognition, services, or rights attached to formal disability status.
Decarceration
The process of reducing and dismantling confinement systems such as prisons, jails, psychiatric institutions, nursing homes, detention centers, and other settings that control people through segregation. In disability abolitionist thought, decarceration requires building material conditions—housing, income, care, health support, community networks—that make institutional confinement unnecessary.
Deinstitutionalization
The movement and policy process of closing or reducing large segregated institutions, especially psychiatric hospitals and facilities for people with intellectual or developmental disabilities. Disability abolition scholarship treats deinstitutionalization as evidence that supposedly permanent institutions can be dismantled, while also recognizing that closure without housing, income, care, and community support can produce abandonment rather than liberation.
Disability
A contested term that may refer to an identity, a bodymind experience, a legal category, a political community, a relation to barriers, or a social form of oppression. The social model distinguishes impairment from disability, locating disability in socially organized exclusion. Disability justice expands this analysis by locating ableism within other systems of power. Indigenous and decolonial scholars further caution that disability itself is not culturally neutral and may be imposed through colonial categories.
Disability justice
A political framework developed by disabled Black, brown, queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming activists and artists, including members of the Disability Justice Collective and Sins Invalid. It centers intersectionality, leadership of those most impacted, anti-capitalist politics, cross-movement solidarity, wholeness, sustainability, cross-disability solidarity, interdependence, collective access, and collective liberation. It differs from a narrow rights framework by confronting structural systems such as racial capitalism, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, policing, and state violence.
Disability rights
A legal and civil-rights approach focused on equal treatment, anti-discrimination, reasonable accommodations, accessibility, and formal inclusion. Disability justice does not reject disability rights, but argues that rights alone cannot address poverty, racism, colonialism, carcerality, gender violence, institutionalization, or the unequal distribution of care.
Disability studies
An interdisciplinary field that studies disability as a social, cultural, political, historical, and embodied phenomenon rather than solely a medical condition. It analyzes representation, identity, access, law, institutions, knowledge, technology, culture, power, and disabled people’s own movements and theories.
Disability visibility
The condition of disabled people appearing in public culture, media, history, politics, art, and institutional narratives on their own terms. Visibility can support recognition and solidarity, but it is not automatically liberatory. Disabled people can be hypervisible as objects of pity, inspiration, surveillance, or spectacle while still being excluded from power.
E
Eco-ableism
Ableist ideas and policies embedded in environmentalism, climate planning, sustainability discourse, emergency response, conservation, and ecological design. Eco-ableism can treat disabled people as disposable in disaster planning, frame bodily difference as ecological burden, or build environmental futures around mobility, health, and self-sufficiency norms that exclude disabled people.
Epistemic injustice
A harm done to people in their capacity as knowers. It occurs when someone’s testimony is discounted because of prejudice, when a community lacks concepts to articulate an experience, or when institutions exclude people from producing and interpreting knowledge. Disabled people often experience epistemic injustice when doctors, researchers, schools, courts, caregivers, and policymakers disregard their accounts of pain, access needs, sexuality, competence, or risk.
Epistemology from disability
Knowledge generated from disabled experience, practice, and standpoint. It asks what disabled people know because they navigate inaccessible environments, diagnostic systems, pain, technology, care, stigma, and interdependence.
Epistemology of disability
Academic, scientific, philosophical, medical, historical, or social knowledge about disability as an object of study. A central question is whether such knowledge is produced with disabled people’s authority or merely about them.
Eugenics
A political, scientific, and social project that seeks to control reproduction and population quality according to ableist, racist, classed, nationalist, and colonial norms. Eugenic logics appear in forced sterilization, institutionalization, immigration restriction, genetic screening, selective abortion discourse, marriage restrictions, and policies that treat certain lives as burdens or preventable mistakes.
F
Forced intimacy
Mia Mingus’s term for coerced disclosure of private bodily, medical, diagnostic, financial, or personal information in exchange for basic access. A disabled person may be required to reveal pain, trauma, medication, bodily functions, diagnoses, or intimate history to employers, schools, doctors, benefit offices, airlines, landlords, caregivers, or strangers simply to receive what others receive without explanation. Forced intimacy is structurally unequal: it turns privacy into the price of access. It is not genuine intimacy because it is extracted rather than freely shared.
Futurity / crip futures
The politics of which lives are imagined as worth sustaining into the future. Crip futurity resists frameworks that treat disabled people as problems to cure, prevent, eliminate, or leave behind. It imagines futures organized around access, interdependence, disability culture, and bodymind difference.
G
Global South critique
An approach that challenges disability studies when it treats Euro-American histories, social models, rights regimes, and institutional assumptions as universal. It examines colonialism, development, debt, humanitarianism, labor, war, poverty, gender, race, and local knowledge. “Global South” is not a homogeneous geographic or cultural category; it names unequal global relations of power.
Governmentality
A Foucauldian term for the dispersed ways institutions govern conduct through expertise, statistics, professional norms, self-management, risk, diagnosis, policy, and administrative procedures. In disability studies, governmentality helps explain how people are made into subjects who must monitor, disclose, rehabilitate, optimize, and prove their bodily capacities.
H
Heteropatriarchy
A system that privileges heterosexuality, cisgender gender roles, male dominance, nuclear family structures, and reproductive norms. In disability analysis, heteropatriarchy shapes assumptions about who is desirable, who can parent, whose dependency is legitimate, who provides care, and which bodies are considered sexually or reproductively valuable.
Human variation
The principle that bodily, cognitive, sensory, psychiatric, and developmental differences are ordinary features of human life rather than deviations that make a person less human. This concept does not deny pain or the desire for treatment; it resists the conclusion that difference itself is a defect.
I
Impairment
A term often used to describe a bodily, sensory, cognitive, psychiatric, or chronic-health difference. In the classic social model, impairment refers to the bodymind difference while disability refers to socially produced exclusion. This distinction is useful but contested: feminist, crip, Indigenous, and critical disability scholars note that pain, embodiment, culture, and social conditions cannot always be cleanly separated.
Inclusion
The participation of disabled people in social, educational, cultural, political, and economic life. Inclusion can be meaningful, but critical scholars ask: inclusion into what structure, on whose terms, with what access, and at what cost? Inclusion that requires compliance with ableist, colonial, or carceral norms may reproduce exclusion in a more palatable form.
Independence
The ideal of functioning without assistance, often treated as proof of adulthood, worth, freedom, or success. Disability justice critiques independence when it becomes a moral demand that obscures universal reliance on other people, infrastructures, labor, land, and institutions. The alternative is not imposed dependency but chosen, reciprocal interdependence.
Indigenous Disability Studies
A field that centers Indigenous knowledge systems, sovereignty, kinship, land, culture, spirituality, historical experiences of colonization, and community-defined understandings of disability. It rejects the assumption that Western diagnostic categories, service systems, and disability theories are universally applicable.
Interdependence
A Disability Justice principle recognizing that people rely on one another and on collective systems of support. Interdependence differs from paternalism: it emphasizes agency, reciprocity, consent, shared responsibility, and the right to direct one’s own care. It also differs from neoliberal independence by acknowledging that nobody survives alone.
Intersectionality
A framework, associated with Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, for analyzing how systems such as racism, sexism, ableism, class oppression, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy overlap rather than simply add together. Disability justice uses intersectionality to reject single-issue organizing and to center people who live at multiple margins.
Intimate citizenship
A scholarly framework for understanding people’s right and practical capacity to form, sustain, and have recognized sexual, romantic, familial, friendship-based, and other intimate relationships. In disability studies, intimate citizenship draws attention to the material conditions that make intimacy possible or impossible: accessible housing and transportation, privacy, income, personal assistance, sexual-health care, communication access, freedom from institutional control, legal recognition, and the right to make relational choices. It challenges the ableist presumption that disabled people are asexual, perpetually dependent children, unfit parents or partners, or incapable of consent and relational agency.
K
K’é
A Diné concept of kinship, relation, and living toward harmonious outcomes. In disability scholarship grounded in Diné thought, K’é challenges individualist models of disability, care, and access by locating people within reciprocal relationships to family, community, ancestors, land, and responsibility. It should not be flattened into a generic synonym for “community.”
L
Leadership of those most impacted
A Disability Justice principle holding that people most directly affected by systems of oppression possess essential knowledge about those systems and should lead the development of strategy, analysis, and practice. It is not token representation; it requires redistributing authority and resources.
Liberal inclusion
A mode of reform that seeks to include marginalized people within existing institutions without transforming the institutions’ basic values, structures, or power relations. Disability scholars use the term critically when inclusion leaves intact racism, colonialism, capitalism, eugenics, carcerality, or productivity norms.
M
Mad / madness
A reclaimed political and cultural term used by some psychiatric survivors, mad people, and activists to challenge pathologizing language and psychiatric authority. It can refer to experiences labeled mental illness, but its meaning and preferred use vary. It should not be imposed on people who do not self-identify with it.
Medical model of disability
A framework that locates disability primarily in an individual bodymind understood as impaired, defective, abnormal, or ill. Its typical response is diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation, cure, management, or normalization. Medical care can be necessary and desired, but the medical model becomes oppressive when it reduces a person to pathology and ignores environmental, social, political, and cultural barriers.
Mutual aid
Collective, reciprocal support through which people meet immediate needs outside or against inadequate state and market systems. In disability justice contexts, mutual aid may include food, funds, transportation, medication support, access labor, child care, translation, or emergency assistance. Mutual aid is strongest when it avoids charity’s hierarchy and attends to power, consent, sustainability, and long-term structural change.
N
Neoliberalism
A political-economic order that elevates privatization, market competition, personal responsibility, austerity, individual entrepreneurship, and reduced public support. In disability politics, neoliberalism recasts structural exclusion as individual failure and rewards the “successful” disabled person who can approximate productivity, independence, and market value.
Neurodiversity
The idea that neurological differences—such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia, Tourette’s, and others—are forms of human variation. Neurodiversity advocacy resists treating all neurological difference as defect while recognizing that many neurodivergent people need support, accommodation, health care, communication access, and protection from violence.
Neurotypicality
The social norm that treats certain cognitive, sensory, communicative, emotional, and behavioral patterns as natural, mature, rational, and socially acceptable. Neurotypicality is not simply a medical fact; it is a cultural standard enforced through schools, workplaces, families, medicine, and public behavior rules.
Normalcy
The cultural and statistical idea that some bodies, minds, behaviors, appearances, capacities, and life trajectories are standard and therefore desirable. Disability studies shows that normalcy is historically produced and politically enforced, not a neutral description of human variation.
P
Paternalism
A relation in which an institution, professional, caregiver, family member, or helper claims to act for someone’s good while overriding their stated knowledge, choices, consent, or authority. Paternalism often presents itself as kindness or protection. In disability contexts, it may appear as unwanted help, substituted decision-making, institutional control, or forced treatment.
Political/relational model of disability
Alison Kafer’s approach to disability, which refuses both a purely medical model and a simplified social model. It treats disability as embodied and political: pain, bodily reality, access, future, environment, and social power must be analyzed together.
Power/knowledge
A Foucauldian concept describing how power produces knowledge and knowledge exercises power. Medical, legal, educational, psychological, and administrative expertise does not merely describe disability; it can create categories, authorize interventions, determine credibility, and govern people’s lives.
R
Reasonable accommodation
A legal term for adjustments an employer, school, housing provider, business, or institution may be required to make for a disabled person. The term is important for civil rights, but it can also narrow access into a case-by-case negotiation that burdens individuals with proof, paperwork, disclosure, and delay.
Recognizing wholeness
A Disability Justice principle affirming that every person has inherent worth, history, complexity, desire, sensation, knowledge, and life beyond capitalist measures of productivity or medical measures of defect. It rejects reducing disabled people to diagnosis, need, service eligibility, inspirational function, or labor capacity.
Relationality
An ethical, philosophical, and political orientation that understands persons as constituted through relationships—to other people, communities, land, ancestors, histories, institutions, and more-than-human worlds. In Indigenous disability scholarship, relationality cannot be reduced to interpersonal “support”; it implicates sovereignty, land, knowledge, responsibility, and collective life.
S
Self-determination
The right and practical capacity to direct one’s own life, make decisions, take risks, form relationships, determine care, and participate in community. Self-determination is not the same as doing everything alone. It requires accessible information, material resources, support, and freedom from coercion.
Social model of disability
A framework that distinguishes impairment from disability and identifies disability as the exclusion produced by inaccessible physical environments, institutions, policies, communication practices, and attitudes. It shifted responsibility away from the individual bodymind and toward social change. Critics and extensions note that the model can understate pain, illness, embodiment, racialization, colonialism, and the complexity of bodily experience.
Social reproduction
The labor and infrastructure required to sustain life across generations: care work, food preparation, cleaning, childrearing, health support, emotional labor, housing, transportation, and community maintenance. Disability justice treats this work as political and material rather than private, feminine, or naturally available.
Standpoint
A socially situated perspective that can generate distinctive knowledge because of one’s position within power relations. A disabled standpoint is not automatically correct or identical across all disabled people; it recognizes that navigating disability, access, stigma, pain, and institutions can reveal aspects of social organization that dominant perspectives overlook.
Sustainability
A Disability Justice principle of pacing individual and collective work so that people and movements can survive over time. It rejects urgency culture, burnout, disposability, and productivity demands. Sustainability is not slowing down for its own sake; it is organizing in ways that do not sacrifice people to the work.
T
Testimonial injustice
A form of epistemic injustice in which a person is treated as less credible because of prejudice. Disabled people experience testimonial injustice when their accounts of pain, competence, abuse, sexuality, access needs, or treatment are dismissed because they are considered irrational, dependent, confused, dramatic, incapable, or unreliable.
Transformative justice
A framework for addressing harm without relying on police, prisons, punishment, or exile as default solutions. It seeks accountability, safety, healing, repair, and changed conditions. Disability justice brings important questions to transformative justice about access, communication, trauma, psychiatric difference, dependency, and the risk that community accountability can reproduce ableist coercion.
W
Whiteness in disability studies
The tendency of disability theory, history, representation, and policy to treat white disabled experience as universal while marginalizing the ways race, colonialism, migration, anti-Blackness, Indigeneity, and global inequality shape disability. Black, Indigenous, and scholars of color have challenged the field to account for racialized debility, diagnostic violence, environmental harm, and unequal access to recognition.
Core citations
Clare, Eli. 1999. Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Ineese-Nash, Nicole. 2020. “Disability as a Colonial Construct: The Missing Discourse of Culture in Conceptualizations of Disabled Indigenous Children.” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 9(3):28–51.
Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Liddiard, Kirsty. 2016. ““Some People Are Not Allowed to Love”: Intimate Citizenship in the Lives of People Labelled with Intellectual Disabilities.” Disability & Society 31(1):131–35.
Mingus, Mia. 2011. “Access Intimacy: The Missing Link.” Leaving Evidence, May 5.
Mingus, Mia. 2017. “Access Intimacy, Interdependence and Disability Justice.” Paul K. Longmore Lecture, San Francisco State University, April 11.
Mingus, Mia. 2017. “Forced Intimacy: An Ableist Norm.” Leaving Evidence, August 6.
Montalti, Chiara. 2025. “Epistemology from Disability, Epistemology of Disability.” Humanamente.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. 2018. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press.
Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Schalk, Sami. 2018. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Sins Invalid. 2016. Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement Is Our People: A Disability Justice Primer. Berkeley, CA: Sins Invalid.
Tremain, Shelley L., ed. 2005. Foucault and the Government of Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Verbeek, Lesley, Mark Koning, and Alice Schippers. 2024. “Understanding Epistemic Justice through Inclusive Research about Intellectual Disability and Sexuality.” Social Sciences 13(8):408.
Wendell, Susan. 1996. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York: Routledge.
Yellowhorse, Sandra. 2023. “Indigeneity and Disability: The Teachings of our Ancestors and Being in Relation Towards Harmonious Outcomes.” Disability Visibility Project.
Additional Resources
Sins Invalid — Disability Justice Principles https://sinsinvalid.org/10-principles/
The foundational 10 Principles: intersectionality, interdependence, collective access, sustainability, cross-disability solidarity, and collective liberation. This should be your first click.
Mia Mingus, Leaving Evidence https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/
Disability Visibility Project https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/
Alice Wong’s ongoing archive of disabled people’s stories, interviews, essays, activism, and media work. It is especially useful for readers looking for first-person disability knowledge rather than institutional explanation.
Project LETS — Disability Justice Resources https://projectlets.org/disability-justice
Disability Justice Project — Resources https://disabilityjusticeproject.org/resources/ Journalism, documentary, storytelling, and accessibility resources that are useful for writers, cultural workers, educators, and organizers.
Indigenous Disability Canada / BCANDS https://www.bcands.bc.ca/
A key resource for Indigenous disability advocacy, education, and Indigenous Disability Awareness Month.
Nicole Ineese-Nash, “Disability as a Colonial Construct” https://cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjds/article/view/645
Especially important for readers who need language for questioning supposedly neutral diagnostic and intervention systems.
Krip Hop Nation https://kriphopnation.com/
Disability culture, music, and political art led by disabled artists of color;
This list is not exhaustive, and it cannot replace the local disabled community. Start with what you need. Follow disabled people whose experiences differ from your own. Pay writers, artists, organizers, and educators when you can. Share resources materially. Build access before someone is forced to ask.