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Compliance or culture?: Toward an understanding of disability justice and collective liberation
October 28, 2023 @ 10:30 am - 12:00 pm
Rights alone are not justice. A narrow focus on compliance provides little sense that the acknowledgement ofr inclusion of disabled communities have any larger benefit or that accommodations serve anyone other than the person who requests them. How can we move past legal compliance to understand disability in all of its complexity– as a culture, lived experience, embodied history, a product of de-ableing oppressions in society– and central to our collective liberation?
Facilitators:
Dr. Lauren Shallish is a community-engaged scholar researching disability studies and higher education. She currently serves as Associate Department Chair of Urban Education and Associate Professor of Disability Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. She is an affiliated faculty member in the Africana Studies Department.
Dr. Shallish’s research examines the hyper-labeling of multiply-minoritized students and how constructs of ability and dis/ability are framed in higher education equity work. She currently serves a member of Teaching Against Erasure, the Active Voice research team, NJ-STEP faculty, and principal investigator for The Troublemaker Project, a student-led collective that teaches disability studies in urban high schools.
In 2022, she was awarded the Chancellor’s SEED Grant for her work to establish the first disability studies program at Rutgers University and received honorable mention in the Pulitzer Center’s Inaugural 1619 Education Network.
Recent examples of scholarly work have appeared in DisCrit Expanded (2022), Women’s Reproductive Health (2022), SPARK Magazine— in partnership with Medium (2020), and Disability & Society (2021).
Her forthcoming book project on Disability and DEI will be published in late 2024.
Joel Negron is a Research Assistant for the Department of Urban Education at Rutgers University-Newark. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Criminal Justice with a focus on Justice Studies with Summa Cum Laude honors. He is currently pursuing his Master’s degree in Public Affairs and Administration with a focus on Nonprofit Management and intends to create his own nonprofit organization specializing in addressing trauma for formerly incarcerated citizens.