Disability Justice

One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent - but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Now, just in time for the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people.

In this collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centers the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all. Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of color are doing to find each other and to build power and community.

Much of the church has forgotten that we worship a disabled God whose wounds survived resurrection, says Amy Kenny. It is time for the church to start treating disabled people as full members of the body of Christ who have much more to offer than a miraculous cure narrative and to learn from their embodied experiences. Written by a disabled Christian, this book shows that the church is missing out on the prophetic witness and blessing of disability.

Based on extensive research, Naomi Lawson Jacobs and Emily Richardson have collected prophetic and transformative narratives of experience, shared directly by disabled people who have rarely been enabled to speak in Christian books about disability. By centering disabled Christians’ own stories, this book calls for churches to move from a care-based approach to disability, to one that is focused on justice, equality and access to churches for disabled Christians.

On July 4th, 2013, Connor Sparrowhawk, also known as Laughing Boy or LB, was found dead in a specialist NHS unit. Connor, who had autism and epilepsy, had a seizure while in the bath, and no member of staff was on hand to stop him from drowning. An entirely preventable death. Sara Ryan presents a frank, sometimes funny and touching account of her son's early life and preventable death and the unfolding #JusticeforLB campaign.

A story of fighting to belong in a world that wasn't built for all of us and of one woman's activism - from the streets of Brooklyn and San Francisco to inside the halls of Washington - Being Heumann recounts Judy Heumann's lifelong battle to achieve respect, acceptance, and inclusion in society. From fighting to attend grade school after being described as a "fire hazard" to later winning a lawsuit against the New York City school system for denying her a teacher's license because of her paralysis, Judy's actions set a precedent that improved rights for disabled people.

Uglification is "ugly" weaponized: a tool, ideology, and type of oppression that designates some bodies as more or less worthy of love, respect, access, and dignity. It defines who's accepted in what spaces, which identities are marginalized, and how we all move through the world—and is part and parcel of systems like white supremacy, ableism, sizeism, sexism, and queer- and transphobia. Here, Lewis takes on uglification, showing us how reclaiming UGLY is a subversive act that roars an unapologetic "yes!" to joy, healing, and community-building in a world that's engineered to hold us back.

For over twenty years, Dara Baldwin has often been the only person of color in the room when significant disability policy decisions are made. Disenfranchisement of people of color and multi-marginalized communities within the disability rights community is not new and has left many inside the community feeling frustrated and unheard. In Demanding Solidarity, Baldwin candidly shares her journey to becoming a disability activist and policymaker in DC while critiquing the disability rights community.

Jessica Slice’s disability is exactly what her child needed as a newborn. After becoming disabled a handful of years prior from a shift in her autonomic nervous system, Jessica had done the hard work of disentangling her worth from productivity and learning how to prepare for an unpredictable and fragile world. Blending her experience of becoming disabled in adulthood and later becoming a parent with interviews, social research, and disability studies, Slice describes what the landscape is like for disabled parents.