Political Orientation

We interdependently take up the past, present, and promissory futures of both disability and accessibility through the oft-obscured and oft-uncited genealogies, stories, imaginations, and realities of transnational disability onto-epistemologies. Our access praxis is made wholly, relational, and decolonially generative when it dethrones and defamiliarizes itself with whiteness settler knowledge-power as both its axis and nucleus. We task ourselves with, in the words of Jasbir Puar (2023), a refusal to “reify Global North/South divides” and instead foreground “the intermeshed matrices of settle-colonialism, empire, and infrastructures of disablement that cut across otherwise self-apparent geographies.”  We ask (knowing that there is no one answer and that our answers might fall short, need to be amended, nourished, repaired) as Laura Jaffee and Lara Sheehi do, “What does it mean to do disability justice transnationally while avoiding imposing epistemologies of the north on southern contexts?” How do we imagine our struggles  as doubly rooted in and indebted to an internationalist and cross-movement coalition of decolonial assemblages?

We name this space as a politically noisy one first and foremost in order to turn askew the oft-depoliticized arena of disability (studies), which materially and ideologically inheres a political and liberationist orientation. We dually commit to this way of being and engaging in order to reject the propensity for political spaces that elide criphood, madness, eldership, debility, illness and disability, erroneously deeming them as unnecessary to (or even more violently, incongruent with) intercommunal projects of liberation.

Finally, we take guidance from Dean Spade’s organizing rubric to forge a “leaderless/leaderfull” space grounded in/with collective stewardship: “We work upon the world and we ourselves are changed by doing so. We experiment with strategies that intervene in our material reality and find communion…a purpose to our work greater than the sum of its parts, an intergenerational commitment for building a future unlike our present, a future worthy of us and our love.” (Rosenthal & Vilchis, 2024).

Decolonial and Transnational orientation

Reckoning with working within from the imperial centres/metropoles

Implicated as beneficiaries of  “Transnationality seems to recognize borders and nations as products of geopolitical histories and their differences, yet it aims not to be delimited by borders in other ways, such as understanding the connectedness of human and nonhuman beings. It also aims to acknowledge the struggles to have borders and nationhood be recognized by international entities.

Link to document: Political Orientation