{"id":196,"date":"2025-07-28T12:30:04","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T16:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/advancingculturalaccessibilitypractices\/?post_type=chapter&p=196"},"modified":"2025-09-04T14:06:37","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T18:06:37","slug":"political-orientation-2","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/advancingculturalaccessibilitypractices\/chapter\/political-orientation-2\/","title":{"raw":"Political Orientation","rendered":"Political Orientation"},"content":{"raw":"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 \u201creify Global North\/South divides\u201d and instead foreground \u201cthe intermeshed matrices of settle-colonialism, empire, and infrastructures of disablement that cut across otherwise self-apparent geographies.\u201d\u00a0 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, \u201cWhat does it mean to do disability justice transnationally while avoiding imposing epistemologies of the north on southern contexts?\u201d How do we imagine our struggles\u00a0 as doubly rooted in and indebted to an internationalist and cross-movement coalition of decolonial assemblages?\r\n\r\nWe 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.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nFinally, we take guidance from Dean Spade\u2019s organizing rubric to forge a \u201cleaderless\/leaderfull\u201d space grounded in\/with collective stewardship: \u201cWe 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\u2026a 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.\u201d (Rosenthal & Vilchis, 2024).\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nDecolonial and Transnational orientation\r\n\r\nReckoning with working within from the imperial centres\/metropoles\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nImplicated as beneficiaries of\u00a0 \u201cTransnationality 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.\r\n\r\nLink to document: Political Orientation<\/a>","rendered":"

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 \u201creify Global North\/South divides\u201d and instead foreground \u201cthe intermeshed matrices of settle-colonialism, empire, and infrastructures of disablement that cut across otherwise self-apparent geographies.\u201d\u00a0 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, \u201cWhat does it mean to do disability justice transnationally while avoiding imposing epistemologies of the north on southern contexts?\u201d How do we imagine our struggles\u00a0 as doubly rooted in and indebted to an internationalist and cross-movement coalition of decolonial assemblages?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Finally, we take guidance from Dean Spade\u2019s organizing rubric to forge a \u201cleaderless\/leaderfull\u201d space grounded in\/with collective stewardship: \u201cWe 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\u2026a 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.\u201d (Rosenthal & Vilchis, 2024).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Decolonial and Transnational orientation<\/p>\n

Reckoning with working within from the imperial centres\/metropoles<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Implicated as beneficiaries of\u00a0 \u201cTransnationality 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.<\/p>\n

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