Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Disability communities engaged with social work recognize how critical feminist inquiry and disability justice principles often overlap to promote anti-ableist theorizing, research, practice, and education. Both the feminist scholarship and the disability justice movement center the voices and perspectives of those most excluded, reflecting the intersectional experiences of disability communities in social work. In this brief, we draw on significant events, such as the impact of climate change and criminal legal systems on disabled people, to map connections between critical feminisms, disability justice principles, and social work values. In re-imagining disability justice as a form of critical feminism, we highlight parallels in their guiding principles and explore how their multi-issue frameworks interrogate the same systems of power and oppression. Through this re-envisioning, we build upon the knowledge offered by intersectional disability communities that center interdependence as practices of survival and resistance. The authors suggest that social workers engaged with principles of disability justice and critical feminisms would do well to consider interdependence, collective care, and mutual aid as pathways toward inclusive and anti-ableist professional praxis.

Keywords

disability justice intersectionality interdependence feminism social work collective care mutual aid

A central aim of feminist inquiry is centering the voices of individuals and groups who are underrepresented and traditionally excluded from dominant discourses. This overarching aim similarly reflects the disability justice movement's tangible and action-oriented principles for practice and amplifies the experiences of disability communities in social work (Berne et al., 2018; Ogden et al., 2017). In this way, the practice of disability justice offers a way to implement critical feminism in practice contexts. In their discussion of putting disability justice into action in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, McCarty (2021) notes, “It looks like supporting friends and family who are the most affected. It looks like donating to organizations or volunteering at vaccination clinics. It looks like talking with like-minded folks who can uplift each other to rejuvenate positive future action” (p. 1).

The Disability Justice Movement

In 2005, a global disability justice movement emerged in response to the disability civil rights movement. While successful in many ways, the civil rights movement prioritized rights-based advocacy and single social identity-based disability initiatives. Black feminist scholar Lorde (1984) explains, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives” (p. 138). Thought of as a second-wave disability movement, the disability justice movement is known as being led by activists with varying social identities, including those who were disabled, Queer, racialized, and working-class (Berne, 2015). To distinguish between the two movements, disabled theorist Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) remarks:

Disability justice to me means a political movement and many interlocking communities where disability is not defined in white terms, or male terms, or straight terms. Disability Justice is to the Disability Rights movement what the environmental justice movement is to mainstream environmental movements. Disability justice centers sick and disabled people of color, Queer, and trans disabled folks of color and everyone who is marginalized in mainstream disability organizing. (p. 22)

Movement founder Mingus (2011, 2022) comments further that “ableism is connected to all of our struggles because it undergirds notions of whose bodies are considered valuable, desirable, and disposable” (para. 18). DisCrit scholars Annamma et al. (2013) expand on Mingus’ perspectives, noting that racism, classism, and other forms of discrimination impact the outcomes of ability-based systems. Key commentary from disability justice activist Brown defines the disability justice movement as “if it's not intersectional, it's not disability justice” (para. 16).

The disability justice movement connects with and has roots in crip theory (emphasizing disability as being beyond the pejorative) and critical disability studies (centering and engaging with disability and disabled people) (McRuer, 2006). Both theories have made meaningful connections to the disability justice movement relevant to our discussion (Robinson, 2018). As Robinson (2017) notes,

Crip theory moves us toward a critical disability studies where we work as a coalition for disability justice by expanding our understanding of how ableism leads us to internalized oppression, in-fighting, and distracts us by turning us upon each other rather than focus our energies on dismantling institutions and systems that perpetuate ableism. (para. 4)

We see the embrace of disability justice principles in the theory-informed practice of critical disability studies. For instance, Nishida (2018) explains that those engaged in disability justice adopt intersectional analyses and consider how ableism is enacted concerning other forms of social injustice.

Scholars, activists, and social work practitioners have increasingly embraced disability justice. This is evident in various areas adjacent to or in social work, such as social work education (Arrow & Grant, 2021; Berridge et al., 2022), education's new attention to the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender and disability (Annamma & Handy, 2019; Hankerson & Brown, 2021; Kulkarni & Chong, 2021), social work scholarship that uses an intersectional disability justice lens (Kuri & Schormans, 2022; Leotti & Slayter, 2022), and social work disability advocacy that embraces cross-movement solidarity (Eiler & D’Angelo, 2020; Lorr, 2022; Slayter et al., 2023).

The disability justice framework encompasses 10 principles offering opportunities for movement building: intersectionality, the leadership of those most impacted, anti-capitalism, cross-movement solidarity, wholeness, sustainability, cross-disability solidarity, interdependence, collective access, and collective liberation (Sins Invalid, 2016). There are strong parallels between critical feminist inquiry and the 10 principles upheld by the disability justice movement, among others, unfamiliar to many in social work (Conway, 2022; Shelton, 2020). For instance, disability justice centers on the priorities and approaches of historically excluded people, such as women, people of color, immigrants, imprisoned individuals, and LGBTQIA2S+ people, much like feminism (Berne et al., 2018; Sins Invalid, 2016). The disability justice movement identified that these principles be adopted in all practices with disability communities at varying systemic levels (i.e. micro, meso, and macro). Additional examples of integrating disability justice principles with multisystemic assessments are found in Slayter and Johnson's (2023) book on disability and social work practice.

Adopting a disability justice lens in social work can expand and enhance our assessments of how ableism and other structural oppressions are connected and sometimes dependent on one another. Berridge et al. (2022) affirm that social work models (and the disability rights movement) tend to pathologize disability communities, adopting deficit-based and individual models of disability. They explain that:

The prevailing social work ethos has tended toward upholding a service model of disability that positions disabled people as people to be fixed or nurtured back to health or, at the very least, taken care of. This ethos directly contradicts the disability studies and disability justice approach, which centers the leadership, self-advocacy, and brilliance of the disability community, with disability justice centering the most marginalized within the disability community. (Berridge et al., 2022 p. 5)

Disability communities have been surviving and providing care through non-hierarchal and non-capitalistic webs of care and support for centuries. Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) highlights the history of mutual aid, with many precolonial examples of brown, Black, and Indigenous communities providing exchanges of care long before social work and charity models were in place. Mutual aid does not presume a hierarchy of giver/receiver and inferior/superior. Instead, it assumes an interdependence based on care and collaboration.

Disability Justice as a Critical Feminist Approach

Whereby gender is formed relative to social and political modes of organization, including labor, family, imperialism, and class structures (Butler & Weed, 2011), critical feminisms seek to explicate its use and meanings in society. Like disability (Oliver, 2013), gender is conceptualized by many as a socially constructed phenomenon (Finn, 2020), historically complex, and ever-evolving. Since the 1980s, disabled scholars have examined how gender impacts disability communities (Garland-Thomson, 2002; Shuttleworth et al., 2012). For example, Begum (1992) noted that “concerns of disabled women strike at the core of both the disability rights and feminist movements” as it relates to gender roles, self-image, and sexuality especially (p. 70). Furthermore, Gerschick (2000) argued that “Disability has a profound effect on the material and nonmaterial experience of gender” (p. 1267), noting that “three sets of social dynamics [are needed]: the stigma assigned to a disability, gender as an interactional process, and the importance of the body to enacting gender” (p. 1264). Travis (2017) argues that “a genderless conception of disability … leads to neither gender-neutral nor gender-inclusive social, political, or legal responses. When gender is ignored, androcentrism fills the void” (p. 841). In Bailey and Mobley's (2019) discourse analysis of popularized disability rights histories, the authors point to the pervasiveness of privileged White men in disabled activist spaces, discontent with their inability to exercise “the full power of their whiteness and masculinity” (p. 27). Furthermore, disability justice as critical feminism is enacted by challenging transmisogyny in our theoretical and practical works. Timmons (2020) writes that “both the trans and disabled subject is presumed as White, and this tendency needs to be challenged and grappled with” (p. 49). As we consider the connections between critical feminisms and disability justice principles, we underscore the need for social work to view the relational aspects between the two, not just similarities, but how each can and should inform the other.

Principles of critical feminisms urge us to think beyond a gender binary or continuum, expanding our conceptualizations to include an increasingly holistic and interdependent notion of what constitutes critical feminist social work (Goodkind et al., 2021). While representations of gender are increasingly fluid over time, culture, and society, cis-gendered disabled identities are often assumed across disability studies. By decentering binaries within gender and disability justice frameworks, we create spaces to better understand and embrace the marginal in our knowledge production. Thus, through the lens of critical feminisms, we promote a re-imagining of categories, binaries, and spectrums to multi-dimensional conceptions of gender, sexuality, disability, and other identities that profoundly impact marginalization (Kattari, 2019). As we adopt a more holistic view of these categorizations, we challenge historical dichotomies and binaries while recognizing the interdependence of complex realities (Goodkind et al., 2021), including more fluid and intersectional experiences of disability.

Using intersectionality, a critical feminist theory attributed to the Black feminist movement (Crenshaw, 1991), we can examine how multiple and interacting systems of oppression perpetuate inequities and injustices (Crenshaw, 1991). The conceptualization of intersectionality empowers complex and nuanced understandings of how gender, sexuality, disability, and other dimensions of social, cultural, political, and economic processes intersect to shape lived experiences and social institutions (Naples et al., 2019). By adopting intersectional approaches within an anti-ableist disability justice framework, we consider how gender intersects with social identities such as disability and their relationship to each other. Adopting an intersectional perspective to highlight and uncover the range of gender identities and experiences in disability communities counters what is often an automatic default to male-centric and cisgender-centric understandings of disability. Indeed, there are emerging dialogs rethinking White, androcentric, and patriarchal conceptualizations of disability, with disability justice frameworks taking a more intersectional approach to praxis (Bailey & Mobley, 2019; Mingus, 2022; Naples et al., 2019). Thus, we understand disability justice and critical feminisms as binding sites for enacting intersectional theory.

As critical feminisms offer us a set of conceptual principles to interrogate the categories for which we make meaning of our social world, a disability justice framework challenges us to consider that bodies are bound to categorizations of “ability, race, gender, sexuality, class, nation state and imperialism, and that we cannot separate them” (Berne, 2015, para. 12). In this way, disability justice can be viewed as a form of critical feminism for how it parallels the critiques of binary categorizations and socially constructed bodymind assumptions. Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) reminds us that while some individuals may wish for less pain and different experiences of disability, these desires are only harmful when viewed through an ableist model of normalcy and cure, a strict binary of broken and fixed. Seen in this way, disability justice offers novel and ever-expanding tools and avenues for anti-ableist professional practice. As Kafer (2013) notes, “In imagining more accessible futures, I am yearning for an elsewhere – and perhaps an “elsewhen” – in which disability is understood otherwise: as political, as valuable, as integral” (p. 3). We suggest that while it is imperative and valuable to critique the binaries and categorizations of disability and gender, disability justice further provides an anti-ableist theoretical site around which to situate and celebrate what disabled people teach us about interdependence, the complex lived experiences of gender bound to other social and political categorizations, and intersectional corporeal realities.

Four disability justice principles, intersectionality, sustainability, interdependence, and collective liberation, are especially connected with critical feminisms. Their aims to promote collective access (dismantling White cisgender heterosexual non-disabled normativity) and collective liberation (no bodymind is left behind) are closely associated with critical feminisms in ways that will be particularly supportive of disability communities (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). Collective liberation is an ongoing feminist and anti-racist practice rather than a simplified attainable goal (Crass, 2013). Disability justice can guide social work in ways critical feminisms imagine; it is a critical praxis to bring about needed change. Entwined with critical feminisms, we re-envision collective liberation as a way to challenge and replace societal norms and expectations to center the most marginalized and impacted by discrimination, promoting liberation in disabled people's lives. For instance, the Hyde Amendment Art Project, founded by Smith (2011), is an educational and advocacy tool to promote dialogue and awareness about reproductive health and access (e.g. abortion) and interconnected issues. One of Smith's art pieces depicts an octopus with the writing, “Nothing is beyond my reach. We made these systems, and we have the power to dismantle them.” We interpret this art piece as one example of intersecting critical feminism and disability justice.

For the connection between sustainability and feminism, Szukala (2018) describes a “(happy) partnership” between the two (p. 1). Moreover, Morang and Venkataraman (2015) employ the concept of eco-feminism, a reminder that all living things have intrinsic value that is not measured by what they can do for or offer us. We connect these examples as counternarratives of individualized responsibility that better reflect critical feminisms and disability justice by placing value outside people's productivity and independence. Anti-racist justice work is also connected to disability justice, eco-feminism, and sustainability (Jampel, 2018). Intersectionality and interdependence deeply undergird this work, as the intersections of race, gender, and disability status, among others, must be prioritized in understanding and uplifting the needs of those impacted and marginalized (Chapple, 2019).

Applications to Professional Praxis

California Wildfires

The intersection of feminism and disability justice is incredibly relevant now, as is the fact that we are witnessing climate change's disproportionate impact on disabled people, who are often excluded from typical ways of coping. One example is the treatment of physically disabled people during the recent wildfires in California from 2019 to 2021 (Browning, 2022) and Colorado in 2021 (Goldman, 2021), and the brownouts and planned blackouts across California in 2019 (Collins, 2019). Gaskin et al. (2017) argued that the “systems designed to assist people in times of emergency, in particular, are often inaccessible to people with disability” (p. 811). In many cases in the outages mentioned above in California, disabled people were left behind by disaster management protocols. Many disabled people were stuck in their homes, unable to seek refuge in hotels or vacation homes for varied physical, cognitive, and emotional barriers to access, transportation, and financial reasons. At the same time, the onus of buying portable generators, high-level filtration masks, and other necessary medical items for survival was placed on them, a group with already fewer resources than the general population due to disproportionately high poverty rates (Clarkson-Hendrix & Cyr, 2023). In response, these resourceful individuals practiced collective community care and mutual aid by jury-rigging filtration units, huddling together in shared spaces to charge their medical devices, and sending masks and respirators from around the country to disabled comrades in affected places, emblematic of the creativity present in the disability community. Finding affordable and accessible housing is an incredible challenge, as many of these fires destroyed homes in tight housing markets (Phillips, 2022). Yet, in 2023, we observe little has changed with social structures and service systems. New housing is still being constructed in areas at high risk for fires. Planned brownouts are being announced across several states due to aging power grid infrastructure and the lack of attention to the ongoing impact of climate change. These situations disproportionately impact disabled people, with a large percentage living below the poverty level (Halper, 2022).

Applying a critical feminist lens and the disability justice principles encourages one to follow the leadership of those most impacted; in this example, those most impacted were disabled people of color and other multiply-marginalized disabled individuals. Gender further connects with other vulnerabilities, such as ethnicity, sexuality, and disability, to increase climate-related risks (Perkins, 2018). It is necessary to consider individuals’ intersectional needs by moving away from individualized responsibility toward sustainability, especially at systemic levels in social welfare. In addition, we can support our disabled communities by fostering interdependence, collective care, and mutual aid, by relying on one another, and sharing resources in the face of government inactions. These approaches include sharing ideas and solutions, such as respirators and filtration systems, committing to treating each other as whole people, akin to social work's person-in-environment and self-determination values, and advocating for collective access and collective liberation to ensure that disabled individuals are connected, supported, resourced, heard, and uplifted. As disabled social work scholars, we have personally been part of community care processes in our practice. For (initials removed for review), their involvement with these recent challenges ranged from boosting requests for needed items, sharing tips on how to jury-rig air filtration systems, and offering tangible support, including emotional, financial, and professional resource connection.

Gender Discrimination

In addition to experiencing multi-level ableism and ableist microaggressions (Kattari et al., 2020), many disabled people experience multiple forms of marginalization and discrimination, especially related to gender discrimination, sexual oppression, and subordination (Egner, 2019). For instance, many disabled people are denied access to gender-affirming care by health insurance systems and the medical profession due to their pre-existing diagnoses (Rodríguez-Roldán, 2020). Rodríguez-Roldán (2020) details the experiences of Kayden Clarke, a 24-year-old autistic transgender man from Arizona who allegedly experienced a suicidal crisis due to his denied access to gender-affirming care for his transition due to his Asperger's Syndrome diagnosis. Police officers murdered Kayden during a welfare check, alleging that Kayden threatened them. This is another example of how the law enforcement system oppresses disabled people, putting them at greater risk of physical harm and death (Leotti & Slayter, 2022). The tragic circumstances related to Kayden's death emphasize the value of integrating disability in a feminist context to understand how multiple systems intertwine and mutually constitute one another. Integrating disability does not obscure the critical focus on gender but shifts the conceptual framework to strengthen our understanding of how multiple systems marginalize individuals and groups (Garland-Thomson, 2002).

Conclusion

As illustrated in our examples above, critical feminisms and disability justice principles can benefit social work values by fostering a reality in which disabled people are recognized as whole persons and valuable members of society. As disabled activist Neil Marcus stated, “Disability is an art. It's an ingenious way to live” (Wester, 2022). Yet the social work profession is sometimes considered to have a fraught relationship with disability justice (Chapman & Withers, 2019; Stainton et al., 2010). Applying disability justice principles to critical feminisms is beneficial for fostering anti-ableism in social work practice, research, and education. Disability communities involved with social work will significantly benefit from the implementation of disability justice principles as a path to bringing about a world that is envisioned by critical feminisms.

Disability justice offers social work a path to live out the values of critical feminisms. One way through which we can enact our anti-ableist tenets is by moving gender and racially marginalized voices to the fore, prioritizing discussions that are grounded in gender, race, and class collectively (Bailey & Mobley, 2019). To live out inclusive and anti-ableist social work practice, it is critical to “center the genius and leadership of disabled and chronically ill communities … working from a place of belief in the wholeness of disability, interdependence and disabled people as inherently good as we are” (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018, p. 63). We suggest that interdependence offers social workers a means to adopt disability justice as informed by critical feminisms, leaning away from individualism into collaborative personal, professional, and scholarly relationships. Disability communities demonstrate their brilliance through interdependent practices such as collective care, mutual aid, and crowdsourcing knowledge, offering social work scholars and educators tangible pathways to living disability justice ideals. As we learn about the necessity of interdependence through the intersectional histories and lived experiences of disabled people, we can offer better practical and immediate actions for both social work theory and practice. Indeed, as Goodkind et al. (2021) highlight, praxis is not just theory put into practice; instead, the heart of praxis calls us to deepen our knowledge for transformative action. We recognize disability justice as connected to critical feminisms because both are mobilized around emancipation from the same power structures, not simply intersecting but often overlapping. As social work scholars working toward anti-ableist ends, we must hold ourselves accountable to a disability justice praxis that emerges from theoretical tenets of critical feminisms, offering valuable and immediate actions for social workers in practice.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Ami Goulden

Shanna K. Kattari

Author Biographies

Ami Goulden is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Shanna K. Kattari is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work and the Women's and Gender Studies Department (by courtesy) and is the director of the [Sexuality | Relationships | Gender] Research Collective.

Elspeth M. Slayter is a Professor at the School of Social Work at Salem State University.

Sarah E. Norris is a Student in the PhD in Health program at Dalhousie University.

References

Annamma

S. A.

Connor

Ferri

(2013). Dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit): Theorizing at the intersections of race and dis/ability. Race Ethnicity and Education, 16, 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2012.730511

Annamma

S. A.

Handy

(2019). Discrit solidarity as curriculum studies and transformative praxis. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(4), 442–463. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2019.1665456

Arrow

K. M.

Grant

Z. S.

(2021). Pandemic possibilities in crip time: Disrupting social work field education. Intersectionalities: A Global Journal of Social Work Analysis, Research, Polity, and Practice, 9(1), 98–114.

Bailey

Mobley

I. A.

(2019). Work in the intersections: A Black feminist disability framework. Gender & Society, 33(1), 19–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243218801523

Begum

(1992). Disabled women and the feminist agenda. Feminist Review, 40(1), 70–84. https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.1992.6

Berne

(2015). Disability justice—A working draft. Sins Invalid. https://www.sinsinvalid.org/blog/disability-justice-a-working-draft-by-patty-berne

Berne

Morales

A. L.

Langstaff

Invalid

(2018). Ten principles of disability justice. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 46(1&2), 227–230. https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.2018.0003

Berridge

Ganti

Taylor

Rain

Bahl

(2022). Infusing MSW programs with disability studies and disability justice: How to create explicit curriculum. Journal of Social Work Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.2022.2029309

Browning

(2022). Wildfires rage as California endures another scorching day. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/us/wildfires-heat-california.html

10.

Butler

Weed

(Eds.). (2011). The question of gender: Joan W. Scott’s critical feminism (Vol. 4). Indiana University Press.

11.

Chapman

Withers

A. J.

(2019). Violent history of benevolence: Interlocking oppression in the moral economies of social working. University of Toronto Press.

12.

Chapple

R. L.

(2019). Toward a theory of Black Deaf feminism: The quiet invisibility of a population. Affilia, 34(2), 186–198. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886109918818080

13.

Clarkson-Hendrix

Cyr

(2023). Employment, housing, poverty and the disability community. In Slayter

Johnson

(Eds.), Social work practice and the disability community: An intersectional anti-oppressive approach. Pressbooks. https://pressbooks.pub/disabilitysocialwork/chapter/chapter-10-employment-housing-and-poverty/

14.

Collins

(2019). U.S. power outages endanger people with disabilities. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/10/23/us-power-outages-endanger-people-disabilities

15.

Conway

M. E.

(2022). Decentralizing feminist theory from academia: bringing transfeminism and disability justice home with Sarah Ahmed. Journal of Feminist Scholarship, 20(20), 75–76.

16.

Crass

(2013). Towards collective liberation: Anti-racist organizing, feminist praxis, and movement building strategy. Pm Press.

17.

Crenshaw

(1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039

18.

Egner

J. E.

(2019). “The disability rights community was never mine”: Neuroqueer disidentification. Gender & Society, 33(1), 123–147. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243218803284

19.

Eiler

E. C.

D’Angelo

(2020). Tensions and connections between social work and anti-capitalist disability activism: Disability rights, disability justice, and implications for practice. Journal of Community Practice, 28(4), 356–372. https://doi.org/10.1080/10705422.2020.1842278

20.

Finn

J. L.

(2020). Just practice: A social justice approach to social work. Oxford University Press.

21.

Garland-Thomson

(2002). Integrating disability, transforming feminist theory. NWSA Journal, 14(3), 1–32. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/37970 https://doi.org/10.2979/NWS.2002.14.3.1

22.

Gaskin

Taylor

Kinnear

Mann

Hillman

Moran

(2017). Factors associated with the climate change vulnerability and the adaptive capacity of people with disability: A systematic review. American Meteorological Society, 9(4), 801–814. https://doi.org/10.1175/WCAS-D-16-0126.1

23.

Gerschick

T. J.

(2000). Toward a theory of disability and gender. Signs, 25(4), 1263–1268. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3175525 https://doi.org/10.1086/495558

24.

Goldman

(2021). Urban wildfires burned 6,000 acres and hundreds of homes near Denver. National Public Radio. https://www.npr.org/2021/12/31/1069514327/colorado-wildfires-acres-homes

25.

Goodkind

Kim

M. E.

Zelnick

J. R.

Bay-Cheng

L. Y.

Beltrán

Diaz

Gibson

M. F.

Harrell

Kanuha

Moulding

Mountz

Sacks

T. K.

Simon

B. L.

Toft

Walton

Q. L.

(2021). Critical feminisms: Principles and practices for feminist inquiry in social work. Affilia, 36(4), 481–487. https://doi.org/10.11777/08861099211043166

26.

Halper

(2022). A summer of blackouts? Wheezing power grid leaves states at risk. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/02/blackout-states-summer-heat/

27.

Hankerson

D. L.

Brown

L. X. Z.

(2021). Technology as a civil right and a move toward disability justice: Ensuring digital access for disabled students in the pandemic. Drexel Law Review, 13(4), 869–908.

28.

Jampel

(2018). Intersections of disability justice, racial justice and environmental justice. Environmental Sociology, 4(1), 122–135. https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2018.1424497

29.

Kafer

(2013). Feminist, queer, crip. Indiana University Press.

30.

Kattari

S. K.

(2019). Troubling binaries, boxes, and spectrums: A galactic approach to queerness and crip-ness. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 6(3), 136–142. https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.6.3.0136

31.

Kattari

S. K.

Ingarfield

Hanna

McQueen

Ross

(2020). Uncovering issues of ableism in social work education: A disability needs assessment. Social Work Education, 39(5), 599–616. https://doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2019.1699526

32.

Kulkarni

S. S.

Chong

M. M.

(2021). Teachers of color implementing restorative justice practices in elementary classrooms: A DisCrit analysis. Equity & Excellence in Education, 54(4), 378–392. https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2021.2000519

33.

Kuri

Schormans

A. F.

(2022). Pivotal care practices: Care ethics in inclusive arts-based research with people labelled/with intellectual disability during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 80. https://doi-org.corvette.salemstate.edu/10.1016/j.aip.2022.101920

34.

Leotti

Slayter

(2022). Criminal legal systems and the disability community: An overview. Social Sciences, 11(6), 255. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci11060255

35.

Lorde

(1984). Sister Outsider – Essays and Speeches. Penguin Random House USA.

36.

Lorr

(2022). Lived experience and disability justice in the family regulation system. Columbia Journal of Race and Law, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.52214/cjrl.v12i1.9924

37.

McCarty

(2021). The fight isn’t over, keep going: Practicing disability justice in an under-vaccinated nation. Visible. https://visiblemagazine.com/the-fight-isnt-over-keep-going-practicing-disability-justice-in-an-under-vaccinated-nation/

38.

McRuer

(2006). Crip theory: Cultural signs of queerness and disability. New York University Press.

39.

Mingus

(2011). Changing the framework: Disability justice. How our communities can move beyond access to wholeness. Leaving Evidence (Blog). Retrieved July 2, 2020, from https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/ 2011/02/12/changing-the-framework-disability-justice/

40.

Mingus

(2022). You are not entitled to our deaths: COVID, Abled Supremacy & Interdependence. Leaving evidence. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2022/01/16/you-are-not-entitled-to-our-deaths-covid-abled-supremacy-interdependence/

41.

Morang

Venkataraman

(2015). Eco-feminism and sustainability of nature. International Journal of Contemporary Research in Humanities and Social Sciences, 2(1), 72–78.

42.

Naples

N. A.

Mauldin

Dillaway

(2019). From the guest editors: Gender, disability, and intersectionality. Gender & Society, 33(1), 5–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243218813309

43.

Nishida

(2018). Critical disability praxis. In Ellis

Garland-Thomason

Kent

Robertson

(Eds.), Manifestos for the future of critical disability studies (1st ed., pp. 239–247). Routledge.

44.

Ogden

McAllister

Neely-Barnes

(2017). Assessment of integration of disability content into social work education. Journal of Social Work in Disability & Rehabilitation, 16(3–4), 361–376. https://doi.org/10.1080/1536710X.2017.1392394

45.

Oliver

(2013). The social model of disability: Thirty years on. Disability & Society, 28(7), 1024–1026. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2013.818773

46.

Perkins

P. E.

(2018). Climate justice, gender and intersectionality. In Jafry

(Ed.), Routledge handbook of climate justice (pp. 349–358). Routledge.

47.

Phillips

(2022). Displaced by Marshall fire, thousands scramble to find homes in tight housing market. The Denver Post. https://www.denverpost.com/2022/01/03/marshall-fire-displaced-tight-housing-market/

48.

Piepzna-Samarasinha

L. L.

(2018). Care work: Dreaming disability justice. Arsenal Pulp Press.

49.

Robinson

(2017). Moving towards disability justice. Disability Studies Quarterly, 37(3). https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5970/4697 https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v37i3.5970

50.

Robinson

(2018). Disability justice and critical disability studies. ASL & Interpreting Faculty Scholarship, 19. https://sophia.stkate.edu/asl_fac/19

51.

Rodríguez-Roldán

(2020). The intersection between disability and LGBT discrimination and marginalization. American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, 28(3), 1–12. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3664342

52.

Shelton

S. Z.

(2020). Disability justice, white supremacy, and harm reduction pedagogy: Enacting anti-racist crip teaching. JCSCORE, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.15763/issn.2642-2387.2020.6.1.190-208

53.

Shuttleworth

Wedgwood

Wilson

N. J.

(2012). The dilemma of disabled masculinity. Men and Masculinities, 15(2), 174–194. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X12439879

54.

Sins Invalid (2016). Skin, tooth and bone: The basis of movement is our people. Berkeley, CA.

55.

Slayter

Johnson

(2023). Disability social work concepts and principles. In: Slayter

Johnson

(Eds.), Social work practice and the disability community: An intersectional anti-oppressive approach. Pressbooks. https://disabilitysocialwork.pressbooks.com/chapter/chapter-1-2/

56.

Slayter

Kattari

S. K.

Yakas

, Singh, R., Goulden, A., Taylor, S., Wernick, L., Simmons, L., & Prince, D. (2023). Beyond ramps, curb cuts and captions: A call for disability justice in social work. Social Work, 68(1), 89–92. https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/swac045

57.

Smith

(2011). Repeal the Hyde Amendment Art Project. https://repealhydeartproject.wordpress.com/about/

58.

Stainton

Chenoweth

Bigby

(2010). Social work and disability: An uneasy relationship. Australian Social Work, 63(1), 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1080/03124070903291886

59.

Szukala

(2018). The (happy) partnership between feminism and sustainability: Exploring the potential of filling the gaps in sustainability education with feminist concepts, theories, and methods [Unpublished master’s thesis]. Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies. h ttp://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/8947366

60.

Timmons

(2020). Towards a trans feminist disability studies. Journal of Feminist Scholarship, 17(17), 46–63. https://doi.org/10.23860/jfs.2020.17.04

61.

Travis

M. A.

(2017). Gendering disability to enable disability rights law. California Law Review, 105(3), 837–884. https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38599Z13G

62.

Wester

(2022). All eyes on Neil Marcus: A champion of disability visibility through artistry. Accessibility.com. https://www.accessibility.com/blog/all-eyes-on-neil-marcus-a-champion-of-disability-visibility-through-artistry#:∼:text=Looking%20back%20to%20Storm%20Reading,an%20ingenious%20way%20to%20live.%E2%80%9D

‘Disability Is an Art. It's an Ingenious Way to Live.’: Integrating Disability Justice Principles and Critical Feminisms in Social Work to Promote Inclusion and Anti-Ableism in Professional Praxis

Abstract

Keywords

The Disability Justice Movement

Disability Justice as a Critical Feminist Approach

Applications to Professional Praxis

California Wildfires

Gender Discrimination

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iDs

Author Biographies

References