“Brilliant”

What does it take to create communities built on justice, inclusion, access, and equity for all? I suggest that an essential part of the equation is accessible love. Accessible love provides the blueprint for healing ableism and creating communities where every body is welcomed, included, and celebrated.

Stereotypes and negative representations about people with disabilities abound. Borrowing from feminist sociologist Patricia Hill-Collins, I refer to these as “controlling images” of people with disabilities. In this talk I unpack some problematic controlling images of disabled people and offer positive alternatives.

Passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) ensured that public spaces and buildings are physically accessible to disabled people. Too many communities and organizations, however, assume that the presence of ramps, accessible elevators and bathrooms, ASL interpreters, or braille material means that the work of access and inclusion is complete. This is not always true. I ask audiences to go beyond architecture and consider what attitudes must shift to ensure genuine inclusion.

Crip tests are the ways in which able-bodied people in communities and organizations regulate and control if and how disabled persons are integrated into the community, thereby maintaining able-bodiedness as the dominant mode of embodiment. In this interactive presentation, I invite participants to examine how their organizations employ crip tests, and to strategize policies and processes for dismantling and avoiding them.

The social pressures of professional performance and production coupled with bodies that are not designed to function at the expected speed of “standard” time, leave emotional, physical, and sometimes professional scars. How might institutions, communities, and organizations adopt “crip time” to slow down and acknowledge that we all move at a different speed of time?