How do we advocate for access in environments that are hostile to life and living? Where can we find community and fellow accomplices as we undertake this work? Please join us as we think-together about access labor, access intimacy, disability justice, and digital crip/mad life in the time of COVID.

Accessibility

CART will be provided. Please email Evan Hoye (hoyevan@umich.edu) with access questions and concerns.

Panelists

Morénike Giwa Onaiwu, PhD(c), is a global self-advocate, educator, parent and disabled person of color in a neurodiverse, multicultural, serodifferent family. A prolific writer, public speaker, and social scientist/activist whose work focuses on meaningful community involvement, human rights, justice, and inclusion, Morénike is a Humanities Scholar at Rice University’s Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, principal operator of Advocacy Without Borders, and a member of several executive boards. Recent and forthcoming publications include: Sincerely, Your Autistic Child from Beacon Press and Neurodiversity en Noir from Jessica Kingsley Publishing. Learn more at: MorenikeGO.com.

ID: a color photograph of a white woman in her 30s with short brown hair and glasses. She's standing in front of a bridge with the letters ODU displayed.

Rua M. Williams is an Assistant Professor in the User Experience Design program at Purdue University. They study interactions between technology design, computing research practices, and Disability Justice. Common approaches to technology and service design for marginalized people tend to naturalize existing inequities, exacerbating injustice even while they attempt to ameliorate it. Dr. Williams deploys Feminist and Anti-Racist approaches to Technoscience, Critical disability Studies, and Science and Technology Studies in the design and evaluation of technological systems to simultaneously illustrate injustice in technology as well as marginalized users’ own practices of resistance through those same technologies.

ID: Headshot of Sara María Acevedo

ID: Headshot of Morénike Giwa Onaiwu

Ruth Osorio is an Assistant Professor of English and Women's & Gender Studies at Old Dominion University. Her work on disability, access, and activism has been published in College Composition and Communication, College English, WPA Journal, and enculturation. Her current book project examines intergroup coalitional activism in the 19th century. She has two kids, loves her rescue mutt, and eats a lot of peanut butter.

ID: a headshot of Rua M. Williams

Sara María Acevedo is a disability justice scholar-activist and critical educator born and raised in Colombia. She is an Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at Miami University where she leads the advancement of Disability Justice praxis through her teaching, research, and community engagement. Her work in the classroom draws from the work of marginalized scholars and practitioners and focuses on bridging critical pedagogy, emancipatory research, and activism. Her research program is informed by intersectional global social movements, transnational feminisms, anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-ableist world systems analysis, among other critical traditions. She is currently leading a project on neurodivergent culture and autonomous forms of governance with a grant from the Ford Foundation’s Disability Rights Program. Sara served a three-year term with the Boar of Directors of the Society for Disability Studies, with whom she led the creation of the organization’s 15 principles. She currently serves on the editorial boards of Disability and the Global South and Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture.