CONTACT: ashley_zhou@berkeley.edu(link sends e-mail), taramadhav@berkeley.edu(link sends e-mail)
The Disability, Racial Capitalism, and Empire working group is a central space on campus for graduate students, faculty, and other community members who research, study, write about, experience, and resist disability and debilitation under the co-constitutive regimes of racial capitalism and empire. It strives to provide members with a space to become more engaged and critical activists in the field of Disability Justice. The Disability Justice movement resists the rights-based discourse of disability and instead turns to the movement for the liberation of oppressed and marginalized groups around the world, particularly those in the Global South and Black and Indigenous communities, whose subjugation is linked to debility produced by empire (Puar, 2017). We “focus on [dis]ability as a system and disability as a relation to power rather than as identity” (Kim & Schalk, 2021). As such, our attention and analyses examine and critique systems of power that construct disability in concert with other forms of oppression. We lift up the work of communities that do not always couch their resistance as part of a disability politic, but regularly resist marginalization and debilitation in the everyday. We strive to create an accessible, equitable, and praxis-oriented space whereby the group’s collective commitment to liberation scholarship is bolstered through a welcoming, uplifting, and most importantly equitably accessible academic environment.