This year CAPPE is hosting a series of monthly online talks on disability politics. These will take place on Wednesday evenings 6pm-7.30pm.
Please contact z.sutherland@brighton.ac.uk with any accessibility requirements.
February, 28th
Disability, Social Construction, and the Disappearing Body
Liam Livesley
Please join us for the monthly Interventions in Disability Politics talks. The next session will be held on 28th February 2024, 6-7:30pm online here with Liam Livesley. Liam is a doctoral researcher in philosophy at the University of Southampton, working on social accounts of disability, and some related questions in ontology and methodology.
‘Interventions in Disability Politics’ is a series of monthly talks aimed at bringing together disabled activists and scholars/researchers committed to disabled people’s emancipation. They’re aimed at both audiences, and encourage presentations which either: a) show academic research which directly impacts strategy and struggles by disabled people for freedom and autonomy, or b) challenge academic orthodoxies through the results of these struggles.
Radical social constructionist accounts of social categories like gender and race have, in recent years, opened up productive new possibilities for theorising, political organising, and undermining naturalistic views of our social world. On these views, category membership is constituted by how you are positioned by social forces in hierarches of advantage and oppression, with “what your body is like” playing a minor role at most. But similar approaches to disability have struggled to get off the ground, with the objection being that disability just does involve the body in a way that is incompatible with these radical constructionist projects.
In this talk, I cash out the worry that radical social constructionist approaches to disability “disappear” the body in a variety of ways, and show how these can be resisted. Moreover, I argue that refocusing on the oppressive role of ableist ideology, rather than “what our bodies are like”, provides anti-ableists with important theoretical and political resources.
March, 27th
Bridging the gap between Trade Unionism and the Disabled People’s Movement
Kirstie Stage
Deaf and disabled organisers have long been part of and contributed to the efforts of the British Labour Movement, notably through organisations such as the National League of the Blind (f. 1894) and later the National Union of the Deaf (f. 1976). On these works, campaigns and efforts have largely focused on impairment-specific issues. Drawing on sources from the Disabled People’s Archive, and memoirs of disabled trade unionists such as Bob Williams-Findlay, this talk focuses on the work of Trade Union Disability Alliance (TUDA). This will build on previous discussions, exploring the ways in which pan-impairment disabled people’s organising sought to bridge the gap between trade unionism and the Disabled People’s Movement as well as through various channels such as the British Deaf community, Disability Arts Movement and self-advocacy initiatives.
In this talk, I set out some of the ways in which Deaf and disabled people campaigned on work conditions, trade union representation, and challenged trade unions to actively consider matters associated with disablement. TUDA created a space for Deaf and disabled trade unionists to debate national policies, share issues, highlight opportunities for work, build on tactics, strategize and build a critical mass of support amongst different channels. Moreover, I argue that Deaf and disabled people’s organising posed an alternative to the approaches undertaken by disability charities and state initiatives during the late twentieth-century. Trade unionism, I argue, was therefore a mechanism for sharing knowledge and information but also was impeded by forces of ableism within trade unions as well as the differing priorities and strategies amongst the broader British Labour Movement.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84314590372?pwd=GKsymrJhXF6bJqbla6DoYR2Y03hgB7.1
Meeting ID: 843 1459 0372
Passcode: 016994
April, 24th
Productivity Versus Fruitfulness/Collective Generativity? Toward a Decolonial Disability Interrogation of the Marxian Conception of Abilities and Needs
Alexis Padillia
The present talk is a work in progress which will be part of my upcoming volume titled Decolonial Disability and Social Epistemologies. Its purpose is to interrogate the meaning of Marx’s famous aphorism: to everyone according to their abilities and to everyone according to their needs (my paraphrasing here is gender neutral). My interrogation invokes the decolonial Marxian critique of Peruvian thinker Aníbal Quijano, a former Marxian scholar who has been articulated and amplified, among other decolonial thinkers, by Brazilian anthropologist Rita Segato. In line with the conversational nature of this exercise, I am sharing an essay by Russian educational philosopher Anna Stetsenko which has impacted my initial oppositional thinking in this matter. Due to her expansive interpretation of Marx, I am now moving toward collective generativity explorations, a radical/strategic process that I am sure you will highly enrich through your comments and insights.
Alexis Padilla is Visiting Professor at the University of Missouri Saint Louis, and the author of Disability, Intersectional Agency and Latinx Identity: Theorising LatDisCrit Counterstories (published by Routledge in 2021). He has worked extensively on disability equality and justice in education, decolonial projects, and religion.
Please note: Our speaker for the next session has some suggested (but not mandatory) pre-reading for their talk. Please contact l.s.beesley@brighton.ac.uk for copies, along with any accessibility requirements you may have.
Stetsenko (2023)_MARXISM IN AN ACTIVIST KEY
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87333711907?pwd=T3zsplfISWw8Imu53EPsEj5vmX5D6E.1
Meeting ID: 873 3371 1907
Passcode: 888537
All sessions will have AI captions enabled. If you have any further access needs please contact Luke Beesley on l.s.beesley@brighton.ac.uk
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