Cripping TJ: Survivors as Organizers, Vicarious Trauma and Disability Justice in Transformative Justice
Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum
600 South Gregory
Urbana
Disability is everywhere in the world, including in transformative justice. How does it show up in our work to create alternatives to police and prison to create safety, healing and justice by and for survivors of violence? In this lively talk with lots of swearing, disability and transformative justice movement worker and writer/editor Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha will examine just what happens when we "crip" TJ- what does it mean when so many transformative justice movement workers are themselves survivors with lots of anxiety and PTSD, how to create anti-ableist accountability strategies as disabled survivors and people who have caused harm, how to look at abuse through a disability justice lens, and what it means to move slow, vulnerable and strong in doing TJ work.
Hosted by: Center for Advanced Study
Cosponsors: Department of Asian American Studies, Department of Gender & Women's Studies, Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES), Education Justice Project, Student Cultural Programming Fee
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled nonbinary femme writer, disability and transformative justice movement worker and educator of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. They are the author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Tonguebreaker, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home (short-listed for the Lambda and Publishing Triangle Awards, ALA Above the Rainbow List), Bodymap, Love Cake (Lambda Literary Award winner), and Consensual Genocide, and co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. They co-edited Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement, forthcoming in 2020 from AK Press. A lead artist with Sins Invalid, her writing has been widely published, with recent work in Pleasure Activism, Guernica, Herizons, Vice, The Deaf Poets Society, Bitch, Self, TruthOut and The Body is Not an Apology. They are a VONA Fellow and hold an MFA from Mills College. She is also a rust belt poet, a Sri Lankan with a white mom, a femme over 40, a grassroots intellectual, a survivor who is hard to kill.
