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Disability Rights, Studies & Justice: Home

Provides a background in the frameworks of disability history, disability as a field of academic study, and disability work within justice movements.

About This Guide

The fields of Disability Rights, Disability Studies and Disability Justice explore disability experience and work to dismantle ableism in society through different frameworks that build off one another. Since everyone will become disabled in their lifetime, whether temporarily or permanently, ableism* impacts everyone, and creates barriers to accessing housing, work, food, education, healthcare, safety, and one's sense of self-worth and ability to self-advocate.

Programs in these fields of study are scarce, so this guide aims to connect folks to information on disability studies, activism and culture to assist in the unlearning of ableism and the acquisition of disability empowerment.

*Ableism 

1. Oppression, prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination against disabled people on the basis of actual or presumed disability.
2. The belief that people are superior or inferior, have better quality of life, or have lives more valuable or worth living on the basis of actual or perceived disability. (Lydia X.Z. Brown)

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Image is of a dark skinned short-haired person in an orange jumpsuit in a wheelchair, locking hands with a lighter skinned person with a head covering, with one arm and one leg amputated and wrapped in bandages. Text reads: "Disability justice means resisting together from solitary cells to open-air prisons, to exist is to resist."

Image by Micah Bazant & Sins Invalid