Disability Justice, White Supremacy, and Harm Reduction Pedagogy: Enacting Anti-Racist Crip Teaching

Abstract

In this personal narrative, I reflect on how I have approached teaching about and for disability justice as a White crip feminist educator. I focus on how I have attempted to be accountable for my Whiteness in my teaching about an activist framework and movement grounded in the lived experiences of queer and trans disabled people of color (Sins Invalid, 2016). Towards this task, I describe my effort to enact what I term a harm reduction pedagogy or an approach to teaching that acknowledges the ongoing violence of whiteness and my participation in it while simultaneously striving to minimize the harm students of color experience in my courses. In the second section of this paper, I describe my process of accountability planning in which I anticipate possibilities for harm and prepare myself to respond to them prior to the moments when they happen.

‘Disability Is an Art. It's an Ingenious Way to Live.’: Integrating Disability Justice Principles and Critical Feminisms in Social Work to Promote Inclusion and Anti-Ableism in Professional Praxis

“…The disability justice framework encompasses 10 principles offering opportunities for movement building: intersectionality, the leadership of those most impacted, anti-capitalism, cross-movement solidarity, wholeness, sustainability, cross-disability solidarity, interdependence, collective access, and collective liberation (Sins Invalid, 2016). There are strong parallels between critical feminist inquiry and the 10 principles upheld by the disability justice movement, among others, unfamiliar to many in social work (Conway, 2022; Shelton, 2020). For instance, disability justice centers on the priorities and approaches of historically excluded people, such as women, people of color, immigrants, imprisoned individuals, and LGBTQIA2S+ people, much like feminism (Berne et al, 2018; Sins Invalid, 2016).…”