On Disability Justice

Disability Justice Goes Beyond Disability Rights

In this conversation with Cyrée Jarelle Johnson and Mordecai Cohen Ettinger from Sins Invalid, we’ll learn about Disability Justice and explore its real-world application in the context of higher education.

Disability Justice goes beyond Disability Rights (i.e., individual and institutional adherence to the laws and policies that govern work related to people with disabilities and accessibility).

Disability Justice confronts ableism and “asserts that we must include the experiences of multiply marginalized people with disabilities such as: People of Color, Immigrants, LGBTQIA+ People, Homeless People, Incarcerated People, and People who have had their ancestral lands stolen.” (World Institute on Disability)

Join us for this important dialogue. Our time together will begin with a short presentation on the 10 Disability Principles, followed by a conversation with our panelists, and audience Q&A.

Thanks to our incredible partnership with the CIIS Library, Sins Invalid’s book, Skin, Tooth, and Bone, is on our reading list and now available to you.

Cyrée Jarelle Johnson (he/they) is the author of SLINGSHOT (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. Johnson's writing has appeared in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, Prompt Press, Apogee, Boston Review, The Root, and The New York Times among other outlets. In 2020, Johnson received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He is the Social Media and Community Engagement Specialist at Sins Invalid.

Mordecai Cohen Ettinger (they/them) has nearly 30 years experience as a multi-sector social justice activist and organizer, holistic healer, radical scholar, and educator. Mordecai co-founded the TGI Justice Project, served as an Interim Co-Director at Justice Now, and as Interim Executive Director at Caduceus Outreach Services, a radical mental health organization. They are adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Their field is critical science, technology, and medicine studies. Mordecai’s research spans environmental health and toxicology, to the workings of the Medical Industrial Complex, to the neurobiology of the social nervous system, and its implications with regard to collective and historical trauma, healing, resilience and social change.

Schooled by years of movement work, and trained in Somatic Experiencing, Reiki, and Cranial Sacral therapy, they have studied with Dr. Peter Levine, biophysicist and founder of Somatic Experiencing and Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. Finally, Mordecai is queer/gender non-binary. They are a survivor of radiation poisoning and what is designated by the UN to be medical torture. They’re here for transforming the Medical Industrial Complex for our futures to be possible.

"Sins Invalid is a disability justice based performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and LGBTQ / gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized.”

Learn more by visiting the Sins Invalid website.