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Celebrate Disability Pride & Culture

A shirtless man seated in a wheelchair, suspended from a harness in mid-air against a blue and black background. He holds himself up by the rope with one hand, but leans back so that the other arm dangles outstretched past his head. The light glows on his torso.
Photo of Rodney Bell in Sins Invalid Annual Performance in 2008 | Photo via Sins Invalid 

Want to learn more about the disability and Deaf pride and culture? Check out these multi-media resources for continued learning and engagement! Please note this is not an exhaustive list of resources, but serves as a starting point to learn more about UW’s 504at50 campaign goals.

Accessible Accordion

  • Black, Blind, & Beautiful — A poem by Leroy F. Moore Jr., a Black write, poet, hip-hop\music lover, community activist, and feminist with a physical disability.
  • Deaf Poet Society — An online literary journal that publishes poetry and art by D/deaf and/or disabled writers and artists
  • Identity-First Language — An article by Disability Justice advocate Lydia X. Z. Brown on the significance of semantics and identity-first language.
  • Ramp Your Voice! — A blog from Vilissa Thompson is a Licensed Master Social Worker (LMSW) from Winnsboro, SC. Vilissa is the Founder & CEO of Ramp Your Voice!, an organization focused on promoting self-advocacy and strengthening empowerment among disabled people.
  • The Body is Not an Apology — Disability specific blogs from an international movement committed to cultivating global radical self-love and bodily empowerment.

  • Autistic Self Advocacy Network — A national network ran by autistic people to empower autistic people across the world to take control of their own lives and the future of their common community, and seek to organize the autistic community to ensure our voices are heard.
  • Disability Visibility Project — An online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture, created by disabled activist, writer, editor, media maker, and consultant, Alice Wong.
  • DisArt — A disabled ran and led production company and arts and culture organization that focuses its energy on creating public art events that cultivate and communicate a disability culture.
  • Crip Riot — A disabled-owned and led company committed to bringing expressions of disability pride to the world, through unapologetic clothing, media, education and activism, created by alumni of the University of Washington!
  • FWD-Doc: Filmmakers With Disabilities — A global, intersectional community of disabled creators and allies working in media to build a more inclusive, accessible, and equitable entertainment industry.
  • Krip-Hop Institute — A worldwide association of hip-hop artists with disabilities, that serves as a cultural, activist, and inclusive platform for multiply marginalized people, especially in uplifting Black and Disabled voices
  • Sins Invalid — 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. Led by disabled people of color, Sins Invalid’s performance work explores the themes of sexuality, embodiment and the disabled body, developing provocative work where paradigms of “normal” and “sexy” are challenged, offering instead a vision of beauty and sexuality inclusive of all bodies and communities.
  • Society for Disability Studies — The leading international professional organization for disability studies, which seeks to advance an understanding of disability as a cultural, social, and political phenomenon and strives for a a critical interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach to scholarly inquiry in solidarity with grassroots disability movements.

  • TED Talk: I’m Not your Inspiration, Thank You Very Much  [9mins] — Stella Young is a comedian and journalist who happens to go about her day in a wheelchair — a fact that doesn’t, she’d like to make clear, automatically turn her into a noble inspiration to all humanity. In this very funny talk, Young breaks down society’s habit of turning disabled people into “inspiration porn.”

  • Disability Disability: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, Alice Wong — From Harriet McBryde Johnson’s account of her debate with Peter Singer over her own personhood to original pieces by authors like Keah Brown and Haben Girma; from blog posts, manifestos, and eulogies to Congressional testimonies, and beyond: this anthology gives a glimpse into the rich complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community. It invites readers to question their own understandings. It celebrates and documents disability culture in the now. It looks to the future and the past with hope and love.
  • Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, Eli Clare — With a poet’s devotion to truth and an activist’s demand for justice, Eli unspools the multiple histories from which our sense of self unfolds. His essays weave together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanings and experiences of home. Here readers will find an intersectional framework for understanding how we actually live with the daily hydraulics of oppression, power, and resistance.
  • Feminist, Queer, Crip, Alison Kafer — Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a pre-determined limit. She juxtaposes theories, movements, and identities such as environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability that are typically discussed in isolation and envisions new possibilities for crip futures and feminist/queer/crip alliances.
  • True Biz, Sara Novic — The title is an A.S.L. expression meaning “seriously” or “real talk,” this is a story of sign language and lip-reading, disability and civil rights, isolation and injustice, first love and loss, and, above all, great persistence, daring, and joy. Absorbing and assured, idiosyncratic and relatable, this is an unforgettable journey into the Deaf community and a universal celebration of human connection.
  • Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life, Alice Wong — From the founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project, and the editor of the acclaimed anthology Disability Visibility, a groundbreaking memoir in essays offers a glimpse into an activist’s journey to finding and cultivating community and the continued fight for disability justice.