Learn more about the event, get the details of how to join in, and watch new videos for this online conversation on the event page.

“Disabled folks have never been able to rely on the systems that are in place or those systems have been incredibly harmful to us.” – Elliott Fukui

In response to heightened levels of abuse and violence experienced by people with disabilities, disability justice organizers have developed tremendous knowledge and creative approaches to care, safety, and preventing and stopping violence without relying on the state. How do disability justice strategies and knowledge inform transformative justice practices? How are disability justice and transformative justice interconnected?

“What would our transformative justice work look like if we put everyone’s access needs at the center?” – Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, in “Cripping TJ,” an essay in the groundbreaking new collection Beyond Survival co-edited with Ejeris Dixon

How is anti-ableism essential to transformative justice? How do we start with the shared values of self-determination and the belief that no one is disposable to build capacity for personal and societal transformation?

This online event will take place in coordination with the release of five new videos in the Building Accountable Communities series, featuring transformative justice facilitators and organizers reflecting on key questions at the heart of experiments in addressing harm. Please watch these videos on the event page as a starting point for our conversation.

ACCESSIBILITY: This event is free and everyone is welcome. Live-captioning and ASL will be provided. The event livestream and captioning will be available on the event page. Please email any additional access needs to bcrw@barnard.edu.

Our website sometimes experience outages due to increased volume. If you experience trouble accessing the website at the time of the event, please check @bcrwtweets on Twitter for instructions to access the livestream. If you have registered for the event, you will also receive an updated link via email in the event of an outage.

About the Speakers

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled nonbinary femme writer, educator and disability and transformative justice movement worker of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. She is the Lambda Award winning author or co-editor of nine books, including (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon) Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, Tonguebreaker, Bridge of Flowers, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Dirty River and (co-edited with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani) The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Activist Violence in Intimate Communities. Since 2009, she has been a lead artist with the disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid. Raised in Worcester, MA, she is a VONA fellow and holds an MFA from Mills College. She is also a rust belt poet, a Sri Lankan with a white mom, an autistic kid who grew up, a survivor who is hard to kill.

Elliott Fukui is a trainer, facilitator, and community organizer with over 10 years of experience in social justice movement work. With Midwest roots and East coast seasoning, Elliott has been organizing both on national and local levels across many different issues and struggles, including reproductive justice, racial justice, economic justice and gender justice. He most recently was the program coordinator of Trans Justice, a political organizing group led by and for Trans and Gender Non-Conforming People of Color and a program of the Audre Lorde Project in New York City, and is currently on the advisory board of the Icarus Project, a support network and education project by and for people who experience the world in ways that are often diagnosed as mental illness.

The Building Accountable Communities Project promotes non-punitive responses to harm by developing resources for transformative justice practitioners and organizing convenings and workshops that educate the public.

Title quote “Moving at the Speed of Trust” from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's video interview, quoting adrienne maree brown.