Moving at the Speed of Trust: Disability Justice and Transformative Justice
Live transcript (PDF)
We are creating a word-for-word transcript that will be posted here when it becomes available.
Slide deck (PDF) by Elliott and Leah featuring important definitions, notes, and frameworks for today’s conversation.
During the event, you can send questions for the Q&A by emailing bcrw@barnard.edu or via Twitter @bcrwtweets #TransformingHarm
On the screen:
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Elliott Fukui (speakers)
Darryn Hollifield and Natalie Cuddy (ASL)
Hope Dector (introduction)
RELATED LINKS
Other events from the Building Accountable Communities Project:
Transforming Harm: Experiments in Accountability – featuring Stas Schmiedt and Lea Roth, moderated by Mariame Kaba
Building Accountable Communities – featuring Kiyomi Fujikawa and Shannon Perez-Darby, moderated by Mariame Kaba
Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, edited by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Ejeris Dixon
Elliott Fukui – madqueer.org
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha – BrownStarGirl.org
Sins Invalid – Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People
Join us online for a conversation with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Elliott Fukui on the intersections of disability justice and transformative justice. Please watch this video as a starting point for the conversation and then join us here on April 10 for the online event.
“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 (available below) as a starting point for our conversation.
Watch the videos below, contribute questions here, or via Twitter @bcrwtweets, or on BCRW’s Facebook page, and join us for an online conversation on Friday, April 10.
How to Join
This event will take place online only. You can tune in here on the event page, where the conversation will stream live from 4PM-6PM EST on 4/10.
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.
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 hdector@barnard.edu.
Video #1: Intersections of Disability Justice and Transformative Justice
In response to heightened levels of abuse and violence experienced by disabled people, 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? In this video, disability justice and transformative justice organizers Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarsinha and Elliott Fukui explore some of the intersections of these movements.
Featuring Elliott Fukui and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.
Video #2: What is Transformative Justice?
How do we prevent and stop violence and harm without creating more violence and harm? How do we transform a society in which harm is endemic to build a culture where violence becomes unthinkable? How can small everyday acts of accountability and relationship building lead to a broad cultural shift away from harm? In this video, practitioners define the scope and potential of transformative justice.
Featuring adrienne maree brown, Mia Mingus, Stas Schmiedt, Ann Russo, Esteban Kelly, Martina Kartman, Priya Rai, and Shira Hassan.
Video #3: What Does Justice Look Like for Survivors?
Writer Kai Cheng Thom suggests that justice is “a slow process of naming and transforming violence into growth and repair.” In this video, survivors and people who work with them explore how transformative justice can offer hope for healing and repair. At the core of their reflections is the question of what justice looks like when survivors of harm are given the time and space to imagine it.
Featuring Mimi Kim, Ann Russo, RJ Maccani, and Rachel Herzing.
Video #4: Centering the Needs of Survivors (Part 1)
Survivor-centeredness is an important value in transformative justice. But what does it actually mean to center the needs of survivors? In this 2-part video, people with years of experience facilitating community accountability processes with survivors of harm and people who have caused harm address whether centering survivors means that survivors define or drive transformative justice processes. This video considers the complexities of honoring and upholding survivors’ agency while balancing other concerns and interests. How do facilitators give survivors the time, space, and support they need while also making sure that other considerations are also incorporated into transformative justice and community accountability processes?
Featuring Sonya Shah, Elliott Fukui, adrienne maree brown, Stas Schmiedt, Lea Roth, nuri nusrat, and RJ Maccani.
Video #5: Centering the Needs of Survivors (Part 2)
Survivor-centeredness is an important value in transformative justice. But what does it actually mean to center the needs of survivors? In this 2-part video, people with years of experience facilitating community accountability processes with survivors of harm and people who have caused harm address whether centering survivors means that survivors define or drive transformative justice processes. This video considers the complexities of honoring and upholding survivors’ agency while balancing other concerns and interests. How do facilitators give survivors the time, space, and support they need while also making sure that other considerations are also incorporated into transformative justice and community accountability processes?
Featuring RJ Maccani, Priya Rai, Rachel Herzing, and Esteban Kelly.
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.