Akemi Nishida, Assistant Professor of Disability and Human Development and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago will present:

“Rethinking Interdependence: Creating Community-Based Care Collectives Among Disabled People and their Allies”

Interdependence is a core value in disability justice activism. It has been particularly salient in the past decade in the development and expansion of community-based care collectives among disabled people and their allies in the United States. Nishida’s ethnographically based research rethinks the role of interdependence among disabled people and their allies in care collectives. This talk shares findings from interviews with informants that reveal the challenges as well as the joys of their relationships. What disabled interviewees voice repeatedly is that dependency itself is generative in unexpected ways. Within the context of work in critical race and disability studies on the debilitation and slow death of marginalized populations under neoliberalism, how can we frame dependency—or interdependency—and its potential generativity?​​