Podcasts about leah lakshmi piepzna samarasinha

Fierce femme dinosaurs, intersex embodiment, Laura Dern – it's surprisingly easy to read Jurassic Park as a feminist celebration of monstrous queer bodies, at least when you have the magnificent Hannah McGregor by your side. In Hannah's ‘bookiest book yet,' we learn about lesbian dinosaurs, the ignorance of white male adventurers, and how and why they're erotically eviscerated for their flaws. Not to be missed!If you would like to observe us in the wild, follow us on Instagram: @hkpmcgregor and @queerlitpodcast.  References:Jurassic ParkHannah McGregor's Podcast or PerishMaterial GirlsTheodor RexWhoopi GoldbergEmmanuel LevinasLaura MulveyHannah McGregor's A Sentimental EducationThe Little MermaidUrsulaThe Last UnicornJen Sookfong Lee (Pop Classic series)Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Femme Shark Manifesto!Terra nulliusLaura DernVerlyn Klinkenborg's “What Were Dinosaurs For?”Prehistoric Planet with David AttenboroughEllen RipleyTales of the City@hkpmcgregor and @ohwitchplease (Instagram)Making Worlds podcast https://www.hannahmcgregor.com/Agatha All Along  Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:     Why/How can we read Jurassic Park as a feminist film?     What is the ‘monstrous-feminine'? How does Hannah speak about this? Can you find out which other scholar(s) we may associate with this term?     What does terra nullius mean? How is this relevant to Hannah's reading of the film?     Lena calls Jurassic Park a queer ecology in the episode. Please name at least two reasons why this term might apply.     What does Hannah highlight about Indigenous and decolonial scholarship in relation to Jurassic Park?    How do you feel about Laura Dern?  

“I've seen a lot of people lashing out at people horizontally, and my gut sense is that sometimes it happens because the folks who are lashing out are definitely super traumatized, in crisis, feel and are really powerless in a lot of ways,” says Disability Justice organizer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. In this episode, Kelly talks with Leah and Elliott Fukui, who develops community safety strategies for emotional wellness and safety, about why people are struggling right now, what's keeping people alive and engaged, and what we need to create together to survive these times. You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: truthout.org/series/movement-memos/ If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

Hello gentle-people, As I was organizing this series into a collection that could be accessed on my landing page, I realized I couldn't find part one. I racked my mind and my posts to see if maybe I accidently changed the name somehow or it ended up somewhere it wasn't meant to be. I gave up after my search rendered no results……it seems I have accidently deleted it.I will return later with a transcript to replace this piece—perhaps when I also get around to doing what I've resolved to do during my publishing break: move my drafts over to a safe place. I have *mumbles incoherently* drafts on here. My biggest fear has been confirmed—I have to be saving these posts somewhere else!Luckily, I had recorded part 1 before this mishap. Wishing you all a gentle landing, as I extend that same wish to my weary self today.Here is part 2 & 3:Hello, gentle people,I am always playing with phrases. Maybe you've noticed. Lately, I have been cracking myself up by dropping, “don't threaten me with a good time, into my conversations.” Today, I am playing with the phrase, I could care less, because it's true—I could give it my best try. water sign woman by Lucille Clifton the woman who feels everything sits in her new house waiting for someone to come who knows how to carry water without spilling, who knows why the desert is sprinkled with salt, why tomorrow is such a long and ominous word. they say to the feel things woman that little she dreams is possible, that there is only so much joy to go around, only so much water. there are no questions for this, no arguments. she has to forget to remember the edge of the sea, they say, to forget how to swim to the edge, she has to forget how to feel. the woman who feels everything sits in her new house retaining the secret the desert knew when it walked up from the ocean, the desert, so beautiful in her eyes; water will come again if you can wait for it. she feels what the desert feels. she waits.The troublesome work of defining careDepending on how you read my intro letter, You might be thinking, “I can't believe Rose J. Percy, writer of A Gentle Landing, is saying she wants to lean into heartlessness. I'm unsubscribing immediately!” And I blame the ambiguous nature of the word care and its many definitions. I could do a whole series on the definitions and probably write a post a week for the rest of the year. Just look at how many interpretations we could delve into. Now, here I have a screenshot of the definitions of care taken from a Google search, which you can delve into yourself and linger on these definitions, but it's interpreted as a noun and also a verb and comes with so many meanings I didn't even count. Luckily, I have already written on some definitions of care that I'm partial to. In one post, I talk about the word care through the word “tender” and how we can think about it as a way of a caring attention. One might call it tenderness, and the acceptance of ourselves as tenders. And that post is called Permission to Linger. I have also written on writing as a practice of care in my series delving into my writing praxis. And that post is called “A Place for Keeping, Writing as a Practice of Care.”Now, here are some definitions that I am fond of. And for the purposes of this post, I am understanding these four definitions of care and I added a fifth for just the ways I'm playing with the words “carrying” and “care” together. * Care as a tending (or attending), once again, with particular emphasis on attention. Since we have been here before, let's stick with “tending.”* Care as an attachment or interest. Let's stick with the word “attachment.” It often feels like the things we care of are a part of us..sometimes we are indeed connected.* Care as avoidance of danger or risk. I will “caution,” instead here, since I also love the phrase “throw caution to the wind.” We can do some fun poetic things with that.* Care as a troubling, a feeling stirred up by what we brood over. I will use the word “burden” here, since something of this definition reminds me to remember the weight.* I will also be playing with caring and carrying in order to drive home one central point: we all have a carrying capacity when it comes to care…even if we hate to admit it.“You have to turn it off. You have to learn to turn it off.” I am trying harder to care less every day.By that I mean, as a child, I used to be overwhelmed by something one might call “car(ry)ing too much. Some might also call it a sense of responsibility or conviction. And I read this book once in college, and it was treated like the pinnacle text for our general education curriculum. And it was assigned as the last text in our ethics class, the capstone text, and it was called Scandalous Obligation by Eric Severson. And I remember reading that book, which talks about Christian responsibility, and I thought, “this book is not for me.” Because I am the girl who, just upon seeing a commercial on food insecurity affecting children miles away, could not bring herself to enjoy a cookout. An auntie of mine gave me a speech which remains with me forever, and the essence was, “you can't help the children if you cry. You have to learn how to suck it up and feed yourself so you can grow big and strong. Then you can be of much better use to them." Through the years, I have either taken her advice or shaken it off. And her words led me to see my feelings as an inconvenience in a sphere of caring. And sometimes I can't help but feel she had a point when I find myself stirring in my worries for myself and others. I was a cautious child and I grew into a cautious adult.I can't help but feel her point when I seem to collect cares or grow a new interest in some injustice in the world beyond my capacity to respond or affect change. And I see her point when as a result of these new interests and attachments, I feel scattered and overwhelmed by all there is to care about.And I see her point when I feel like I'm failing, either emotionally or through physical challenges I'm still learning about in my attempt to “learn how to carry water,” as it leaks out of the sides of my eyes in this last ditch attempt to demonstrate how burdened I truly am. So as I consider her words, I felt like I had to learn how to turn something off. And back then I was just barely a teenager and I couldn't name it. So I tried hard when I was overwhelmed to shut off everything. I've included a picture of my monstera plant when I first got it a few months after I first got it in the spring of 2021. Something had to go. In the midst of what has been a hard couple of weeks, much of which was defined by embodied mental, emotional, and spiritual pain, I wanted to let something go. I had entertained many different ideas, but I was pretty certain I wanted to cut off my hair. In the past, going bald served as a foundation for embracing a new shift in focus. But I didn't want a new haircut.I wasn't ready to let go of my locs. I didn't want to get a new haircut. I wasn't ready to let go of my locks, but something had to go. I could feel it.So I chose to take some cuttings off of this beautiful monstera plant you see in these pictures. I kept the new cuttings and placed the large potted plant, which looked a bit too large to be on the bookshelf that it lived on, out to the curb to be received by some happy stranger.I first got my monstera in 2021 when I was nurturing a rather large houseplant collection. The room I was staying in had a beautiful big south-facing window. My monstera lived with me through three houses, and I had gifted cuttings from it and watched it grow to require two moss poles for support.I watched in surprise when it flourished at the last place I lived, a place where I struggled to flourish. My room, small and dark, had a tiny window taken up halfway by an AC unit that was screwed into the window. I used grow lights to try to keep a few plants alive on the bookshelf. My efforts failed. Somehow, though, new leaves kept coming up along the sides of my monstrous potted home. I wrote down my care instructions on an index card, complete with notes on the last time it was fertilized and how long ago it was repotted. I hoped the next person would not let her die, but I knew there was a chance I could have killed her myself. I worried about killing her constantly. Now she was someone else's burden. I now have one less thing to care about. I could care less. “Rose, run that song back one more time. The one where you're crying, ‘Help me, I'm dying.' I love the melody!”—me in a conversation about how my work feels sometimes. When I consider that burnout produces apathy, it makes sense that so many people experience a fatigue around their ability to care. It has been a while since I read Burnout: The Secret of Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagowski,but I hold onto one of my takeaways from the definition of burnout outlined in Three parts, the first being emotional exhaustion, the fatigue that comes from caring too much for too long. Many of us know this in a parallel term, compassion fatigue, which often applies to those who work in caring professions or hold domestic caregiving responsibilities.Our society is continually reinforcing individualism that harms us all, and this definitely impacts what we think caring ought to look like. This is a quote from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha from Care Work Dreaming Disability Justice:“What does it mean to shift our ideas of access and care (whether it's disability, health care, economic access, or many more) from an individual chore an unfortunate cost of having an unfortunate body to a collective responsibility that's maybe even deeply joyful? What does it mean for our movements? Our communities/fam? Ourselves and our own lived experience of disability and chronic illness? What does it mean to wrestle with these ideas of softness and strength, vulnerability, pride, asking for help and not—all of which are deeply raced and classed and gendered?”These questions posed by Piepzna-Samarasinha serve as an inspiration for me as I write. An understanding that communal care makes a gentle landing possible undergirds all of this. Also true is the understanding that falling, failing, and flailing are often inevitable on this path.But what does that have to do with caring less? You tell me. How much can you actually hold? How much are you holding right now in this breath when you think of that question? So let's break it down further into questions that reflect the definitions I've mentioned:;* What are you tending to in this season, really? Not what you are saying you are tending to, but what is actually possible within the time you have allotted? * Are you committed to anything at present that requires more than your hands in order to be well taken care of? Have you stumbled into new interests and formed new attachments? Are these new extremities splintering your capacity? Is there anything you can cut off so that water can flow to what is flourishing? Are there ways these new attachments can be nurtured through a network of care versus your individual care? * Perhaps you are now much more aware of all there is to be afraid of, the dangers and the risks all around you. Has any of this fear contributed to loving yourself and others better? Where can you, “throw caution to the wind,” in recognition that your worrying has its limits with forecasting? I hope you're keeping track and notice that I left burden out of this list. We will return to it soon enough.But how about we take a break here? I also included a Lucille Clifton poem here. So you're free to take some time with it and we will come around to it again. because I am learning how to pace myself as an active care. I am taking time with my words, as you've seen in the “perching lines” series.I am trying to make these newsletters just a bit lighter. But trust, we will come back to the burden. I know because, well, the burden always finds its way back to me. I am learning how to carry water.I want to say this marvelous woman's poetry has changed my life. Since the day I first heard, won't you celebrate with me, recited by the dean of students in seminary. I knew it was for me somehow. In the way that I know many Black women, femmes, and men, such as my brothers Robert and Jan, find themselves in her poetry. June 27th is her birthday. Tomorrow, if you're reading this on pub day. I wanted to do something big. I wanted to have a conversation, read some poems, have folks listen. And as I planned it, the details that I wanted to line up only led me to more questions. But I kept searching for a way to honor her birthday and to recognize how becoming a Lucille Clifton scholar has shaped me. I want to honor her work like Alexis Pauline Gumbs honors the survival ethics of Audre Lorde or how adrienne maree brown devotes herself to the world building of Octavia Butler.I would be satisfied to honor her with just one twentieth of the archival devotion Professor Honorée Jeffers brought to the three-hour class she taught on the Sankofa Poetics of Lucille Clifton last month. I have been trying to find a way to study the poetics of Lucille Clifton in some official capacity other than this newsletter, but maybe this is it. And if that is the case, I am thankful to reflect on her poetry here. I am thankful for the people it has brought close to me. I am thankful for the light that came to Lucille Clifton and so glad it seems to have found its way to me.Or maybe this is my burden: to do as my faves above do in bringing the words they love into the worlds they love. Perhaps this is why it doesn't feel like enough to just do an event, read some poems, and call it a day. I need to write about the light that came to Rose J. Percy. I keep wondering if I am meant to carry it all by myself. As I sat in my sorrows about this event that never was, I realized I overlooked a very important Cliftonian idea:The event was her life.She says, won't you celebrate with me what I have shaped into a kind of life?So I sent some brave emails. I applied for a job I felt too afraid to hope I might get. I shared a burden with my closest friends. I am taking steps to learn to live and love better.21:05I am leaning into my dreams because I must do something with this quote kind of life and quote that I keep surviving. In her invitation is the audacity to believe there is something worth celebrating about being here. I will celebrate her life by living my own more deeply. If you are reading, then you are bearing witness and thus attending an event I could never plan out in my wildest dreams. So thank you for being here. Let's keep seeing where this goes. Get full access to A Gentle Landing at agentlelanding.substack.com/subscribe

COVID is not over. It is still here. This is an invitation to understand that reality, and to let it transform you. Grounded in disability justice, and brought to you by a chorus of staunch disabled voices: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Darcy from Sick/Sovereign, Tori Hobbs and Julia Rose Bak from The Disability Justice Network and Li from COVID Solidarity ‘syd.' Produced by Samantha Haran, Shareeka Helaluddin & Sehej Kaur. Additional thanks to Justin Chen, Allison Chan and Juliet Fox. Episode artwork by Li @eternallyuncomfortable Arundhati Roy on ‘The pandemic is a portal': https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca COVID resources: Let Them Eat Plague! (Intro to COVID politics and basic COVID myth busting): https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/let-them-eat-plague/  You Are Not Entitled To Our Deaths: COVID, Abled Supremacy & Interdependence (Mia Mingus) https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2022/01/16/you-are-not-entitled-to-our-deaths-covid-abled-supremacy-interdependence/  How to do COVID Conscious events resource (by COVID Solidarity ‘syd'): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kf1AKdE0j5k2hqIOvIjeS4tYzxgsoar6SOot6JklLE4/edit  NSW COVID safer venues database (by COVID Solidarity ‘syd'): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tAN1QE_4_b5JSzwooQSEXwlM995UusdU9w4rswRecZ0/edit?gid=1146046115#gid=1146046115  What to do if you have COVID (by The Peoples CDC - US based): https://peoplescdc.org/2023/01/10/what-to-do-if-you-have-covid/    Support the rich chorus of voices that made this episode possible: Read Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's latest book: https://brownstargirl.org/the-future-is-disabled/  Read the Sick/Sovereign zine: https://www.yacvic.org.au/ydas/policy-and-events/policy/covid-19/resources/first-nations-zine/  Darcy's work with Blackfulla Alt2Su: https://instagram.com/BlackfullaAlt2Su Join the Disability Justice Network facebook group (disabled people only): https://www.facebook.com/share/g/zYoTbvvRLkQYYSJz/?mibextid=adzO7l Donate to the Disability Justice Network mutual aid fund: https://www.gofundme.com/f/disability-justice-network-mutual-aid-fund Follow COVID Solidarity ‘syd': https://www.instagram.com/c0vidsolidaritysyd/  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Margaret and Leah talk about disability, preparedness, and covid. Guest Info Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (They/She) is a writer and structural engineer of disability and transformative justice work. Leah can be found at brownstargirl.org, on Instagram @leahlakshmiwrites, or on Bluesky @thellpsx.bsky.social Their book The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs can be found: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-future-is-disabled-prophecies-love-notes-and-mourning-songs-leah-lakshmi-piepzna-samarasinha/18247280 Their book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice can be found: https://bookshop.org/p/books/care-work-dreaming-disability-justice-leah-lakshmi-piepzna-samarasinha/16603798 Host Info Margaret (she/they) can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Leah on Disability and Preparedness Resources Mentioned: StaceyTaughtUs Syllabus, by Alice Wong and Leah: https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2020/05/23/staceytaughtus-syllabus-work-by-stacey-milbern-park/ NoBody Is Disposable Coalition: https://nobodyisdisposable.org/ Power To Live Coalition: https://www.powertolivecoalition.org/ Disability Visibility Project article about Power to Live : https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2019/10/26/call-for-stories-powertolive/ Power to Live survival skillshare doc: http://tinyurl.com/dissurvival Long winter crip survival guide for pandemic year 4/forever by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Tina “constant tt” Zavitsanos https://www.tinyurl.com/longwintersurvival Pod Mapping for Mutual Aid by Rebel Sydney Rose Fayola Black: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-QfMn1DE6ymhKZMpXN1LQvD6Sy_HSnnCK6gTO7ZLFrE/mobilebasic?fbclid=IwAR0ehOJdo-vYmJUrXsKCpQlCODEdQelzL9AE5UDXQ1bMgnHh2oAnqFs2B3k Half Assed Disabled Prepper Tips for Preparing for a Coronavirus Quarantine. (By Leah) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rIdpKgXeBHbmM3KpB5NfjEBue8YN1MbXhQ7zTOLmSyo/edit Sins Invalid Disability Justice is Climate Justice: https://www.sinsinvalid.org/news-1/2022/7/7/disability-justice-is-climate-justice Skin Tooth and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People (A disability justice primer): https://www.sinsinvalid.org/disability-justice-primer DJ Curriculum by Sins: https://www.sinsinvalid.org/curriculum Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies: https://disasterstrategies.org/ Live Like the World is Dying: Leah on Disability & Preparedness **Margaret ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host, Margaret killjoy. And I always tell you that I'm excited about episodes, but I'm really excited about this episode. It put me in a better mood than when I started the day that I get to record this episode. Because today, we're going to be talking about disability and preparedness. We're gonna be talking about Covid abandonment. And we're gonna be talking about a lot of the questions that... a lot of the questions that people write us to talk about that they have about preparedness and I think that we can cover a lot of those. Not me, but our guest. But first before the guest, a jingle from another show on the network. Oh, the network is called Channel Zero Network. It is a network of anarchists podcasts and here's a jingle. [sings a simple melody] **Margaret ** 01:08 Okay, and we're back. So, if you could introduce yourself with your name, your pronouns, and then I guess just a little bit about how you got involved in thinking about and dealing with disability and preparedness. **Leah ** 02:00 Sure. Hi, my name is Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. She and They pronouns. Right now I live in Pocomtuc and Nipmuc territories in Western Massachusetts. And that is a great question. I will also just plug myself briefly and be like I'm a disability justice and transformative justice old sea-hag, aging punk of color who has written or co-edited ten books and done a lot of shit. Okay, so when I was sitting on the toilet thinking about "What do I want to tell Margaret when we get on the show?", I was actually thinking that my disability and my preparedness routes are kind of one in the same because... So I'm 48 [years old] now and I got sick when I was 21-22. So like back in 96-97. And, it was the initial episode that I got sick with chronic fatigue, ME, and fibromyalgia. And I was just super fucking ill and on the floor and was living in Toronto as somebody who was not from Canada. And, you know, I was just sick as hell, like crawling to the bathroom, like sleeping 18 hours a day. The whole nine. And I'd been really really deeply involved in anarchist of color and prison abolitionist and antifascist organizing and lots of stuff. I had a community, but it was 1997, so most of my community was just like, "What you're sick? Why didn't you make it to the meeting? We have to write all the prisoners with the [untranslatable]." And I was just like, "I just.... Okay, great." Like it was a really different time. There was no GoFundMe, mutual aid, Meal Train, someone brought me some soup. Like, know you, we weren't really doing that. And people really did not have a consciousness around, "You can be a 22 year old brown, nonbinary femme and be really, really sick and be disabled." So something I think a lot, and I've said before, is that disabled people are really used to the concept that no one is going to save us and we are really not surprised when state systems abandoned us because we live in that all the time. And so I was just like this little 22 year old sicko weirdo who'd read my Octavia Butler--and, in fact, that was part of the reason why I was like, "Toronto, great, there's gonna be more water and less heat." Okay, wasn't totally right about that. But, you know, I mean, I really had to save myself and I kind of was like, "Alright, I don't have..." Like, I'm working off the...I'm working under the table. I have hardly any money. I'm gonna make my own herbal medicine. I'm gonna grow a lot of what I eat from my backyard. I'm going to store water. I'm going to run a credit card scam and get a lot of dried goods and live off of those for like a year. [Margaret Hell Yeahs] Yeah, stuff like that. I feel like from there, over the last, you know, 26 years like it's....like, that's the route. The route was, you know, similar to a lot of people, I think of my generation, we were like on the cusp of looking at the current crises of like hot fascist war, hot eugenics war, hot climate crisis, and being like, "It's coming," and I started being like, "Yeah, like don't...don't think that it's all going to work out okay and that somebody else is going to fix it for you." So, I would say that's where my initial route--and then do you want to jump in? Or can I jump ahead like 20 years or something? **Margaret ** 05:10 Honestly, you could jump ahead 20 years later. I'm gonna come back and make you talk more about Octavia Butler. But we'll do that later. **Leah ** 05:16 Let's talk more about Octavia Butler because I have a lot of stuff about Octavia Butler and how she thought of--and I think sometimes misused--like nowadays [this is probably not the word but it's untranslatable] and also about disability. [Margaret "Oooohs" curiously] I know. We can get to that. Okay, so that's one route. And then, you know, I mean, I was always kind of like a little weirdo, where it's like, yeah, I grow most of my own food--or as much as I can--and it's not a fun green hobby. It's like, I'm broke as fuck and I need to grow a lot vegetables that fucking, you know, I can mulch and that can stay growing into December, you know? I stashed stuff. Something I also think a lot, is that as disabled people--and we talked about this a little bit when we're emailing--I think we're always prepping whether we call it that or not. Like most disabled folks I know just do shit. Like if you get a prescription and you have extra, you store it, you know? Like, if you can get a double dose, you put that aside. And then maybe you have it for yourself. Or, there's so many disabled mutual aid networks I've been a part of where someone's--I mean, before Facebook clamped down, this is really common on a lot of Facebook disabled groups--someone would be like, "Yo, does anyone have an extra five pills of such and such?" and I've seen total strangers for 15 years of disability justice be like, "Yep, what's your address? I do. I'm gonna mail it to you. I have my old pain meds. I've got this. I've got that." But, um, yeah, like doing the jumping forward that I promised you, so for people who don't know, disability justice as a movement was founded around 2005 by a group, a small group of disabled Black, Asian, and poor and working class, white disabled folks, who were all pretty, you know, gay, trans, and radical. And they were like, "We want to bring a revolutionary intersectional out of our own lives and experiences and issues. We want to create a disability movement that's for us and by us that's not just white, single issue, often cis, often male, often straight." Like, we want to talk about the fact that 50% of bipoc folks who were killed by the cops are also disabled, deaf, neurodivergent, etc... just to give one example. So, you know, that was '05 in Oakland, you know, Patti Burn, LeRoy Moore, Stacy Milbern, Ely Claire, Sebastian Margaret, Stacey Milbern Park, you know, the six. And I was living in Toronto and I moved to Oakland in '07 and I was kind of around for some of the beginnings of it. There's two stories I want to bring in. One actually predates my move. It was right when I was getting ready to leave Toronto, I got invited to go to this reading by a bunch of queer--I think all white--disabled radical folks. And I was just like, "Oh?" And I did the whole, like, "Am I really disabled enough?" and then it was like, "Oh, it's gonna be really depressing." And then it was really awesome. And I was like, "Whoa, disability community. Life saving." But it was kind of one of my moments of being brought into the disability community because there was this writer who was there who, their reading series was actually a choose your own adventure where there's four disabled, queer, and trans folks who are having a sex party and the zombie apocalypse happens. And then they have to figure out how to survive it without abandoning each other. And it was all like, "Okay, you all get to the van, but then there's no ramp. What do you do? Oh! You get this accessible ramp, but it smells like perfume and somebody has NCS. What do you do? And I was just sitting there with my mouth open--and it was also interwoven with like, 'Yeah, and then somebody's fucking somebody else with like, you know, a dildo strapped to their prosthetic,'" and I was like, wow, I fucking love disability. Like, sign me up. But I gotta say briefly, that was one of my first examples of like, you know, there's a really important phrase in Disability Justice, which is, "No one left behind, " right? Like, that's one of the core organizing principles. And that was kind of.... Before I even heard that phrase, I was like, "Fuck like this is..."--because I'd been around antiauthoritarian, quasi prepper, like "shit's gonna happen, we have to get ready." But I was always kind of quiet in the corner closeting my disability being like, "Well, shit, like, what if I don't have my meds? Or what if I'm too.... What if I can't run away from, you know, the Nazis or the zombies because I have a limp and I walk with a cane? Like, what if?" And that was my first example of this cross disability fantasy space of like, "We're going to escape together and we're not going to let anyone get eaten and it's going to mean really being creative about access stuff." Okay so jump ahead to, right, then I moved to Oakland and then I ran into actual Disability Justice community through Sins Invalid, which is an incredibly important foundational Disability Justice group, and through a lot of friendships I started making with other QTBIPOC disabled folks and my really, really good friend Stacy Park Milbern, who, people should totally know her work. She's incredible. She was one of the best movement organizers that the movement has ever seen. And we met online. And she was living in Fort Bragg, North Carolina with her family on the base because her family's military. And she was a queer southern, working-class, Korean and white, you know, physically disabled organizer from when she was really young. And then she was like, "Okay, I love my family, but I'm literally hiding my gay books in the wall because my mom's Pentecostal." So, yeah, and she's like--I literally realized she tells the story a lot--she's like, "Yeah, like, I realized I hadn't really left the house for a couple months and like, this is gonna be it," and she's like, "I was literally watching Oprah. And Oprah said, 'No one's coming to save you.'" And she was like, okay. She's 21 years old. And then through online, disabled, queer of color community there was this--or she organized--this initiative called To the Other Side of Dreaming where she moved crosscountry with Mia Mingus, who's another queer Korean organizer who was a friend of hers, ad moved to the Bay Area. And so that was around 2010-2011. And then in 2011, what happens but the Fukushima nuclear accident, right, disaster? And we're all on the West Coast--and it's completely ridiculous bullshit, looking back on it now--but all of these Bay Area folks were like, "Oh my God! Radiation!" And some people pointed out, "Look, you know, we're not.... There's...it's a big ocean. The people who really have to worry are in Japan and areas around it, so whatever?" But it was one of those times where we were like, fuck, this is a really big nuclear accident and we are sort of close and it's making us think about disaster. And I remember just going to fucking Berkeley Bowl, which is this big, fancy, organic supermarket and people had bought out all of the burdock all the fucking seaweed. And I was like, "Oh, my God, these people." But out of that, Stacy started having conver--and I and other people who were in our organizing network of disabled, majority BIPOC--were like, "What are we going to as disabled BIPOC if there is an earthquake, fascism, like another big disaster? And Stacy said, really bluntly, she's like, "You know," and she was a power wheelchair user. She used a ventilator. You know, she's like, "Yeah, I am supported by electricity and battery dependent access equipment." And she's like, "Well, I'm going to be really honest, my plan has always been, if something happens, I'm just going to lay down in my bed and die, because I don't think that any emergency services are going to come save me and the power is going to run out in 48 hours. And then we were like, "Okay, that's super real. What if, through our amazing collective access stuff we're doing, we could figure out something else?" And we had this meeting at Arismendy bakery, which for folks who know, is like a worker owned co-op chain, Our friend Remedios worked there. It's wheelchair accessible. We met there after hours. And it was just like, 12-15 of us who started just sitting there and being like, "What are the resources we have? What are the needs we have? And we made this map, which I still have, which I think I shared with you, which is just like, "Apocalypse, South Berkeley/Oakland Map 2011," where we were like, "Okay, you know, when the power goes down, the communication goes down. We're gonna meet at this one traffic circle because people who are wheelchair users can roll up. And we're gonna bury note paper in a mason jar with pens and we're gonna leave notes for each other. But we're also going to agree to meet there the day after at noon." And I was like, okay, my collective house, the first floor is wheelchair accessible. We have solar, we have a landline. And we have a lot of space. So like, let's meet there. And then someone was like, "We've got the one accessible van. And we know, it's only supposed to fit 4 people, but we can fit like 12 in there." And we started.... Like, I just think about that a lot because it's, I think it was a really important moment where it was important...the stuff that we did like that--you know, the actual strategies and the resources we started talking about--but it was also that it was the first time in my life that I was like, "Okay, we're not--not only are we not going to just die alone in our beds, I'm also not going to be the one person who survives. Like, I can actually survive with, and because of, other people. And we're all disabled BIPOC with a couple of disabled white folks. And we can actually collectively strategize around that. And this will be my last leap forward, because I see that you're like, "I want to ask you stuff." So, you know, eight years go by, and in that time we all do an incredible amount of Disability Justice organizing and strategizing. And, you know, in 2019.... And a lot of it started to be around climate disaster on the West Coast. Like, I moved to Seattle in 2015. The wildfires started being really bad a year or two later. A lot of us were involved in mask distributions, just spreading information about smoke safety and survival. And then 2019 was the infamous year where the wildfires came back and Pacific Gas and Electric, in all of its fucking glory, which is the main--for people who don't know--it's the main utility electrical company in Northern California. They announced two days before wildfires were going to really impact the Bay, they were like, "Oh, so we've decided that our strategy is going to be that we're just going to shut down all the power in Northern California. **Margaret ** 14:52 No one uses that. [Sardonically] **Leah ** 14:53 No one uses that. And they're like, "Oh, if you have a medical need, call this number, and we'll make sure to leave it on at your house." and Stacey was, "Okay." She had just bought her house, the Disability Justice Culture Club in East Oakland, you know, which was her house but also a community center, de facto community center, that housed a lot of disabled folks of color. And she was like, "I was on the fucking phone for eight hours. Like, I never got through." And she and some comrades started this campaign called Power to Live where they were like.... It started out as, "Okay, we can't save everybody, but we're not going to just lay down and die. What do we do?" So it started out as like, okay, let's identify who has housing that still has power. There's some people in Richmond, there's some people in this neighborhood, but then it also developed into this thing where it was just this amazing crowdsource survivalist resource where it was everything from, she's like, "Here's a number. Here's an email. If you need something, text us, call us, email us. We have a team of eight people. We'll figure it out. If you have something to offer, do it too." And then some of it was that people were sharing everything from generator information, to generator shares, to people in different areas-- like I was in Seattle and we were like, "Okay, we will mail you generators and air purifiers, because it's obviously all sold out in the Bay, but we can get it here and get it to you." The thing that always stands out to me is people being like, "Oh, yeah, here's how you can use dry ice and clay pots to keep your insulin cold if refrigeration goes down." And there's a lot more I could say about that action and how amazing it was. But for me, when I think about the through line, I'm like, that moment in 2011, when we all got together, and were like, "What do we do?" we were prepping for what we couldn't fully predict, you know, the exact manifestation of eight years later. We're there and we're like, "Okay, there's wildfires, there's smoke, there's no fucking power, and we've not only built our organizing base, we built our relationships with each other so that we can actually trust each other and more or less know how to work together when this shit actually is hitting the fan to create something that's really life giving. Okay, I'll shut up. That was a lot. **Margaret ** 16:52 Now I have so many questions about all of it. **Leah ** 16:53 Yeah, ask me all the questions. **Margaret ** 16:55 Because there's a couple...there's a couple of questions and/or feedback that we get with Live Like, the World is Dying a lot. And some of them are very specifically disability related, and you covered most of them, but I want to highlight some of them. Like a lot of people write and are like, "Well, I rely on the following thing that is provided by civilization. So my plan is to lay down and die." Right? This is a--and I know you've kind of answered it--but I.... I want to ask more. Okay, I'll go through all the things. Okay. So to talk more about what "No One Left Behind," means? And then the other thing that really stands out to me is that, you know, when we were talking, when we were talking about what we were going to talk about on this on this episode, I was saying, okay, we can talk about, you know, making sure that preparedness is inclusive and open and includes disabled folks, or whatever, and you pointed out, really usefully, the, the necessity to reframe it. And I think that the story you just gave is a really beautiful example of this, where it's less about, like, "Hey, make sure to pay attention to the people who need canes," you know, or whatever, right? Like, you know, "make sure you keep track of folks based on disability." And more than like the thing you just described, is the thing that we're always trying to push, which is that you need to make a list of all the resources and needs within your community and then figure out how to meet those needs and instead of assuming that we can't meet those needs, figuring out how to actually do it. And so I love that it's actually like.... It's actually disability justice movements that we should be learning from, I mean, or participating in, depending on our level of ability, or whatever, but I just find that I find both of those things really interesting. And so I wonder if you have more that you want to say about alternatives to laying down and dying, and specifically, to tie into the other thing that I get asked the most or that I get the common feedback is--because we talk a lot about the importance of community for preparedness on this show--a lot of people don't feel like they have community and a lot of people write to be like, "I don't have any friends," or "I don't know any other people like me," or, you know. And so, I guess that's my main question is how do.... [Trails off] Yeah, how do? **Leah ** 19:22 So how do you make community when you don't have community? Alternatives to lying down and dying? And was there a third one in there? **Margaret ** 19:28 I was just highlighting how cool it is that y'all sat there and made a list of resources and needs, which is exactly what.... Instead of deciding things are impossible, just being like, "Well, let's just start doing them." You know? **Leah ** 19:40 And I think.... Okay, so I'll start there. Like I think that like.... You know, Corbit O'Toole, who's like a, you know, Disability Rights Movement veteran and like older Irish, disabled dyke, you know, in Crip Camp, the movie, she's like, "Disabled people live all the time with the knowledge that the society wants thinks we're better off dead," right? Like one...back in the day, you know, there's a--I think they're still active--one of the big Disability Rights direct action organizations was called Not Dead Yet, right? [Margaret Hell Yeahs] I think this is the thing is like I think that sometimes abled people or neurotypical people are not used to sitting down and making the list. And I think that even if disabled people aren't preppers, we're used to being like, "Okay, what do I need? Fuck, I need somebody to help me do my dishes. Oh, I can't bend over. I need to figure out what is the access tool that will allow me to pick up something from the floor when my that goes out? Like, if my attendant doesn't show up, can I have a..." You know, like, my friends always like, "Yeah, I've got a yogurt container by the bed in case my attendant doesn't show up so I can not piss the bed. I can lean over and piss in the yogurt container." Like there's a--and I think that.... God, I mean, there's been so many times over the years where I've done or been a part of doing like Disability Justice 101 and me and Stacy would always talk about crip wisdom and crip innovation and people will just look blank like "What are you talking about? You guys are just a bunch of sad orphans at the telethon." It's not just about making the list, it's also about how disabled disability forces you to be innovative. Like, Stacy would always share this story where she's like, "Yeah," like, she's like "Crip innovation is everything from," she's like, "I save a lot of time sometimes by pretending I can't talk when people come over and want to pray over me. You know, I just act like a mute and they fucking leave and they go on with their life," and she's like, "You know, I realized one day, if I took my sneakers off, I could ramp a step if it's just two steps. I could just put them there and I could roll up." Or I mean, there's a million examples.... Or like, because I think it's about prepping and about making the lists and it's also about whatever you prep for, there's always going to be the X Factor of "Oh, we didn't fucking expect that." And I think that's where a lot of prep falls apart is people have their "Dream Bunker." They're like, "Oh, okay, I know exactly what the threats are going to be." And then of course, it doesn't fucking happen that way. I really hope I can swear on your show. **Margaret ** 21:46 You can. Don't worry. **Leah ** 21:47 Great. So, I mean, one example I could give is I'm remembering at, you know, a Sins show when we were in rehearsal, where everyone drove over from Oakland in Patty's wheelchair accessible van, and then the ramp broken wouldn't unfold. So we just were like, alright, who do we know who has welding equipment? Who do we know has lumber? Like, I think we ended up going to a bike repair shop and then they had tools. And then we're like, okay, we'll just bring the rehearsal into the van and do it that way. Like, you have to be innovative. And that's a muscle that I think society doesn't teach you to flex and that often, I think that even people who.... I think there can be a lot of eugenics in prep, you know, whether people are overtly fascist or not, there's a real belief of like, "Oh, only the strong and smart," --which looks a certain way-- "survive," and that "We should use rational thinking to make it all work out." And I think a lot of crip intelligence or wisdom is actually knowing that shit can go sideways 48 different ways and you have to adapt. And you have to just kind of be like, "Well, let's try this." So I think that's one thing. And I think, you know, one thing I'll say is, yeah, just speaking to kind of the reframing we were talking about, I think it's less like, "Oh, remember the people with canes," but, I mean, that's good, but also knowing that we're already doing it and that abled people actually have a shit ton to learn from us. But also, I mean, something.... I mean, the title of my last book is "The Future is Disabled," and it comes from something--it's not unique thinking to me--it's something that a lot of disabled people have been thinking and saying throughout the pandemic is that we were already at like a 30% disabled world minimum and we're pretty close--we're probably at majority disabled right now. Because what, 2% of the world didn't get Covid? Like, how many people have Long Covid? How many people have complex PTSD? We're all sick, crazy, and, you know, needing access equipment. Disability is not out there. It's in here. Like there's no such thing as doing prep that's like, "Oh, only the three Uber Mensch are gonna survive." Like fuck that. And that actually--I mean, sorry, this might be a side note, but a lot of people have probably seen The Last of Us. And I'm just gonna SPOILER ALERT it. You know that famous episode three of those two gay bear preppers in love? Yeah, I loved a lot about it. I was so pissed at the ending, which I'm just going to spoil. So you know, the more artsy, non-prep guy....[interrupted] **Margaret ** 21:47 Yeah, they don't survive. **Leah ** 22:47 Well, no, but like, not only did they not survive but one of them gets chronically ill. And I was just like, grinding my teeth because it's like, "Oh, he's in a wheelchair. Oh, his hand tremors." And then they end up deciding to both kill themselves rather than do anything else. And I was so furious at it because I was like, these are two people who are so innovative. They have figured out all kinds of problem solving. They have an entire small city for themselves. And it's all like, "Oh, no, he can't get up the stairs." And I'm like, really? There was no accessible ranch house you couldn't of fucking moved to? **Margaret ** 24:38 Or like build a bedroom on the fucking ground floor. **Leah ** 24:40 Or youcouldn't get meds? You couldn't? I mean, when his hand was shaking, it was like, "Oh, it's so sad. He's being fed." I'm like, there's tons.... First of all, it doesn't suck to be fed. A lot of things that seem like a fate worse than death are not when you're in them. And also, there's like all kinds of adaptive utensils that they could have fucking raided from medical supply if he wants to feed himself. Or I'm sorry, there's no cans of Ensure? They absolutely have power. They couldn't have made smoothies? Like, what the fuck is this? But beyond that--and I think that a lot of people who have talked about that episode did, I think, have some good analysis of it where, you know, the whole way they set up their prep was they were like, "Oh, it's just the two of us," and the one super prepper guy was like, "I don't even want friends to come over." And the other guy was like, "Hey, actually, we need to make alliances because there's things they have that we don't. And we also need more than just the two of us because I love you, but I'm gonna kill you." And I think that's something to think about is really moving away from the idea that just your little you know, the utopic queer rural community that so many fucking city queers fantasize about or, you know, lover are going to be enough, because it's not. So that actually leads me to, "I don't have community. Where the fuck do I get it?" And I'm like, yeah, that's super real. Right? And I think it's something I actually wrote about in "The Future is Disabled" is that I have people be like--when I write about different crip communities, just even when I talk about stuff on Facebook.... Like my friend, Graham Bach, it's going to be his second year death anniversary in like two weeks, and he was like, you know, white, psychiatric survivor, super poor, amazing sweetheart of a human being, he died.... I mean, he died in his, you know, rent to your income apartment because he was really afraid to go to the hospital and he had cardiac stuff going on. And he was an anarchist, he was amazing, kind, complicated human being. And, I was writing about, like.... I'm going to tell the story and there's a couple things I want to pull out of it. So I was writing about meeting Graham when I was in my early 20s through radical Mad people community, and somebody was reading it and was like "That sounds so great." And I was like, "Yeah, it wasn't utopic. Like, I had to yell back at Graham because he would scream at me and I'd be like, "Shut the fuck up!" Like, there was so many fights. There was so much racism. There were so many older white cis dudes who had electroshock who were jerky or gross, you know? And I guess that was the thing is, I was like, they're like, "Well, how did you find each other?" And I was like, it wasn't perfect. Also, it was very analog working class. Like my friend Lilith Finkler, who is an amazing Moroccan, Jewish, working-class queer femme psych survivor, she would just go to the donut shop where everybody poor hung out and would talk to everybody who wass there who wass crazy who no one wanted to talk to and be like, "Hey, do you want to come hang out at this meeting at the fucking legal clinic? We have a room. We have a snack plate. I'll give you tokens. Let's organize." So I think that's the first thing is that it's not--and I don't mean this in a finger-wagging way--it's not automatic. And also, one of the really big ways that community is often ableist, and that a lot of us get cut out from it, is that a lot of us who need it the most are not particularly easy to love in ableist neurotypical worldview. It's like we're cranky, we're wounded, we're in a bad mood, we're weird. So a lot of the time, I think it's thinking about, first of all, what's one step, one move you can take towards it. Like, can you make one fucking acquaintance and build it. And really think about what it would mean to build some kind of relationship. I think the other thing that I really want to highlight is that a lot of the communities that I see that keep each other alive, that I'm lucky to have been a part of making and being supported by in disabled community, they're not static and they're not perfect. Like, I have networks with people who piss me the fuck off and who, you know, I've sent 20 bucks to people who I'm just like, "I really don't like you, but I can see that you really don't have food," you know, and we're not going to be friends and we're not going to like each other, but I don't want you to die. And that's not...I mean, it's bigger.... There's also people who I'm like, "Okay, you're my ex-abuser. I'm not gonna give you $5. Someone else can give you $5. **Margaret ** 28:42 There's this person who puts a lot of their effort into talking shit on me on the internet and I...they're also broke and have a lot of chronic health issues and I send them money every month. And every now and then I'm like, could this like...could you stop talking shit now? **Leah ** 29:03 I think this is the thing sometimes is like, hey, how about this is the deal, like maybe just say "Thank you," or maybe just talk shit even like 20% less? Because you know, I'm really doing we keep us safe here. I just really want a "thank you." **Margaret ** 29:16 I don't want you to die. Like, I don't want you to starve to death, but I really wish you would be a little bit more open minded to people having different opinions on yours. **Leah ** 29:26 Oh yeah, nuance, right? Yeah, it'd be fucking nice. **Margaret ** 29:29 God forbid. Anyway. **Leah ** 29:31 No, it's good. I guess my TLDR would be to start where you are and start with "what's one thing you can do? What's one person you can reach out to?" And I think, you know, I don't know if this is true for everyone who reaches out to you and it's like, "Well, I don't have anybody," but I think that social media and online connectivity is a real double-edged sword because for some of us who are isolated, it can create both online communities that can sometimes become in-real-life community and, either way, can be sources of some community or support. But I think.... I mean, you know, I'm a Generation X'er and I've just seen social media get more and more chokehold and just turn into fucking the panopticon meets a mall, you know? [Margaret laughs] And I think it's hard because 12 years ago I was part of really early online disabled spaces, which were great because so many people were like, "Well, I'm so isolated in my small town or in my city," or "I can't leave bed, but this is great. I'm meeting with other people and we're building these connections and it's actually more accessible for me to be real about my stuff from like my bed with a heating pad." And now I just think it's so chokeholded that it's hard for us to find each other. So it's much more common for people to be like, "Wow, I'm seeing all these people who have millions of followers and a shiny brand and I just feel like even more of an isolated loser." And then at the same time, I think people are like, "Well, how did people meet each other before this?" And I was like, "Yeah, like, you go to the coffee shop or the donut shop. You put up a flier. You go to the library. You like, I don't know. I mean, I just remember people I met on the food stamps line, you know, when we got there at six in the morning. And not everything's gonna stick, but maybe something sticks. And I also think about like, I'm going back to 13 years ago in early Disability Justice community spaces where--I mean, I think back to [untranslatable] when I went back to Toronto--which, yeah, big city--but I remember I had so many people come to me and be like, "You're..."--because I was starting to be more out about disability, cuz I was like, "I'm in the Bay and there's these wild people who talk about it and they're not all white people." and so I have so many, especially Black and brown disabled femmes be like, "Hi, you don't really know me, but I have fibromyalgia too," or "I have Lupus too. And like, no one I know talks about that. How do you do it?" And I'm specifically thinking about this time that this person I'm no longer in touch with--but we used to be friends--who's like, you know, queer, brown nonbinary person was like, "Let's just have a meet up of other chronically ill femmes of color," which is how we were identifying a time, and it was four of us, four heating pads, a bottle of Advil, and just very tentatively starting to share things about our lives. And I was like, "Yeah, that was four people." But a lot of that hang out then rippled outward. And it was like, I think it's also important to be like, it's scary to build community. Some tools I want to shut out like, so Mia Mingus, who I mentioned before, she has a lot of really great writing on her blog Leaving Evidence and she created this tool a long time ago now--that some people might be familiar with but for folks who aren't--it's, you know, it's her tool that she calls Pod Mapping. And she actually created it as part of a collective she founded called the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective that was working on doing transformative justice interventions into intimate violence, specifically childhood sexual abuse a lot of the time, and she had this framework that I find really helpful. She's like, "A lot of..." she was talking about in community accountability, transformative justice spaces and she made a really good point where she's like, "Sometimes we talk about like, 'Yeah, bring in the community. Like, everyone has a community.'" And she's like, "Most people don't have a fucking community, let alone one that can interview in childhood sexual abuse." So she created this tool where she's like, "Let's broaden the idea of what community is." Like, maybe it's that one cousin, that you only talk to once a year, but you could call them in a jam, or it's this hotline, or it is like, yeah, they're a weird church, but you really like their food banks. She's like, "You have to really bring in.... Like, start where you are and do the resource mapping we were talking about" I really liked that tool a lot as a place for people who are like, "What's my community?" because I think it's a big word and really being like, "What does that even mean to me?" and like, "What's one place that can start building it?" And I also want to shout out, Rebel Sydney Black, who's a friend of mine who passed this June, at the beginning of the pandemic, he created this tool called Pod Mapping for Mutual Aid that was specifically aimed at disabled folks who were trying to pod map during Covid--and we can provide the link and stuff like that--but I would say that those are two places to start and then I want to get to alternatives to lying down and dying. And then I'll stop. **Margaret ** 34:04 Okay, wait, wait, before we get to that I want to talk more about the building community thing. **Leah ** 34:08 Yeah, please. **Margaret ** 34:09 I think you brought up a lot of really interesting points. And one of the things that I really like about it, you know, talking about having like...you're broadening the idea of what counts as community, which I think is really useful. And one of the things I realized is that a lot of times when I was younger, I was like, "Y'all say 'community' and you just mean the people that you like," right? And that didn't make any sense to me. Community seems like the people where you have a shared interest, whether the shared interest is you live on the same block, or whether the shared interest is an identity, or whether the shared interest is an interest that you're trying to see change, or whatever. It doesn't mean people you like. It's a different thing. Friends are the people I like, right? Well, mostly. I'm just kidding. I love all of you. I mean, there's a lot of people I love that I don't always like. Anyway, so I don't know, and so I think that one of the things that stuck out with me about what you're gonna say and I want to highlight is the idea that--or maybe I'm misreading it--but like "pick issue to work" around seems like a good useful way. Especially if you struggle to just have friends, right? That's not like the thing that you're good at. But maybe there's a thing that you want to work on? Or having that meetup where it's like, oh, all the following people who have the following things in common, let's meet up and talk about it. Or honestly, activism is a really good way to meet people and work closely with people about things. And it doesn't necessarily have to mean these are now your friends. But they can be people where you rely on each other. And that doesn't have to be the same. I think about it a lot because I live in a fairly isolated and rural environment where there's not a lot of people around me who are culturally.... Whatever, there's not a lot of out, queer people where I live. There's not a lot of punks. And I'm like, that's okay. I talk to my actual neighbors instead. I mean, some of them, not all of them, but most of them, you know, they're who I would rely on in a crisis, because they're right there. It doesn't mean that we have the same ideas about a lot of stuff, you know? But we have similar ideas, like, "Let's not die," right? And so that's enough sometimes. Anyway, I just wanted to.... **Leah ** 36:12 No, I really appreciate it. And I mean that makes me kind of think about, when you were talking, I was like, yeah, you know, there's friends, there's communities, and then there's survival networks, which can include contacts, right? Because I just think about what would I do right now, if some should happened? And I was like, I've got long distance kin and long term friendships and relationships ofvarious kinds and I also have--because I moved to where I live, which is like semi-rural, but definitely more rural than where I've lived before--and I'm just like, yeah, I have a small number of friends. But there's like people who I know who I can...who are neighbors who like, maybe we don't know a shit ton about each other but I could be like, "Hey, this thing?" or "Hey, do you have water?" or, "Hey, let's do this." I think it's a lot about thinking about what are your goals? Is your goal intimacy? Is your goal survival? Is your goal friendship? Because you need different levels of trust and commonality depending on those things, right? I also think, and this is the thing too, I think something.... I think a lot of times because I've had people be like, "Well, I don't have community," also, I've heard that. And I think that a lot of times the context, I hear it in is people being like, "Well, I have care needs, but I don't have any community." So then there's also the really big thorny question of "need" and like being cared for is actually very complicated. It's very risky. It's very vulnerable. It's not safe a lot of the time. It may feel a lot easier to just be like, "I don't have any fucking needs." And so there's a lot, I will just say that there's a lot of unpacking that needs to do around like, "What would I need to be cared for? What are my lower risk needs that I need help with? What are my higher risk needs?" right? Like, there's people who I can.... There's some needs I have where I'm like, I don't need to trust you super, super deep politically or on an intimate level to let you do that. There are certain needs where I'm like, that's only going to be people where we've really built a lot of fucking trust because if this goes sideways you could really stuck with me. Right? And I think that when you're starting from nowhere, I think often where people get stuck is like, "Where I am feels like I have nobody and nothing. And I want to get to like the thing I've read about in your topic science fiction, where you know, it's Star Hawk and everybody loves each other. And how the fuck do I get from A to B." And I think the solution is like, yeah, you're not gonna get to fucking "Fifth Sacred Thing" right away--and that book is complicated. **Margaret ** 38:29 Yeah, It was very influential on my early.... **Leah ** 38:31 Oh yeah, when I was 18, I just wanted to fucking move there. And now I'm like, "Oh God, this is embarrassing. There's some shit in here." I'm like, "Wow, everybody's mixed race, but everyone's Black parents are dead." Wow. Cool. Nobody really thinks about race. I'm like, I'm gonna throw up. And like, you know, BDSM is just violent....Okay, sorry. We're not going to get into that. **Margaret ** 38:47 Oh my God, I don't remember that part. **Leah ** 38:49 Oh, yeah. No, where it's so violent. Like, "We're just loving." And I wrote a really no passion paper for school, because we actually had to read it in a college class I was in, and I was like, "Why are they not into leather sexuality?" And my professor was like, "Okay, 18 year old..." but yeah. **Margaret ** 39:04 I mean, legit. You 18 year old self had a legitimate critique. **Margaret ** 39:08 Yeah. **Leah ** 39:08 Yeah, no, there's a lot there. But, um, but jumping back, I guess it's just like, you know.... And I think this feels like disabled wisdom too, it's like, what can you do with the spoons or the capacity you have? Like, what's one move you can make that small? And then can you build on that? Yeah, but can I talk about alternatives to lying down and dying? **Leah ** 39:28 Yeah. Well, I think...I mean, this is the thing, is like, I'm a survivalist, but I'm not like anti-civilization in the ways that some people are. Like, I want meds, you know? And I think that's something that other crips I know talk about a lot, which is like, you know, we're really against this way that some people, including some people who would like align themselves with like Healing Justice who are like "We're like, oh, yeah, we just have to go back before colonialism and capitalism, and just everyone lived on herbs and it was great." and I was like, "Nah, bitch, I need surgery and meds." Like I want it all. Like, I love non-Western pre-colonial traditional healing. Absolutely. And I've had friends who died because they didn't get their surgeries on time. Like my friend LL died because nobody would give him a fucking kidney because they said he was too fat. And I'm just like, my good future involves.... I mean, and he's one of millions right? So like, my good future involves that we have surgical suites. And I'm just like, you know, honestly, also, a lot of times that worldview just seems so white to me, because I'm just like, listen, a lot of like, global south places figure out how to have field hospitals, right, in really dire and low-resource situations. So I'm sorry.... **Margaret ** 40:40 I mean, only Europoe's ever figured out surgery. No one else has done surgery until Europe showed up. [Said sarcastically implying the opposite] **Leah ** 40:45 Yeah, not fucking ever. [Also said sarcastically] **Margaret ** 40:46 Said the people who are like, "bite down stick and I'll saw your arm off." **Leah ** 40:49 Yeah, so I mean, I guess one thing I would just say is like, I would say that and I would say like, you know, really...I want to like lift up and encourage people to look at--and they can be hard to find--but look at cultures, look at organizing initiatives where people were like, "We can have our own ambulance, we can have our own like..." And when that's not there, to think about what it would mean to have medical care after the apocalypse, right? What would it mean to make hormones, make drugs, synthesize chemicals, and it's not impossible. I think that we're still in the in between of like, okay, we gotta figure out how to do that. But, um, you know, I'm thinking about, Ejeris Dixon, who's my friend and comrade, and, you know, we co-edited "Beyond Survival" together, which is a book we wrote that came out right at the beginning of the pandemic about stories and strategies from how people are actually trying to create safety without the cops. Ejeris always talks about how they were like, "Yeah, like, in Louisiana, you know, in the South, you know, like in the 50s, and 60s, and before I believe, there were all kinds of Black run ambulance and 911 services," because regular 911 wouldn't come to Black communities. Right? And they, I mean, something that I've heard them say a lot over the years is like, "We don't have the people's ambulance yet. But we could." And then it makes me also jump to some friends of mine who were in Seattle who were really active as street medic crew during the rebellions after George George Floyd was murdered by the police in, you know, 2020 in the summer, and specifically in, as some people remember, Seattle managed to have 16 square blocks break off from the city for a while, CHOP, Capitol Hill Organized Front. And so what people don't know is that the cops were like, "Okay, fuck you. We're not going to...If there's any 911 ambulance calls, we're not going to fucking let anyone go in there." So the street medic crew had to deal with a lot of really intense situations. And then after that, like a lot of us folks, like some folks were already nurses or EMTs and a lot of folks who were involved went to nursing school or EMT school and we're like--and I don't know where it's at now--but they were like, "We want to create,"--because right now in Seattle, there's, if somebody is having a crisis on the street, like a medical or a mental health crisis or an altered state crisis, there's no non-911 crisis response that you can call. There's either you go down the stairs to talk to somebody or there's the cops, right. And they were like, "We can get a van. We can get medical equipment from eBay." And you know, I don't know where they're at with that, but they were really organizing around like, "Yeah, we could get a defibrillator. We could get oxygen. We could get blood pressure cuffs. We could get fucking..." you know? And I think that that shit gets complicated in terms of insurance and regulation and the State and the medical industrial complex, but I want us to keep thinking about that. I also, and then I'll wrap up because we have other questions to get to, but it also makes me think about, I mean, I don't know if folks are familiar with Gretchen Felker Martin's amazing science fiction book "Manhunt," right, which is about.... **Margaret ** 43:50 I haven't read it yet. **Leah ** 43:52 It's so fucking good. Okay, so I won't give it away. But just for people who don't know, I'd say it's the one kind of gender sci-fi book where "Oh, a virus, you know, affects people with certain chromosomes or certain that dih-dah-dug that's not TERFy because it's a book that, you know, she's trans, and it's a book that centers trans women and nonbinary communities and there's like one or two trans masculine characters. But the two main trans femme, like trans women characters in the book, they're like, they have to, they're like, "Yeah, like, we're going on raids to get, you know, hormones, and, you know, different, like chemical drugs we need. And we're also figuring out how to synthesize them from herbs and different substances." And it's not easy. It's a struggle. But there are organized communities of trans women and allies that are fighting to do it. And I'm just like, yeah, and I mean, it's an amazingly well written book, and she's incredible, and I fucking loved it. And it's just beautifully written and really just--sorry, I won't gush too much but go read it, it's incredible--I just really also appreciated it because she was like, "Yeah, of course we're gonna get our hormones after the end of the world. Like of course it's possible." And I will also.... I have some criticisms of the ableism in it, but M.E. O'Brien and--fuck I'm forgetting the second author's name, but every you know, "Everything For Everyone," that book. I appreciated how in the good future society, they're like, "Our priority is making sure that insulin and chemical drugs and hormones are accessible and free to everybody." And I was like, I guess I would just push people towards there are ways of imagining the future where we can defeat capitalism but still have medical care of all kinds. We can have Reiki and acupuncture and we can also hormone surgery and transplants. And we might be doing it better because it's not controlled by fucking corporations and assholes. Sorry, that's my soapbox. Um, okay. I will say in terms of people being like, "That's really nice. But what about me?" I would be like, you know, I mean, right now in the war on trans America, there are so many people already who are like, "Yeah, I'm stockpiling meds. I like doing meds trading." I would say it goes back to what we started about, which is like, "Okay, what are your needs? What are the things that you're worried will not be there if the world ends?" Right? And we also need to recognize that the world's already ending and it's ended for some of us a bunch of times already. But I would be like, make that list and then really be like, "Alright, how do I get it?" You know, and if I can't specifically get it, are there like backups that I can get? And it may be stuff that you can research on your own. It also might be stuff where it's like, "Okay, are there trans [untranslatable], disability justice organizations, nationally, globally, locally, that you can hit up and be like, "What are folks thoughts about this? Are there ways that we can resource share?" Because I think it's about pills. I think it's also about durable medical equipment. So in terms of stuff that requires power to live, I think about generators and I think about generator shares. And I think about things like...there's a story when Hurricane Sandy hit New York 10 years ago, there were a whole bunch of us where...there's a guy Nick who's in community who, physically disabled guy, 13th floor, accessible apartment, you know, the lights went out, you know, really dependent on electricity to change out the batteries on his ventilator. There's a whole crew of disabled folks, like people walked up and down those fucking stairs every eight hours to take the spent batteries, figured out, "Hey, you know, what still has power, the fucking fire department." People were walking down recharging the batteries every eight hours. And it was allies, it was ambulatory, it was disabled people who could walk. It was fucking hard. But people were like, we're not.... Nick and his friends were like, "We're not just going to die. We're needed." So I wanna shoutout that and just for possibility modeling, I really want to, one other place I want to shout out, is an org that used to be known as Portlight but was now known as the Center for Inclusive Disaster Strategies, which is a disabled-led organization that is about like, yeah, when there's a climate or other disaster, they figure out ways of getting like accessible fucking evacuation methods to places because they know...we know, there's millions of examples of people who are just left to die in nursing homes or like, "Oops, the bus doesn't have a ramp," or, you know, I really want to name that during Katrina, some people might know about, you know, the situation with the nursing home that was there were a lot of folks who were wheelchair users or had high care needs were fucking killed by medical staff because the medical staff were like, "We're gonna actually euthanize these folks without their knowledge or consent." [Margaret exclaims] Yeah, no, there was actually a movie on HBO about it I think semi recently. Because "that's easier than figuring out how to fucking get people in the medivac ," right? Yeah, and so the Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies, I'm still getting to know them, but I have friends who are involved and they're like, "Yeah, we're aware this is an issue." So yeah, let's work with the fucking Cajun fucking Navy to like make sure that you can get folks with different bodies onto evac boats. Like let's figure out what disabled survival looks like. And I will just say, and this is the last thing I swear, for me, I mean, we all know water is important. Like, I can't lift 54 pounds. Guess what? So can't--which is, you know, a seven gallon right, like a five or seven gallon whatever--I'm just like, yeah, so I can actually have smaller jugs of water that I can lift. So yeah, I have a bug out plan, but I also have a real Shelter in Place plan because I'm just like, yeah, my apartment's accessible for me. So yeah, I got a shit ton of water right here and I'll be good for a while. And I also have a plan B for.... Okay, there's...I've got my filtration equipment, so when that runs out, I'm close to some water sources where I can go and I can filter that shit. And that's me thinking about what works for my body. Think about what works for yours and then plan out from that. Okay, I'll really stop talking now. **Margaret ** 49:44 No, no, but there's so much there. Even just like to go to the weight of water, right? The thing that I ran across that I'm like--I'm reasonably able-bodied and such like that, right--but I live alone and so obviously there's this specific thing where like.... Well, one, I mean, abledness is always a temporary position.... **Leah ** 50:04 Yeah, you're going to get disabled, you're gonna get sick and disabled. **Margaret ** 50:07 Like it literally happens to--unless you, I don't know, die very quickly, very suddenly, probably violently, you're gonna go through a period of disability in your life, you know? And so my argument is that machismo is anti-prepping. And one of the ways that I would say is that like, there's now, I think.... Okay, so cement bags, they come in 50 pound bags traditionally, right? But now there's more and more, I think, there seems to be more and more 30 pound bags, right? And I used to be like, "Oh, whatever, I can lift a 50 pound bag. So I should carry the 50 pound bag." And then I'm like, well, it was not a helpful way to look at it. It is far better for me to just have 30 pound bags of cement because they're easier to carry and I'll get tired less. And I, you know, at the time that I was pouring these bags, I lived up a hill about probably the equivalent of a seven storey walk up to this cabin that I was building, right. And so I had to carry each and every one. It was way nicer that I carry 30 pound bags. And if your preparedness doesn't include the fact that your level of ability will change in different situations, then it's not very good preparedness. And and so like, I don't know, I mean, like most of my water jugs are four or five gallon jugs. I use jerry cans. I think most of them are five gallon. And I hate the six gallon ones and the seven gallon ones. They're just heavy and annoying. And it's like I can give lift them but there's no reason why I should. Unless I'm specifically working on lifting weights. And then the other thing that you talked about that I really think about a lot, you know, is this idea, of does your version of disaster mean that every doctor dies? Or like, does your version of disaster mean everyone who's ever made insulin dies? Like, it's possible. Sure, you could have 90...if almost everyone on Earth dies, then everything is a little different. But most disasters don't actually..... Most disasters destroy ways of living and large numbers of people, but not the majority of people write. Most people survive most disasters. And, people are like, "Well, our organizational systems are what produce insulin," and like, no, people produce insulin and they use organizational systems with which to do it. But different organizational systems can also produce insulin. Like different organizational systems can use the same infrastructure sometimes and make the things that we rely on. And it came up with this like whole thing where people on the internet were like, "Ah, if you're an anarchist, you hate disabled people because in anarchy, you can't have insulin," **Leah ** 50:28 That's gross. **Margaret ** 52:40 It is a complete misunderstanding of anarchism. It is not a lack of organization, it is a different type of organization. **Leah ** 52:46 Anarchy is responsibility. **Margaret ** 52:48 Yes, totally. **Leah ** 52:50 Sorry, sorry. **Margaret ** 52:52 That's why people don't like it. People are afraid of it because they actually have to.... It's the accepting no one is coming to save us except us. You know? No, I love that way of framing and it also annoys anarchists when you tell them this too. **Leah ** 53:07 Okay, well, I mean, you know, so I worked at Modern Times books, which was, you know, is no longer around, but was a long time anarchists and anti authoritarian radical bookstore in the Bay. And we had the only public toilet in all of the Mission because everybody else was like, "No, you gotta buy something." and in my interview, they're like, "How will you make the store better?" And I was like, "I will make the bathroom not smell horrible." Because, you know, it was just like a bust, everyone was pissing in there. And so I taped up a sign that said "Anarchy is responsibility. If you spray the fucking toilet with urine, please wipe it up. Together we can have a toilet." And somebody called me out and was like, "That's capitalist." And I was like, "No, just wipe your piss up or we're not gonna make the revolution. Like, come on." But yeah, they got pissed at me about that. [Both laugh] But yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good point. And it's like, you know, I mean, I think that it does point to, you know, I think a structural problem in a lot of our movements, which is like, yeah, we don't we need more people who know some basics of chemistry and can synthesize stuff. Like, that's, you know, we need more people who've gone to some kind of science or engineering school who can figure out how sewage works and how you synthesize insulin and how you synthesize hormones and like, basic surgery. And I think there's a lot of hopefulness because I--maybe it's just the folks I hang out with--but I have a fair number of friends who are like, "Yeah, I'm gonna be a nurse practitioner. I can give you an abortion. I can sew up your wound. I can help you figure out this thing." And I'd love for there to be more of us who can go to PA school or

How do we practice Judaism from disabled bodies? In this episode Charlie and Jaime study disability justice texts from Leah Lakshmi, Mia Mingus, and Rabbi Elliot Kukla to explore the ways we show up in our spiritual and relational lives. Both hosts grapple with recent diagnoses, and share their processes of grief and rediscovery of lives centering disability.Sources in this episode include:Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018)Mia Mingus, "Access Intimacy: The Missing Link" (2011)Rabbi Elliot Kukla, "The Holiness of Being Broken: Trauma and Disability Justice" (2022)Cover art by Noa SkyeMusic by PixabaySupport the showTell us what you think on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jewqueeries/Love the show? Support us at: https://ko-fi.com/jewqueeries

In this episode, I meet with Chelsea House, CPACC, about ways healthcare providers and educators can create more accessible spaces for the disabled community.  Join us in this conversation as we discuss:  Chelsea's own experience with her intersectionalities  How the social model of disability applies to medical diagnoses  Finding self-acceptance with your disabilities Specific recommendations for SLPs and people in healthcare You can watch the visual episode on Youtube on the Pediatric Speech Sister Network here: https://youtu.be/nrXN63ZrLr0  ABOUT CHELSEA:  Chelsea House is a universal designer, digital creator, and Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC). She is also a Black, neurodivergent, queer, Disabled femme who lives with largely non-apparent, chronic disabilities. Despite living with disabilities since birth, Chelsea didn't begin identifying as Disabled until college, and only began identifying as Disabled with Pride in the past 3 years. After 5+ years redesigning service experiences for federal and state government agencies and Fortune 500 companies, Chelsea is repurposing her skills and Disability experiences to create environments that are inclusive of Black Disabled Femmes like her. In 2022, Chelsea founded her business, Ability Design House, an access-centered consulting and creative services agency working with Black and Brown communities to reimagine inclusive marketing and community experiences. The same year, Chelsea also launched the Black Disabled Femme Community - a connection space uplifting joy, ease and advancement of Black Femmes who are D/disabled or living with disabilities and chronic health conditions.  You can learn more about Chelsea, her business, and the Black Disabled Femme community at http://BlackDisabledFemme.com and following @‌BlackDisabledFemme on Instagram and Tiktok.  You can also book time with Chelsea to talk about how you can make your communities inclusive for Black Disabled Femmes and Communities CHELSEA'S BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS:  Disclaimer: Delightful reads are recommended here with potential affiliate links. If you choose to explore further and make a purchase, a commission may come my way, lighting up my day. Your positivity and support mean the world! Get - Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk HERE: https://amzn.to/3tB4c0w Get -  Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction by Sami Schalk HERE: https://amzn.to/3M0aGN3Get -  Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century: Unabridged Selections by Alice Wong HERE: https://amzn.to/46qWXHj Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha: https://brownstargirl.org/care-work-dreaming-disability-justice/ The Future is Disabled by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha: https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/T/The-Future-Is-Disabled _________________________________________________ This podcast is sponsored by the Pediatric Speech Sister Network© on YouTube Live. You can checkout the latest live replays here: http://youtube.com/@PediatricSpeechSisterNetwork  MORE FROM PEDIATRIC SPEECH SISTER Follow me on Instagram!⁠ http://instagram.com/pediatricspeechsister⁠  Get your “5 Ways to Support BIPOC Children in Clinical and Education Settings” FREE Poster Here: http://tinyurl.com/supportBIPOCkids "Introduction to Cultural Competemility in Speech Pathology" eBook Pre-Sell: https://tinyurl.com/culturalcompetemility GET HERE: CULTURAL RESPONSIVENESS GLOSSARY: Start challenging your implicit biases with the “Empowering Inclusivity: Culturally Responsive Glossary with Implicit Bias Self-Reflection, 2LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, and Disability Terms Get 10% OFF USING CODE PSS10 TODAY! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pediatricspeechsister/support

Reversers! Welcome to Sunday morning and to the third episode of the Radio Reversal Podcast.Today's episode is the third and final instalment of our introductory mini series, Learning Out Loud, and it follows on from last week's sampling of our joint podcast launch party with fellow fresh Zed-casters Paradigm Shift on Sunday 24th September 2023. For that event, we welcomed our incredible community of listeners and contributors to join the RR collective (Anna, Nat, Shreya & Han) and Paradigm Shift's Andy Paine for a wholesome-as-heck live-radio-style mixtape, accompanied by the slightly chaotic fun of everyone's favourite experimental house band, It's Science And Feelings - aka Jodie Rottle, Matt Hsu, and RR's own Han Reardon-Smith.The soundmaking-as-kinmaking continues throughout today's episode, which features performances by protest-as-pedagogy singer-songwriters Phil Monsour and Andy Paine, along with Lamisse Hamouda performing a poem by Portuguese artist Grada Kilomba along with her own work.To gear you up for the density of all this brilliance, Nat and Han got together to recap our favourite moments of the launch, and to engage with some of the thinking about making art that is entangled with politics. We dig into “companion thinking” - an extension upon Sara Ahmed's idea of “companion texts” (found in her 2017 book Living a Feminist Life) - and the article by Han and their companion thinker & bestie Jodie Rottle, “Companion Thinking in Improvised Musicking Practice.” Other texts mentioned in this intro include Julietta Singh's Unthinking Mastery, Octavia E. Butler's Parable Series novels, Joyful Militancy by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, and the work of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Don't worry, this is not the last substantial reading list you'll get from us (you're welcome)!Following the performances, Andy and Lamisse sit down for a chat along with radical poet, musicker, and political nerd Jonathan Sriranganathan about making art and making change. This is a deep and insightful discussion not to be missed, exploring some of the challenges to making bold statements and experimental works in an age of Everything Is Forever On The Internet. Picking up the themes of fumbling through artmaking in public, It's Science And Feelings close us out with some more sonic theory-making. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radioreversal.substack.com

For this month's book, we discuss Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's powerful 2018 book "Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this episode the 1ME crew talks tots and transformation with Zara Raven of Queenie's Crew! Queenie's Crew engages children in learning about building communities of care without prisons or policing. Every month, members receive an email with an activity that kids can complete to learn more about abolition: they share activities like coloring pages, word searches, word scrambles, mazes, and reflection exercises. Using readings and art projects, the collective supports children in imagining a collective future where we are all free. Coordinator Zara Raven talks about how young people understand abolition, the catharsis and growth the collective has created for parents and caregivers, and much more. Plus, a squad of youth participants read See You Soon, the picture book on which the experiment is based. SHOW NOTES See You Soon read by Queenie's Crew - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAfg9sT1fYw&t=73s The Zine - https://millionexperiments.com/zines/queenies-crew Learn more about Queenie's Crew - https://queeniescrew.com/ Buy See You Soon by Mariame Kaba, illustrated by Bianca Diaz - https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1891-see-you-soon The Revolution Starts at Home ed. by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Ching-In Chen, & Jai Dulani - https://www.akpress.org/revolutionstartsathome.html Queenie's Crew Reading List - https://queeniescrew.com/resources Micah Bazant - https://www.micahbazant.com/ It's All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation by Patricia Hill Collins - https://www.jstor.org/stable/3810699 IN OUR OWN HANDS: ​tools for talking abolition & transformative justice with little ones by Rania El Mugammar - https://www.raniawrites.com/inourhands.html Building Your Abolitionist Toolbox - https://abolitionist.tools/ Keeley Schenwar Memorial Essay Prize - https://truthout.org/articles/keeley-schenwar-memorial-essay-prize/ Erin Miles Cloud - https://www.movementforfamilypower.org/indexa

On this episode the 1ME crew talks tots and transformation with Zara Raven of Queenie's Crew! Queenie's Crew engages children in learning about building communities of care without prisons or policing. Every month, members receive an email with an activity that kids can complete to learn more about abolition: they share activities like coloring pages, word searches, word scrambles, mazes, and reflection exercises. Using readings and art projects, the collective supports children in imagining a collective future where we are all free. Coordinator Zara Raven talks about how young people understand abolition, the catharsis and growth the collective has created for parents and caregivers, and much more. Plus, a squad of youth participants read See You Soon, the picture book on which the experiment is based. SHOW NOTES Learn more about Queenie's Crew - https://queeniescrew.com/ Buy See You Soon by Mariame Kaba, illustrated by Bianca Diaz - https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1891-see-you-soon The Revolution Starts at Home ed. by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Ching-In Chen, & Jai Dulani - https://www.akpress.org/revolutionstartsathome.html Queenie's Crew Reading List - https://queeniescrew.com/resources Micah Bazant - https://www.micahbazant.com/ It's All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation by Patricia Hill Collins - https://www.jstor.org/stable/3810699 IN OUR OWN HANDS: ​tools for talking abolition & transformative justice with little ones by Rania El Mugammar - https://www.raniawrites.com/inourhands.html Building Your Abolitionist Toolbox - https://abolitionist.tools/ Keeley Schenwar Memorial Essay Prize - https://truthout.org/articles/keeley-schenwar-memorial-essay-prize/ Erin Miles Cloud - https://www.movementforfamilypower.org/indexa

In this episode of Movement Memos, host Kelly Hayes talks with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs about disability justice, interdependence, rejecting human disposability in the COVID era and the practice of grief as stewardship. You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: bit.ly/movementmemos If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter Music: Son Monarcas & David Celeste

Our monthly contributors via Patreon/ActBlue receive EARLY ACCESS to listen and download the full uncut conversations from our weekly LFShow.  Season 3, Episode 341-  “The Future is Disabled” with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha:  Writer, Disability/Transformative Justice Movement Worker; Author, The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning SongsDescription: “At the core of my work and life is the belief that disabled wisdom is the key to our survival and expansion,” shares Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, a writer, disability, and transformative justice movement worker. Laura speaks with Leah about her newly-released book of essays, The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs. The book, published by Arsenal Pulp Press, an independent queer of color-led press, was written during the pandemic and documents two years of “disabled” isolation. Among the grief and despair came essential organizing from the Disability Justice movement — and we should all take notice. And what about joy? Disabled pleasure activism, disabled art and culture-making brought hope in a time of crisis. Leah has joined Laura twice previously to talk about their work and read their poetry. In her new book, Leah asks: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled—and what if that's not a bad thing? Full research and reading list to further delve into the conversation is available here on Patreon. 

In this episode, we learn "the science of a beautiful life" through the wisdom of tantra, and how to fully practice "the joy of being in the world."  Sam Bianchini joins me to talk activism, spirituality, collective healing, and so much more:growing up in Baltimore & Philadelphia acting and creating since birthwhat she learned from identifying as an athiestthe moment she came back to faith in something biggerher life changing "year of gratitude"Sam's decision and inspiration to become an egg donorhow to listen to our intuition, and discern spiritual guidance from fear and trauma patternslearning to listen to our bodies, and healing our nervous systemindividualist vs. collectivist culture the root cause of stress and sufferingthe ancient wisdom of Tantra Yoga and why it's so much bigger than s-xre-connecting with the true self, and remembering our worthwhy we need each otherthe link between Activism and SpiritualityHarriet Tubman, Tricia Hersey (The Nap Ministry) and Rest as Resistancepower, pleasure, and the patriarchycalling out vs. calling inhow unexpress emotions get trapped in the bodyembodying our purpose every single day"For over a decade, Sam has devoted her life to working with indigenous wisdom keepers from around the world, and praying with Native North American Red Road Traditions , The Mexica, the tribes of the Amazon, and more. She is a ceremonial facilitator, psychedelic guide for personal journeys and group connection, sound healer, international yoga teacher+educator guiding  200hr Yoga Teacher Trainings and Continuing Educations all around the globe, an herbalist, and ceremonial musician.  She is also an actress and director and writer, working in film and theatre around the country.  She's a poet, activist, mentor, and much more.  Sam loves Tom Waits, Tom Robbins, and hiking with her dog, Guy, in their home of Los Angeles, CA.  She is (most importantly) a friend." You can find Sam Bianchini on Instagram @samdarlin.  Please be sure to rate and review the podcast, follow @arynevans and @lovespacepodcast on Instagram, and send this episode to a friend.  Thank you for connecting with us and sharing the love! xMore resources:CARE WORK: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (book)BE LOVE NOW: The Path of the Heart by Ram Dass & Rameshwar Das (book)REST IS RESISTANCE by Tricia Hersey (book) & the Nap Ministry

“At the core of my work and life is the belief that disabled wisdom is the key to our survival and expansion,” shares Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, a writer, disability, and transformative justice movement worker. Laura speaks with Leah about her newly-released book of essays, The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs. The book, published by Arsenal Pulp Press, an independent queer of color-led press, was written during the pandemic and documents two years of “disabled” isolation. Among the grief and despair came essential organizing from the Disability Justice movement — and we should all take notice. And what about joy? Disabled pleasure activism, disabled art and culture-making brought hope in a time of crisis. Leah has joined Laura twice previously to talk about their work and read their poetry. In her new book, Leah asks: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled—and what if that's not a bad thing?“When I say the future is disabled, I mean that as disabled people . . . we are imagining, in the worst conditions, futures where not only do we exist but we are thriving, we are in leadership and we are sharing the tools that everyone's going to need to survive.” - Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-SamarasinhaGuest:Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: Writer, Disability/Transformative Justice Movement Worker; Author, The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs Full conversation & show notes are available at Patreon.com/theLFShowThe Show is listener and viewer supported thanks to you!  Please donate and become a member.

In this episode, I am joined by Kalpana Mohanty, writer, Ph.D. Candidate and Trudeau Scholar at Harvard University. She works on disability, colonialism, and gender in South Asia. Kalpana grew up in Portugal, Canada and India. Her proposed PhD topic focuses on the history of disability in India, particularly during high colonialism. Inspired by her own lived experience as someone with chronic illness who lives with a disability, Kalpana is passionate about accessibility in all forms, whether that be making academic spaces accessible for all students or making scholarly work engaging and interesting for a non-academic audience. She is committed to using the rigorous framework and theory of academia to address wider cultural issues ranging from the serious to the trivial as a cultural commentator. Kalpana reads and we discuss her incredible article, Beautiful Lies, where she asks why public discourse on beauty remains so shallow. Kalpana's Links:Twitter:  @kalpanamohantyWebsite: https://kalpanamohanty.squarespace.com/ Audio clips included: Now This News: Sabrina Strings Explains How 'Fatphobia' is Rooted in RacismIntersections of Disability Justice and Transformative Justice Ft. Elliott Fukui and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha by Barnard Center for Research on WomenVenmo: Elliot Fukui @elliottseiji Buy Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's books hereLinks Mentioned:Beautiful Lies | Kalpana Mohanty Mobeen Hussain is the Cambridge scholar who studies skin lightening in India. Jaclyn WongAfghan Girl Portrait by Steve McCurryConstant Cravings by Alice WongBook and other recommendations included:Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia  by Sabrina Strings | Thick: and other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom | Alok V Menon | The Age of Instagram Face by Jia Tolentino| Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da'Shaun L. Harrison | Maybe Baby | Haley Nahman| The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan | What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon| Maintenance Phase Podcast  | Perfect Me by Heather Widdows --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ayandastood/support

Ben Mattlin and I talk about Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's book Care Work.  It's a book about a social justice movement I didn't know existed.Buy Care Work:https://www.amazon.com/Care-Work-Dreaming-Disability-Justice/dp/1551527383

This is it, right here, this is the final episode. And if you're here right now, and you've been choosing to return to this work again and again, I want to say, thank you. Cuz If we want alternative means to responding to harm other than the systems on offer from the state, we are the ones who have to invest time, energy, labor into learning, healing, imagining, practicing, remembering, and organizing to get there. As Black feminist revolutionary writer June Jordan said, “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” Now is the time to generously bring forth our gifts and throw down for our collective liberation. So again, thank you for choosing to be here.Let's dream forward.Episode transcript: Coming soon!Sogorea Te' Land Trust: https://sogoreate-landtrust.org/Save the West Berkeley Shellmound: https://shellmound.org/June Jordan: http://www.junejordan.com/The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities, ed. Ching-In Chen, Jai Dulani, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: https://www.akpress.org/revolutionstartsathome.htmlDemocracy Now!, “Remembering Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015): ‘We Have to Change Ourselves in Order to Change the World'”: https://www.democracynow.org/2015/10/6/remembering_grace_lee_boggs_1915_2015Kim Tran: https://www.kimtranphd.com/ Kyra Jones: https://www.kyrajones.me/Adrienne Skye Roberts: http://therapywithadrienneskye.com/Mia Mingus: https://www.soiltjp.org & https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective: https://batjc.wordpress.com/For additional resources, including this episode's ASL video: https://www.weriseproduction.com/therealworkzAnda of DiaspoRADiCAL: @diaspo.radical on Instagram & https://soundcloud.com/diasporadicalConnect with us at weriseproduction[at]protonmail[dot]com, and follow us on Facebook & Instagram at weriseproduction, & on twitter at WeRiseProducers.

Tuck speaks with writer and organizer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (she/they). Topics include: Do non-disabled people exist? Diagnoses, autism, and how disability + transness intersect  How to build care networks without relying on social capital Why disabled people have the skills we need to survive the climate crisis, pandemics, etc.  Plus: ye olde “what does femme mean?”  This Week in Gender: The San Francisco Marathon offered a nonbinary division, which led us to 2 Hot 4 Hoodies. Find Leah on twitter @thellpsx and instagram @leahlakshmiwrites, and at brownstargirl.org. Preorder The Future Is Disabled (and browse several of their other books) via Arsenal Pulp. Find Tuck on the Trans Mutual Aid episode of the TransLash podcast, and keep an eye out for their Life Kit episode about trans name changes.  ~ Join our Patreon (patreon.com/gender) to get access to our new bonus podcast feed, plus our weekly newsletter and other fun perks. Join the Gender Detectives Slack at bit.ly/gender-slack. Find episode transcripts and starter packs for new listeners at genderpodcast.com. We're also on Twitter and Instagram @gendereveal. Associate Producer: Ozzy Llinas Goodman Logo: Ira M. LeighMusic: Breakmaster CylinderAdditional Music: “Hickory Interlude” by Blue Dot Sessions Sponsors: Enby (promo code: GenderReveal)

Thank you Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Bridget Bertrand and Dr. Jennie Wang-Hall who attempted to address the question: What does it mean to be a care worker in the third year of this global pandemic? Thank you for the additional question.....“What happens when we are reached for, and we are the alternative system, and we are completely tapped out?” (Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha) and thoughts on rushing towards denial, heartbreak, disability justice, "i can't go to your party," "no vietnam war memorial for the covid dead," deep grief, being in crisis and at capacity, stuck in trauma loops, building alternative systems care, hope in abolition, connecting in rage and grief and creating and joining collectives. Kintsugi Therapist Collective CARE WORK: Dreaming Disability Justice By Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/asher-pandjiris/message

This episode features an electric conversation between four of the most cutting edge thinkers and activists in the field of Critical Disability. Join us as Mills professor Kirsten Saxton facilitates a free flowing discussion between Dr. Jina Kim, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Dr. Jasbir Puar and Dr. Sami Schalk as they discuss disability studies, activism, capitalism, arts and the academy, and the role of the bodymind in a time of epidemic.

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you'll hear about: How ‘the good life' makes people disconnected and unhappy Mia Birdsong's work in community building The intentionality required for creating communities of support The importance of interdependence, vulnerability, accountability, and leaning on each other And a discussion of her book How We Show Up Today's book is: How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community by Mia Birdsong, in which Birdsong uses research, interviews, and stories of lived experience to explore how showing up—literally and figuratively—points us toward the promise of our collective vitality and leads us to the liberated wellbeing we all want. Our guest is: Mia Birdsong, who was an inaugural Ascend Fellow and faculty member with The Aspen Institute, a New America California Fellow, and Advocate-in-Residence with University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Policy and Practice. She has been published widely and speaks at conferences and universities across the country. A graduate of Oberlin College, she stays “apocalypse ready” by gardening, keeping bees and chickens, studying herbalism, and occasionally practicing archery. Her children, partner, and chosen family are her home. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-creator and co-producer of the Academic Life. Listeners to this episode might also be interested in: How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community by Mia Birdsong Mia Birdsong's website Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformational Justice Movement, by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, eds. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, by Ibram X. Kendi This Academic Life episode about finding mentors and friends You are smart and capable, but you aren't an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we'd bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you'll hear about: How ‘the good life' makes people disconnected and unhappy Mia Birdsong's work in community building The intentionality required for creating communities of support The importance of interdependence, vulnerability, accountability, and leaning on each other And a discussion of her book How We Show Up Today's book is: How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community by Mia Birdsong, in which Birdsong uses research, interviews, and stories of lived experience to explore how showing up—literally and figuratively—points us toward the promise of our collective vitality and leads us to the liberated wellbeing we all want. Our guest is: Mia Birdsong, who was an inaugural Ascend Fellow and faculty member with The Aspen Institute, a New America California Fellow, and Advocate-in-Residence with University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Policy and Practice. She has been published widely and speaks at conferences and universities across the country. A graduate of Oberlin College, she stays “apocalypse ready” by gardening, keeping bees and chickens, studying herbalism, and occasionally practicing archery. Her children, partner, and chosen family are her home. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-creator and co-producer of the Academic Life. Listeners to this episode might also be interested in: How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community by Mia Birdsong Mia Birdsong's website Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformational Justice Movement, by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, eds. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, by Ibram X. Kendi This Academic Life episode about finding mentors and friends You are smart and capable, but you aren't an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we'd bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/academic-life

If you know you know, if you get it you get it, if you're an Ottessa fan you're an Ottessa fan. In this episode, we are talking about My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. Erica is convinced this is one of her favorite books of all time and Katie is not so sure! We save the plot discussions for the second half, so if you haven't read the book, we'll tell you when to drop off! Follow us on Instagram: @booktok_podcast Follow us on TikTok: @booktokpodcast Shop our Bookshop.org storefront: https://bookshop.org/shop/booktok --- Other books mentioned in this episode: Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh Milk Fed by Melissa Broder Honor by Thrity Umrigar Stay and Fight by Madeline Fitch The Push by Ashley Audrain On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson Girlhood by Melissa Febos No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura Pure Colour by Sheila Heti Verity by Colleen Hoover Beyond Survival edited by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Ejeris Dixon

Recorded by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha for Poem-a-Day, a series produced by the Academy of American Poets. Published on March 12, 2022. www.poets.org

Tatum Tricarico (she/her/hers) is a 23 year old Disability rights advocate. She is attending Duke Divinity school in hopes to become a progressive pastor and create space in the Church for Disabled people and other marginalized groups. She enjoys reading, writing, advocacy work, and board game nights with friends. You can follow her on instagram @blind_Person_in_area .    I am part of @yoDisabledAndProud which is a youth organizing network for Disabled youth ages 16-28.   Tatum recommends: "If you’re interested in more Disability Theology, I recommend reading The Disabled God by Nancy Eiseland or Spirit, A Healing Homeletic by Kathy Black, or  the Politics of Disabledment by Sharon Betcher. Or you can read my senior honors project here: https://pointloma.whdl.org/sites/default/files/Tricarico%2C%20Tatum%20HP.pdf   If you are interested in Disability Justice more broadly, I would recommend reading Being Heumann by Judith Heumann (@theHeumannPerspective on instagram) or listening to her podcast, reading Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (@leahlakshmiwrites on instagram), reading Haben by Haben Girma (@habengirma on instagram), or following @crutches_and_spice and @the.autisticats on instagram." https://www.instagram.com/blind_person_in_area/ https://lomabeat.com/drc-to-eac-a-disappointing-change/     other topics: Ugly Laws: https://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/tree/54d39e27f8a0ea4706000009#! The music artist she mentioned was Semler (Grace Baldridge) @gracebaldridge on instagram. Tatum recommend listening to Jesus From Texas, but her entire preachers kid album and late bloomer albums are amazing.Sub-Minimum Wage:MUCH to read about here! https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/wages/subminimumwage https://www.disabilityscoop.com/2021/04/16/new-push-underway-to-eliminate-subminimum-wage/29295/ https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/what-the-rest-of-the-world-knows/2020/11/03/disability-justice-advocates-blazing-trails?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=YESDaily_20210821&utm_content=YESDaily_20210821+CID_eaed244ce66b4522360be855d4f452d4&utm_source=CM&utm_term=Read%20the%20full%20story Additionally, from the SPL Center:   Book mentioned: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree: https://bookshop.org/a/8901/9781626980051

Washington Post senior writer Frances Stead Sellers moderates a two-part series about disability rights in the United States, the shape of discrimination today and the critically important considerations around caregiving.

El and Josie draw on the wisdom of Dean Spade and Critical Race Theory to examine why anti-discrimination and hate crime laws don't do quite what we want them to. CW: hate crime discussion, mass shooting mentions, discrimination discussion. For more information, check out Normal Life by Dean Spade. You can also find out more about restorative and transformative justice in Beyond Survival, edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Music for Gender Journeys Composed by Sonia Bourdaghs *** Follow us on social media or find us online! Twitter: @Gender_Journeys Tumblr: Gender Journeys Website: JosieWrites.com/GenderJourneys Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Need some advice? Reach out to us at josiewrites.qtn@gmail.com!

This is a conversation with Promise Li. He's a US-based member of the Lausan collective and the Democratic Socialists of America doing solidarity work with Hong Kong and China's dissident movements. Get early access + more perks at Patreon.com/firethesetimes Blog: https://thefirethisti.me You can follow on Twitter or Instagram @ firethesetimes too. Topics Discussed: Growing up in Hong Kong in the shadow of the Tiananmen Square massacre and after the UK-China handover What is Lausan? The difficulties of navigating online discourses on Hong Kong (and Lebanon, Syria etc) Rooting ourselves in democracy Translating Self-Determination Hong Kong's water revolution (context and history) and how the Chinese Communist Party crushed it, at least for now (the national security law, ongoing crackdown etc) The globalization of the war on terror rhetoric and how ‘anti-imperialist' governments and parties also use it. How governments and politicians learn from one another (example of Gebran Bassil in Lebanon; Saudi and Palestinian ambassadors to China; Henri Kissinger praising the CCP and vice versa, Chinese cops praising American cops; Hezbollah in Syria) What's so different about the CCP's oppression compared to other governments' authoritarianism, and how western leftists don't seem to quite grasp that (example of China and Syria) How tankies and others try and think like Xi Jinping or Bashar Al-Assad (and always fail) The multiplicity of places Reacting to the camps in Xinjiang Having a specific anger towards people who were oppressed in the past and who now oppress others (Israel, China) Identifying as Hong Konger Chinese, the complicated identities of being both Jewish and Arab, the example of Hindutva and Indian Muslims Being anti-nationalist and how that intersect in the global south The importance of including migrant domestic workers in our struggles Linking up Hong Kong with Black Lives Matters Learning from Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement What BLM could look like in Lebanon Fighting anti-Asian violence cannot include apologism for the Chinese state Recommended Books: China: The Revolution is Dead, Long Live the Revolution by The 70's Collective Punching out and other writings by Martin Glaberman, edited by Staughton Lynd Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement edited by Ejeris Dixon & Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

About Syan Rose: Syan Rose is an illustrator and comic artist whose work plays with both surrealist and representational imagery to approach topics of personal history, politics, accountability, and healing. She’s been published in Bitch, Slate, Gay Magazine, Truthout, and Autostraddle, and has self-produced many comics and zines. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled femme writer and performer of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. Her most recent titles are the nonfiction book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018) and the poetry book Tonguebreaker (2019). Her memoir Dirty River was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a Publishing Triangle Award (Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction). She is also author of the poetry books Bodymap and Love Cake (Lambda Literary Award winner) and Consensual Genocide, and co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. She is the co-founder of Mangos With Chili, North America's touring queer and trans people of colour cabaret, and is a lead artist with the disability justice incubator Sins Invalid. About Our Work Is Everywhere: An Illustrated Oral History of Queer and Trans Resistance: A visually stunning graphic non-fiction book on queer and trans resistance. Over the past ten years, we have witnessed the rise of queer and trans communities that have defied and challenged those who have historically opposed them. Through bold, symbolic imagery and surrealist, overlapping landscapes, queer illustrator and curator Syan Rose shines a light on the faces and voices of these diverse, amorphous, messy, real, and imagined queer and trans communities. In their own words, queer and trans organizers, artists, healers, comrades, and leaders speak honestly and authentically about their own experiences with power, love, pain, and magic to create a textured and nuanced portrait of queer and trans realities in America. The many themes include Black femme mental health, Pacific Islander authorship, fat queer performance art, disability and health care practice, sex worker activism, and much more. Accompanying the narratives are Rose's startling and sinuous images that brings these leaders' words to visual life. Our Work Is Everywhere is a graphic non-fiction book that underscores the brilliance and passion of queer and trans resistance. Includes a foreword by Lambda Literary Award-winning author and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Full-colour throughout.

Dr. Diana Quinn, naturopathic physician, ceremonialist, and end of life doula comes on the show to talk about healing justice, nature, connection, language, and finding the way forward. Diana Quinn ND (she/her) is a licensed naturopathic doctor and healing justice practitioner specializing in integrative mental health, grief and end of life care, and decolonized healing modalities. A queer mestiza Xicana, her work centers Black, Indigenous, and people of color, and the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. She offers monthly psychedelic integration circles for BIPOC and queer folks, entheogenic support for individuals and groups, and psychedelic education for healthcare professionals. She is a member of the Psychedelic Medicine Association, the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines, and the Queer Psychedelic Collective. For more information visit drdianaquinn.com and follow her on FB, IG and Twitter @drdianaquinn. Links: https://www.drdianaquinn.com/ https://www.healingbychoicedetroit.com/ https://www.drdianaquinn.com/healing-justice A Not-So-Brief History of the Healing Justice Movement by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: https://micemagazine.ca/issue-two/not-so-brief-personal-history-healing-justice-movement-2010%E2%80%932016 Susan Raffo on healing justice and disrupting the medical industrial complex: https://www.susanraffo.com/blog/healing-histories-disrupting-the-medical-industrial-complex-1 The history of healing justice movement: https://www.susanraffo.com/blog/healing-justice-at-the-us-social-forum-a-report-from-atlanta-detroit-and-beyond Robin Wall Kimmerer on the language of animacy: https://orionmagazine.org/article/robin-wall-kimmerer-language-animacy/ Free monthly integration circles: one for BIPOC, one for 2SLGBTQIA+ folks https://www.drdianaquinn.com/events

This week, we invite you to join us in holding space for one another as we let ourselves float on the often unpredictable tides of self-love; where Junauda Petrus prompts us to discuss our own relationship with Nature, from its stress-absorbing powers all the way to conversing with the wind, while Dr. Micha Cardenas leads us along the intimate journey to reconnecting to herself and (re)defining her worth. Later, the inspiring Amita Swadhin reaches into our hearts by allowing us into her road to survival recovery and pleasure reclamation. Finally, we witness the beautiful Alana Devich Cyril’s nearly unshakable commitment to pleasure, while Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha reminds us of the importance of joy at the intersection of disability justice, care and pleasure. And, all the way through, we love and hold each other between the bursts of laughter and the waves of raw emotions. Trigger warning: As usual, we invite you to enjoy the ride but most importantly to be kind to yourself; feel free to opt out of this one if need be as some of the topics discussed could be triggering. With love always. Your devoted hosts, Mayis & Lucie Referenced in this episode: · Marina Abramovich’s video series titled “Balkan Erotic Epic Series” · Alana Devich Cyril “My Life Interrupted” available on Vimeo · Text by Maisha Kai on theglowup.theroot.com · Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha “Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice” + “A Modest Proposal For a Fair Trade Emotional Labor Economy Centered By Disabled Femme of Color Working Class/Poor Genius” (bitchmedia.org) ✨ You can find us on Instagram @softedgespodcast ✨ ✨ Our beautiful music is by the amazing Patrick Walinga and our gorgeous graphic design is by the wonderful Yuri Sato. ✨

In this week’s episode, we are invited to dive head first (pun intended) into one of the juiciest topics of all… S.E.X. So kids, grab your notebook and your to-do list because you are in for a sweet, sweet treat. Our slippery ride starts with a candid conversation around our relationship to sex toys, guided by adrienne maree brown’s own discussion with one of the most famous and enjoyed “adult” toys of our time. A little further down our path, we *almost* get carried away as we run into the deliciously dear to our hearts topic that is nipple magic, before our delectably bumpy road takes us through the nooks and the hills of casual – and less casual – sex, as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha reminds us of its trauma healing powers and as Holiday Simmons lets us into his dating life, from Mr. Streetlamp Sugar Lips all the way to the joys of getting back on D. We laugh and we blush and, as usual, we have nothing to hush. With love, your devoted hosts Mayis & Lucie You can find us on Instagram @softedgespodcast for the latest updates. Our beautiful music is by the incredible Patrick Walinga and our unique graphic design is by the wonderful Yuri Sato.

Today's interview is with Mix Thomas, MSW, LGSW (they/them) who is a therapist based in Washington DC. We chat about Mix's journey to becoming a therapist (it wasn't a linear process!), their experience working with non-binary and transgender clients, and their approach to clinical work.https://mixthomas.com/ Books Mix Mentioned(non-fiction) Care work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha(non-fiction) Gender Trauma by Alex Iantaffi(fiction) Cantoras by Carolina De Robertis Mix on instagram @enbycalledmix Become a Beyond the Couch INSIDER:  https://view.flodesk.com/pages/60030d50d46c01f41fc0b776 Finding A TherapistPsychology Today Therapist Finder (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists) Google search in your areaNational Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-8255 (1-800-273-TALK) Text Hotline:Text HOME to 741-741Trevor Project for LGBTQI+1-866-488-7386Text START to 678-678Online messaging: https://www.thetrevorproject.org/get-help-now/ 

Rainey, Blue & Liz discuss pods doing social justice after reading Philly Stands Up (Esteban Kelly, Jenna Peters-Golden, Qui Dorian, Bench Ansfield and Beth Blum)'s chapter in Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Philly Stands Up is a small collective of individuals working in Philadelphia to confront sexual assault in their community. This bookclub-feel episode focuses on building a pod in your geographic community, the challenges & benefits of a pod, surviving sexual assault & doing social justice. Trigger Warning: This episode mentions sexual assault and rape.

Rainey, Blue & Liz discuss pods doing social justice after reading Philly Stands Up (Esteban Kelly, Jenna Peters-Golden, Qui Dorian, Bench Ansfield and Beth Blum)'s chapter in Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Philly Stands Up is a small collective of individuals working in Philadelphia to confront sexual assault in their community. This bookclub-feel episode focuses on building a pod in your geographic community, the challenges & benefits of a pod, surviving sexual assault & doing social justice. Trigger Warning: This episode mentions sexual assault and rape.

In the second episode of season 2 of Tejana Feminist Talks, Leslie gives an intro to Disability Justice. She begins by breaking down the difference between Disability Rights and Disability Justice before talking about some excerpts from the book "Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice" by Leah Lakshmi-Piepzna Samarasinha. Leslie also talks about why Disability Justice is necessary within the Reproductive Justice movement. Below are some of the resources she talked about thoughout the episode. TW: Mention of death, police brutality (around 42:00 mark) Sins Invalid - What is Disability Justice: https://www.sinsinvalid.org/news-1/2020/6/16/what-is-disability-justice Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi-Piepzna Samarasinha (Ch.1 - Care Webs: Experiments in Creating Collective Access and Ch.3 - Making Space Accessible Is an Act of Love for Our Communities Project LETS: https://projectlets.org/ Tejana Feminist Talks website: https://www.tejanafeministtalks.com/ Shoutout to Dom & Dylaina for buying me a coffee & keeping this podcast going!! Love y'all and appreciate y'all. To invest in my work, go to www.buymeacoffee.com/tftalkspodcast and buy me a coffee as well

Rainey, Blue & Liz discuss Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, resolving conflict without involving the police, the importance of a "Pod" and Rainey & Liz reminisce about surviving military life.

Rainey, Blue & Liz discuss Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, resolving conflict without involving the police, the importance of a "Pod" and Rainey & Liz reminisce about surviving military life.

Vero Vergara is a nonbinary, disabled, brown, queer farmer and food systems cultural worker based on Coast Salish territories. Vero is a founding worker-owner of Sweet Hollow Farm in Woodinville, WA. They work at the intersection of autonomous food systems building and liberatory community care. Learn more about Sweet Hollow Farm at their website: www.sweethollow.farm or their Instagram account: @sweethollowfarm. Some folks that are mentioned in this podcast are: Karen Washington: https://www.riseandrootfarm.com/karen-washington Leah Penniman: https://www.soulfirefarm.org/meet-the-farmers/ Mai Nguyen: http://farmermai.com/farmer/ Rowan White: https://sierraseeds.org/rowens-story/ Ashante M Reese: https://ges.umbc.edu/ashante-m-reese/ Ricardo Salvador https://www.ucsusa.org/about/people/ricardo-salvador Robin Wall Kimmerer: https://www.esf.edu/faculty/kimmerer/ Winona la Duke: http://www.honorearth.org/speaking_engagements Chris Newman: https://www.sylvanaqua.com/ Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: http://brownstargirl.org/ Ejeris Dixon: https://www.visionchangewin.com/meet-the-consultants/ejeris/ Music credit to Made By Finja by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/6171-made-by-finja License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Become a member of the National Young Farmers Coalition today at youngfarmers.org/join and join our advocacy network by texting FARMERS to 40649.This episode was edited by Hannah Beal.

In Episode 6 of Season 2, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan discusses the binary of Victim and Perpetrator with Kristen Cherry. Kristen is a survivor advocate and a movement worker based in Louisville, Kentucky, in the USA. She worked at her local domestic violence/sexual assault crisis center for 2 ½ years, counseling survivors in shelter, over the crisis line, and through the court process after filing for civil protection orders. Kristen is currently involved in community organising efforts in Louisville as protests continue following the police killing of Breonna Taylor in 2020,  that has included co-coordinating a protest arrest hotline, which provides support to protestors facing charges and connects them with free legal support. In this episode Kristen helped to shed light on the ways victim/perpetrator hides the contexts that produce violence, and enables them to go uninterrogated. Should violence be understood as an inherent part of someone, and equally, should being victim to it? How can we center survivors and healing, as well as create outcomes that lead to accountability and justice rather than merely offer incarceration as the solution to violence? The book mentioned by Kristen is Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement. ed. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Ejeris Dixon.To read the transcript of this episode instead, follow this link: https://www.suhaiymah.com/breaking-binaries-transcripts.

A. Andrews is a disabled cartoonist from Minneapolis, Minnesota and the creator of A Quick & Easy Guide to Sex & Disability from Limerence Press. Join A. and Princess as they talk about their process in creating the guide, removing the stigma for disabled people to talk about their bodies and the larger movement for disability justice. Resources in this episode: A. Andrews' new graphic novel A Quick & Easy Guide to Sex & Disability from Limerence Press; Princess' review of the guide over at Rebellious Magazine for Women; other must-have books like Disability Visibility: First Person Stories From the 21st Century Edited by Alice Wong; and Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Follow Feminist Erotica on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and email us with questions/comments/concerns at feministerotica@rebelliousmagazine.com. Wanna join our book club Lit Lap? Read our January pick with us here. This episode is sponsored by Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.

Lydia X. Z. Brown, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Katie Tastrom join Tristan Taormino to talk about disability justice, sex, and relationships. We explore the question: what does it mean to apply a Disability Justice lens to sexuality and sex-positive culture? What are the effects when Black and Brown disabled people are hypersexualized, desexualized or degendered? On an interpersonal level, desexualization assumes disabled folks don’t have agency or skill when it comes to their sexuality and can put pressure on them to perform a kind of hypersexuality. We discuss desirability and undesirability, strength-based approaches to disability and sexuality, disabled sex workers, and the overwhelming amount of sexual violence disabled people face. We also delve into ableism, politics, and representation in the legal case of Marjorie Anna Stubblefield who had a sexual relationship with D.J., a non-verbal man with cerebral palsy. This episode is sponsored by Calm and Dipsea. Lydia X. Z. Brown is a disability justice advocate, organizer, educator, attorney, strategist, and writer whose work has largely focused on interpersonal and state violence against multiply-marginalized disabled people living at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and language. They are Policy Counsel for the Privacy and Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology; Adjunct Lecturer in Disability Studies for Georgetown University; and Director of Policy, Advocacy, and External Affairs at the Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network. They are also founder and volunteer director of the Fund for Community Reparations for Autistic People of Color's Interdependence, Survival, and Empowerment. Currently, they serve as a founding board member of the Alliance for Citizen Directed Supports, presidential appointee to the American Bar Association's Commission on Disability Rights, and chair of the American Bar Association's Section on Civil Rights & Social Justice, Disability Rights Committee. In 2015, Lydia was named to Pacific Standard's 30 Top Thinkers Under 30 list, and to Mic’s list of 50 impactful leaders, cultural influencers, and breakthrough innovators. In 2018, NBC featured them as one of 26 Asian Pacific American breakthrough leaders for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, and Amplifier featured them as part of the We The Future campaign for youth activism. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is just another middle aged mixed-race rust belt autistic aging queerpunk, and a queer disabled and autistic nonbinary femme writer, performer, educator freedom dreamer, and disability and transformative justice movement worker of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Roma ascent. She is the 2020 winner of the Lambda Literary Foundation's Jean Cordova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, and is the author and co-editor of nine books, including Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon), Tonguebreaker, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice,Bridge of Flowers, Bodymap, Dirty River, The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities (coedited with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani), Love Cake and Consensual Genocide. Their work has won the Lambda and been shortlisted four times for the Publishing Triangle Award.  A lead artist for the disability justice performance collective, Sins Invalid, since 2009, Leah also co-created the collectives Performance/Disability/Art, Mangos With Chili, and Toronto’s Asian Arts Freedom School and is currently on the programming team for the Disability and Intersectionality Summit. They believe in the power of storytelling and witnessing, being an everyday-ass human being, the power of disability justice to create an abolitionist present and future, crip and Crazy person brilliance, and the unpredictable future. Raised in Worcester, MA, they currently live in South Seattle, unceded Duwamish territories.    Katie Tastrom is a writer and sex worker based in Upstate NY who focuses on disability justice, sexuality, and abolition. Her most recent article was in HuffPost.  

For this week's episode, Autumn and adrienne sit down with Ejeris Dixon (@ejeris) and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (@brownstargirl), the editors of Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement. We discuss book touring, their journeys to this work, and transformative justice in this time. TRANSCRIPT - https://www.dropbox.com/s/0vm1kk16nfrsbkt/HTS_Beyond%20Survival.pdf?dl=0 HTS ESSENTIALS SUPPORT Our Show on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/Endoftheworldshow PEEP us on IG https://www.instagram.com/endoftheworldpc/ TWEET @ us https://twitter.com/endoftheworldPC --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/how-to-survive-the-end-of-the-world/message

In this latest episode I talk to Natalyia Dell. I first met Natalyia in 2009 when working at the University of Birmingham and I'm lucky to have her as a friend.  She talks candidly about her own experiences of being sensory, physically and neurologically impaired and the impact this has had on her education, career and everyday life.  She has much to say on a range of issues including her experiences of disablism in the LGBT community when she first came out as well as the prevalence of biphobia within the LGBT community.  She discusses what has driven her to be such a passionate and committed disability and LGBT activist and encourages us all to play our part no matter how large or small in the ongoing fight for true equality and justice for disabled and LGBT people.  It was a true pleasure talking to her and I hope you enjoy listening as much as I did talking to her!.Please see below for links to some useful resources mentioned in the discussion:Reasonable Access a charitable Deaf and Disabled People's organisation which seeks to educate and empower disabled people to assert and enforce our rights www.reasonableaccess.org.uk BiCon  www.bicon.org.uk Care Work – Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha  https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/C/Care-Work 

Money and Nikeeta are back this week talking rules around posting baes on social media. Money is annoyed that Sam J ruined one of her favorite pods, so her mental moment is a long but helpful one on how to tell if therapy is working. Nikeeta puts us up on Charlene Mitchell - the first Black woman to run for president of the US. We celebrate Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha as QueerPOC of the week. Intro by TRUTH of Mother Nature. If you love the intro, listen to their new album here: https://open.spotify.com/album/0KWoevXqscd4eMWNZpodAE?si=l67fMsjnQUOKuZ89QtCZzA Where to find us: IG & Twitter - @queerwocpod FB - https://www.facebook.com/QueerWOCpod/ Tumblr - www.QueerWOC.com Listen to us on Soundcloud, Stitcher, Castbox, PocketCasts Contribute to QueerWOC via CashApp: $QueerWOCPod Become a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/queerwocpod Love us out loud by doing The R’s: Rate, Review, Request, Repost, Retweet, and Reply! Use the hashtag #QueerWOC to talk all things the podcast Send us an email or submit your Curved Chronicles: QueerWOCpod@gmail.com QueerWOC of the Week 00:07:50 Queer disabled femme writer, organizer, performance artist and educator Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha Community Contributors 00:17:28 Diedrick, Della Small Town Shout outs - HOL ON now Mt. Holly?!?! we need a meetup cos i thought i was the only queer out here lmao Biloxi, MS / Pompton Lakes, NJ / Portland, / Brownsburg, IN Mental Moment with Money 00:48:40 5 ways to know therapy is working & 5 things you should do to make sure it does work Word 01:04:50 Charlene Mitchel 1968 Presidential Run - https://www.aaihs.org/a-black-woman-communist-candidate-charlene-mitchells-1968-presidential-campaign/ 2004 interview with Lisa Brook from ‘No Easy Victories’ http://www.noeasyvictories.org/interviews/int04_mitchell.php Mentions Charlene’s efforts to help free Angela Davis https://cpusa.org/article/a-forthright-stand-communists-in-the-struggle-for-black-lives/ Charlene Mitchell on electoral law barriers (video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OelrpQEEm94 Topic 01:35:00 Relationships and Social Media Curved Chronicle 01:50:00 Submit your curve chronicles to queerwocpod@gmail.com

This week we spoke with Nora Rachel, a Mitigation Investigator who works to save the lives of those on death row. By mounting a mitigation defense for Voldemort, we discussed the impacts of trauma on childhood development, the importance of intervention, the power of neuroplasticity, and how transformative justice models can interrupt the cycles of abuse and trauma that lead to violence . At its heart, this is an episode about prison abolition, the need for community care systems, and the power of individuals to help heal the world. cw: mentions/discussions of child abuse, sexual assault, incest, animal abuse, the carceral system For more information on transformative justice, check out Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, available here: https://www.akpress.org/beyond-survival.html To find Nora and her art, head to www.norarachelart.com or find them on instagram @norarachelart The queer kids show Nora mentioned is called All Together Now and you can check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_SFqFyFISE  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mollyallis/all-together-now Check out EsGAYpe From Reality, our new podcast about Carry On by Rainbow Rowell! Want even more Gayly Prophet? Join our Patreon! patreon.com/thegaylyprophet Find us on socials! twitter.com/thegaylyprophet instagram.com/thegaylyprophet facebook.com/thegaylyprophet thegaylyprophetpodcast.tumblr.com Find out everything you want to know, and buy our merch at thegaylyprophet.com Show art is by Theo Julien Forrester Music from https://filmmusic.io"Industrial Music Box" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

In this Episode, we discuss and dive into and begin to reimagine how we conceptualize activist work that is so incredibly important within the contemporary moment. Drawing from Healing and Disability Justice activists Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and adrienne maree brown, to reimagine what activism would look like and mean to center healing as a primary mode of activism. Diving into the work and unique forms of crip knowledge we ask the question what does care look like and why do we need a healing justice and disability justice framework if we want to create lasting change in black, brown queer and indigenous movements. Audio clip credits go to Leah Lakshmi Peipzna Samarasina and the Asian American Writers Workshop for their talk on Care Work Dreaming Disability Justice, accessed here: https://youtu.be/8UpQVlT2wCQAnd adrienne maree brown and Kate Werning on Irresistible podcast accessed here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2yEnrX4lZzVvCyHFD3ymcZ?si=mGAuycvjQx6Md4in3KOmoA

In this episode of Tejana Feminist Talks, COLLEGE GRADUATE (haha) and host Leslie Lopez talks about transformative justice. She first discusses the differences between punitive, restorative, and transformative justice. Leslie then uses "Beyond Survival," a 2020 anthology edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, to describe the TJ movement and ways to practice TJ in our lives. Below are some of the websites, organizations, and collectives she mentioned: What Does Justice Look Like for Survivors? By Barnard Center for Research on Women What Is Transformative Justice? By Barnard Center for Research on Women AORTA's Punitive, Restorative, and Transformative Justice: The Basics What is Restorative Justice Vent Diagrams Organizations: Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, Spring Up, AORTA, Creative Interventions, Oakland Power Projects, Philly Stands Up Pieces read from Beyond Survival: “From Breaking Silence to Community Control” by Audrey Huntley, “Maybe You Don't Have to Call 911? Know Your Options” By Oakland Power Projects, “What To Do When You've Been Abusive” by Kai Cheng Thom, “Facing Shame: From Saying Sorry to Doing Sorry” by Nathan Shara, and "Pods and Pod-Mapping Worksheet" by Mia Mingus

Welcome to the first episode. There are a few people to thank. Joe Schine for the amazing art. Drake Stafford for the intro song, and Cullah for the outro song. Really we are just so excited that this is happening and can't wait to go on the journey with you all. Below are the show notes from the first episode. Thanks for the listen.If you like us and rate us that helps out a lot. Also here is how to contact us.Bob at BMaze19 @twitterDave at Davepeachtree@gmail.comFour people killed and 13 shot at at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, 1970.   Star Wars Day started in 2011.  “May the Fourth” be with you.Hay Market Riots started with a bomb that was thrown into a crowd on May 4 in Hay Market Square in Chicago in 1886.  It was never determined who threw the bomb, but 9 labor organizers/anarchists were executed for plotting a riot.  There is evidence that the bomb was thrown by the police. Dave and Al married April, 19th 2014The name of the class that Dave took at CU was a writing course called “Topics in Writing: Dystopias” taught by the great Jim “Jam” Miller. “Crazy” is an ableist word.  I’m sorry I used it. Children of Men.  Is a dystopian movie directed by Alfonso Cuaron, staring Clive Owen and Julianne Moore.  The plot takes place in 2027 after 2 decades of human infertility.1984 by George Orwell. This is Orwell’s last and perhaps greatest book.Back to the Future came out in 1985.COLA struggle at UCSC. The struggle started in Fall quarter of 2019 with a grading strike.  It escalated to a full strike with a large picket in Winter quarter.  The university used militarized police, surveillance, and extreme punishment to break the strike.  The university faces a unfair labor practice lawsuit in the wake of this repression.Japanese Knotweed is a prolific plant.Emergent Strategy and biomimicry. Emergent Strategy is a book by adrienne maree brown, who has a podcast called How to Survive the End of the World.  We will return to her work in episode 3.Beyond Survival by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha focuses on alternatives to retributive justice and the prison system for communities in struggle. 

We meet with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, a Seattle-based writer, transformative justice and disability justice movement worker, and educator. By the Sound is produced and edited by Sarah Mayes. Episode 014 is hosted by Chelsea Alvarez, Aisha Hauser, and Sarah Mayes. You can support the show and learn how to join our community at: https://www.patreon.com/bythesound (https://www.patreon.com/bythesound) SHOW NOTES: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (www.brownstargirl.org) : writer, crank, disability and transformative justice worker (https://www.akpress.org/beyond-survival.html) , edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (https://www.powells.com/book/-9781849352628) , edited by Ching-In Chen, Jai Dulani, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha The Audre Lorde Project (https://alp.org/) The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-revolution-will-not-be-funded) The NW Network (https://www.nwnetwork.org) “ Policing is a Dirty Job, But Nobody’s Gotta Do It: 6 Ideas for a Cop-Free World (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/policing-is-a-dirty-job-but-nobodys-gotta-do-it-6-ideas-for-a-cop-free-world-199465/) ,” Rolling Stone (2014). BYP100 (https://www.byp100.org)   The Oakland Power Projects (OPP) ( http://criticalresistance.org/chapters/cr-oakland/the-oakland-power-projects/) Trans Lifeline (https://www.translifeline.org) The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC) (https://batjc.wordpress.com) INCITE! (https://incite-national.org) API CHAYA (https://www.apichaya.org) Black & Tan Hall (https://www.facebook.com/blackandtanhall/) SFSX (SAFE SEX) (https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/sfsx-safe-sex) (https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/C/Care-Work) , by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/T/Tonguebreaker) , by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha Support this podcast

One of our favorite episodes of AAWW Radio was from 2018 featuring Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice author Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in conversation with poet Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, author of SLINGSHOT. Leah reads from her work and together they discuss meaningful inclusion of disability justice, Intersectional disability, and the nuances and multitudes of the disability experiences. Watch the full event on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UpQVlT2wCQ

The COVID-19 pandemic is bringing real and significant disruptions to our lives, our communities, and our organizing. The scale of this shift in our social fabric is new, but these are challenges that disability justice organizers have always faced. How can we organize in a state of constant uncertainty and limitations on physical movement? How can we protect people with compromised immune systems as we work to build people power? How do we get the work done while leaving no one behind? This episode shares stories and insights from disability justice organizers that all of us can learn from and apply to organizing in our current conditions. Thank you to JOIN for Justice, the Jewish Organizing Institute and Network, for organizing this call & working with us to turn the recording into a podcast episode. You'll hear featured voices Patty Berne, Lydia X. Z. Brown, & Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, moderated by Allegra Heath-Stout. Transcript, further resources, & full show notes at www.irresistible.org/podcast/61 ---- Thanks to Myra Al-Rahim & Zach Meyer for production, Josiah Werning & Alyson Thompson for design and social media, and Ana Cecilia for music. Irresistible is sponsored by Kalliopeia Foundation: Dedicated to reconnecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. Learn more at kalliopeia.org

What does it look like in the Justice sphere? If you don't want to call the cops, what else can you do? Many people turn to transformative justice for help. In the nation that incarcerates more people than any other on earth, there are many reasons why a person might not want to call 911. Undocumented, sick, over-policed, dependent on or in love with an abuser? In this episode, Laura talks with the editors of the just-released book, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement. Transformative justice applies the principles of mutual aid to justice. It seeks to resolve violence for the long term at the peer-to-peer, grassroots level by looking for resolution, not punishment, and relying on community, not the system.  Music in the Middle:  New Yorkers at home applauding essential workers from their windows.  It's a daily ritual at 7pm to show appreciation while staying at a distance. And that appreciation is growing louder by the day!  EPISODE NOTES AND MORE:You can find more information on my guests Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, anti-violence trainer Ejeris Dixon, and the book they've edited Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement at our website. And if you're part of our Patreon community,  we'll include a link to that SKILL SET FOR SURVIVAL Ejeris mentioned - as well as more in our episode notes at Patreon.com/theLFShow. You do not have to contribute money, but we hope you will. For as little as $3 or $5. monthly you partner with us to report on how we might move from here to a better future for all. 

Salut, c'est Furies, le podcast de la Queer Week ! Dans cet épisode, on revient sur les racines des conflits, sur nos vécus, nos émotions, nos traumatismes et sur l'importance de déconstruire nos propres parcours pour mieux comprendre les violences. De nombreux outils existent pour apporter de l'aide, que ce soit à la personne agressée ou à la personne qui a perpétré l'agression, voire pour faire de la prévention des conflits. Ces outils proviennent de l'éducation populaire, de la psychologie, du droit ou encore du féminisme. Parce que nous, queer, nous portons une critique du système normatif et du système judiciaire, nous pouvons concevoir et penser différemment la réparation, et Cha nous ouvre ainsi la voie à cette réflexion dans cet épisode. Références citées : Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair, Sarah Schulman, 2016, Arsenal Pulp Press Paranormal Tabou : exemple de justice communautaire sur un cas de conflit interpersonnel Féminisme du ressenti : Le féminisme au pays des bisounours : violence du ressenti, ressenti de la violence, Mathias, Maïc, Kira, Flo & Gaël Ching-In Chen, Jai Dulani, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, The Revolution starts at home. Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities, 2016, AK Press Starhawk, Rêver l'obscur - Femmes, magie et politique, 2019, Cambourakis Collectif Fracas Furies est un podcast de la Queer Week, cet épisode a été enregistré en février 2020, écrit et réalisé par Elsa Deck-Marsault et Gala Munforte, monté par Anaïs Reinhardt. La musique originale est de Clara Apolit.

Afraid to call 911, but not sure what to do instead? Read this book! Beyond Survival collects tools, strategies and personal stories of the struggle to create safety, justice and accountability beyond the criminal justice system.  This long-awaited and deeply necessary book documents some of the work of the transformative justice movement- collecting everything from personal stories of successful interventions in abuse and violence to guides to being accountable if you’ve been abusive, from strategies to support folks having emotional crises without calling 911 to toolkits for creating safer party spaces and community safety zones from ICE.  Along the way, there’s plenty of personal essays and reflections from long time organizers on the state of the movement, and visions for the future we’re building that will bring us all home.   Editors Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha are in conversation with activist-contributors Amita Swadhin and Raquel Lavina.  

Happy new moon in pieces, wonderful listeners! This episode feels like a really wonderful treat to kick this moon cycle off with. It's been a deeply resonating, wonderful and insightful conversation with Brunem Warshaw of Well Deep Remedies. Here is some of what we talked about:  - Making friends with neighbourhood plants - Weaving disability justice and anti capitalist values into healing work - Prioritising plant connections in the way we spent our social energy - Navigating feminized labour with the support of plants  - Heartbreak and grief as a sacred practice Brunem mentioned the books Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women by Silvia Federici.  You can sign up for Brunem's newsletter here: https://www.subscribepage.com/f1n2m3 Learn more about their upcoming class on herbal support for emotional intelligence and relational work: https://www.welldeepremedies.com/herbal-support-for-emotional-intelligence-relational-work And find Brunem on instagram: instagram.com/welldeepremedies Brunem is a Clinical Herbalist and wellness educator who weaves scientific and intuitive approaches together to support people in healing themselves with the assistance of plant medicines. Brunem is also a queer nonbinary femme with invisible disabilities who is descended from Irish and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors. Their clinical practice Well Deep Remedies has a particular focus on trauma and addiction recovery, queer/trans support, ancestral magic, and disability justice. Here is more info about the witch heart mentoring program I offer: https://www.yarrowmagdalena.com/witch-heart-mentoring/ and you're welcome to support the show by becoming a Patron if you like: https://www.yarrowmagdalena.com/for-patrons/

tl;dr Is squirting embarrassing? How can I find a fat-friendly therapist? What if my marriage is falling apart? News! Patrons who support at $3 and above, you're invited to join the Explore More book club. We are meeting in December to discuss Jenny Odell's "How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy", so check out my new post at patreon.com/sgrpodcast. This week, it's me and you! An awesome video called "How to Support Harm Does in Accountability" came across my feed this week, and it turns out it's part of a multi-video series by the Barnard Center for Research on Women featuring Mia Mingus, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, adrienne maree brown, and a bunch of other amazing folks. Definitely check them all out. How can we become more committed to collective healing and safety? What do we need to let go of in order to center the most marginalized? I explore this a bit as I share a few quotes and tidbits from the videos. Then, we dive into your questions. Sad Gay Millennial and SaFyre both wrote in this week with really sweet notes about how the show has helped them. I'm holding them so tenderly. Ina wrote to me about being in a fat body and finding support. How can you find a fat-friendly therapist? I have resources for you to check out at dawnserra.com/ep282. Regardless of who you have near you for support, I recommend asking lots of questions about their values and going in with a list of requests and boundaries that would help you to feel more safe and supported. Is squirting embarrassing? Amy wrote in because she squirts and after she does, she often feels really embarrassed and worried about the mess she made. Her current boyfriend is really supportive, but she wants to know if there's a way to feel less awkward about the mess her body makes. Finally, Emotionally Wrecked Matt wrote in because he lost weight last year and as a result his wife has experienced a lot of insecurity and withdrawal. Sex isn't what it used to be, feelings are hurt, and now they've shared some fantasies with each other that left the other feeling even more hurt. What can he do? As much as there is to dive into in this email, what's clear is that Matt and his wife need some support. Repair needs to come before adventure and play, so let's talk about that. Have questions of your own you'd like featured on the show? Send me a note using the contact form in the navigation above!   Follow Sex Gets Real on Twitter and Facebook and Dawn is on Instagram. About Dawn Serra: What if everything you’ve been taught about relationships, about your body, about sex is wrong? My name is Dawn Serra and I dare to ask scary questions that might lead us all towards a deeper, more connected experience of our lives. In addition to being the host of the weekly podcast, Sex Gets Real, the creator of the online conference Explore More, I also work one-on-one with clients who are feeling stuck, confused, or disappointed with the ways they experience desire, love, and confidence. It’s not all work, though. In my spare time, you can find me adventuring with my husband, cuddling my cats as I read a YA novel, or obsessing over MasterChef Australia. Listen and subscribe to Sex Gets Real Listen and subscribe on iTunes Check us out on Stitcher Don't forget about I Heart Radio's Spreaker Pop over to Google Play Use the player at the top of this page. Stream it on Spotify Find the Sex Gets Real channel on IHeartRadio. Hearing from you is the best Contact form: Click here (and it's anonymous) Episode Transcript Find it at dawnserra.com/ep282

This week in the pharmacy we have the writer, poet, and artist KHAIRANI BAROKKA! All the poems we prescribe and talk about in this episode can be found here: http://bit.ly/2klT8AG KHAIRANI BAROKKA was born in Jakarta and currently lives in London. Among her honours, she was an NYU Tisch Departmental Fellow for her masters, Emerging Writers Festival’s (AUS) Inaugural International Writer-In-Residence (2013), and Indonesia’s first Writer-In-Residence at Vermont Studio Center (2011). Okka is the writer/performer/producer of, among others, a deaf-accessible, solo poetry/art show, Eve and Mary Are Having Coffee. It premiered at Edinburgh Fringe 2014 as Indonesia’s only representative, with a grant from HIVOS. She was recognized in 2014 by UNFPA as one of Indonesia’s “Inspirational Young Leaders Driving Social Change”, for highly prolific, pioneering international work in inclusive, accessible arts. Published internationally in anthologies and journals, Okka has presented work extensively, in ten countries, is a frequent public speaker, and has been awarded six residencies and various grants. She is author and illustrator of poetry-art book Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis Press, 2016), co-editor with Ng Yi-Sheng of HEAT: A Southeast Asian Urban Anthology (Fixi, 2016), and co-editor, with Sandra Alland and Daniel Sluman, of Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches Press, May 2017). A PhD-by-practice researcher at Goldsmiths, as an LPDP Scholar in Visual Cultures, Okka is currently working on a book and visual works. Her first full-length poetry collection, Rope, is currently out with Nine Arches Press (October 2017). [Theme music for the podcast is by Aretha Franklin played by the wonderful coversart & also Ahmad Jamal from his album Tranquility]

We revisit Green Book, and discuss how marginalized people—or parts of a marginalized existence—are left out of mainstream stories told from a more privileged perspective. Lin rejoices in the rich conversations about disability at the launch of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Margrit brings up some middle-grade novels featuring disabled protagonists. In some of them, living with disability is the main plot point, e.g., El Deafo by Cece Bell, Out of My Mind by Sharon M. Draper, and Wonder by R.J. Palacio. In The Magisterium series by Holly Black and Cassandra Clare, the protagonist’s disability is neither easy to overlook, nor an impediment in the adventures he lives through. Question of the episode: What do you think about the pressures on marginalized people to constantly explain their marginalization? Join the conversation on Twitter at @World_ofStories or email us at worldofstoriespodcast@gmail.com.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice outlines what it means to create spaces by and for sick and disabled queer people of color. In this episode of AAWW Radio, Leah reads from her essay collection and then has a conversation with Cyrée Jarelle Johnson about meaningful inclusion of disability justice, Intersectional disability, the nuances and multitudes of the disability experiences, and “crip wealth.”

What is the difference between disability justice and disability rights? How can we make our social justice movement spaces accessible to and led by people with disabilities of all kinds? What kind of world could we create if we valued and centered the experiences of our most marginalized community members? In episode 62 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach interviews writer and cultural worker Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha about the past successes and current challenges of the disability justice movement, how to create truly accessible performance and art spaces, and why helping survivors remake the world is how Leah imagines otherwise. Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/62-leah-lakshmi-piepzna-samarasinha-part-2

How have marginalized people harnessed the genre of memoir to write themselves into history? What might queer crip time teach us about the writing process? What happens when writers allow themselves the time and space to sit with their work? In episode 61 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach interviews writer and cultural worker Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha about her transformative justice memoir Dirty River, how queer brown and disabled people write themselves into history, how you can bring ritual into your writing practice, and the value of letting your writing develop slooooowly—like a sourdough starter. Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/61-leah-lakshmi-piepzna-samarasinha-part-1

Our guest, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, (she/they) is a queer disabled non-binary femme writer and cultural worker of Burger/ Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/ Roma ascent. Her work has been widely published, most recently in The Deaf Poets Society, Glitter and Grit and Octavia's Brood.  Her memoir, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home was praised as a “gritty, glorious, multi-layered story of homecoming and self-healing.” Currently a lead artist with the disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid, she teaches, performs and lectures across North America. Primarily, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarashinha is a self-described weirdo who writes about survivorhood, disability justice, transformative justice, queer femme of color lives and Sri Lankan diaspora while sitting in her room. Well. . . perhaps we will get some “weirdo” crip conversation when guest Leah Lakshmi teams up with Pushing Limits producer Eddie Ytuarte for this half hour interview. The post Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha appeared first on KPFA.

Seeing the unseen. We talk about the often-invisible work that goes into emotional labor with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and hear from Andrea Ritchie, the author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color. Plus: new music from artist Julia Weldon. 

Just in time for LGBT Pride Month, this episode has us discussing LGBTQ+/QUILTBAG Non-Fiction books! We talk about queer Canadians, own voices, the importance of cultural context, and how this is our newest episode ever (in terms of publication dates for books). Plus: Anna and Matthew will be at the American Library Association conference in Chicago this weekend. Tweet at us if you’ll be there and want to say “Hi!”. You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or your favourite podcast delivery system. In this episode Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray | Jessi  Books We Read (or tried to) The Lesbian Lexicon by Stevie Anntonym (recommended) Queer Game Studies edited by Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw (Matthew mistakenly called this Queer Gaming) David Bowie Made Me Gay by Darryl W. Bullock (out November 21st, 2017) (recommended) Outlaw Marriages by by Rodger Streitmatter Queers Were Here: Heroes & Icons of Queer Canada edited by Robin Ganev and RJ Gilmour (recommended) Scott Thompson (of The Kids in the Hall) LOOK: Lesbian Organization of Kitchener LOOT: Lesbian Organization of Toronto The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Health Care edited by Zena Sharman (recommended) The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (recommended) The Life and Times of Butch Dykes (series) by by Eloisa Aquino The Case of Alan Turing: The Extraordinary and Tragic Story of the Legendary Codebreaker by Éric Liberge and Arnaud Delalande (recommended) My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness by Nagata Kabi (recommended) Goodreads review that suggestions Nagata Kabi is “non-binary and possibly asexual” Cities vol. 1 by Anand Vedawal (recommended) The Prince of los Cocuyos by Richard Blanco  Books We Mentioned On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor Fun Home and Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel Pedro and Me by Judd Winick (that page shows the terrible cover) (recommended) Two or Three Things I Know for Sure and Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature by Dorothy Allison Forward by Abby Wambach Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man by Thomas Page McBee (recommended) My Body is Yours by Michael V. Smith (recommended) Female Masculinity by J. Jack Halberstam Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme edited by Ivan E. Coyote and Zena Sharman Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (recommended) Tomboy Survival Guide by Ivan E. Coyote (recommended) Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari, Eric Klinenberg Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh (recommended) Princess Jellyfish (series) by Akiko Higashimura (recommended) DAR (webcomic) by Erika Moen How to be a Guy (series of articles) by Jay Edidin (recommended) Links, Articles, and Things Our list of genres QUILTBAG definition on Wiktionary LGBT Pride Month QZAP: The Queer Zine Archive Project Mass Effect Kaiden Alenko Casey the Canadian Lesbrarian Broad City The Imitation Game Otokonoko: A frustratingly brief WIkipedia article about crossdressing in Japan Questions Do you want a postcard? Email us your address! Will you be at ALA in Chicago? Let us know! Got any recommendations for asexual non-fiction? Check out our Pinterest board and Tumblr posts for all the QUILTBAG/LGBTQ+ books we read, follow us on Twitter, join our Facebook Group, or send us an email! Join us again on Tuesday, July 4th, when we’ll talk about Reading Exhaustion and Reading Slumps (or maybe a super secret surprise). Then come back on July 18th when we’ll be discussing Legal Thrillers!

Pam picks a bunch of audio tracks to preview some of the artists performing at the 2017 Verses Festival of Words: Sheri-D Wilson, Mighty Mike McGee, Saul Williams, Khari Wendell McClelland, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

In this talk-show style live podcast recording, Nia interviews Elena Rose about how Sojourner Truth NEVER said "Ain't I a woman?", Juba Kalamka about meeting Kanye when he was fifteen, Lexi Adsit about running an all trans women of color comedy program, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha about the perks of making it "big time". Read the transcription at scribd.com/artactivistnia. Support the podcast at patreon.com/artactivistnia.

I encountered Amanda Harris’ work via a Gender and Media class. I love her Femme Spaceproject and was so excited to talk to her for this episode!  Amanda  is a queer high femme charmer from the South. She was the co-curator of Y’all Come Back: Stories of Queer Southern Migration in the 2015 National Queer Arts Festival, where she exhibited portraits in her EXODUS series. Her photographs have been published in Glitter & Grit: Queer Performance from the Heels on Wheels Galaxy, G.R.I.T.S.: An Anthology of Southern Queer Womyn’s Voices, Towards the “Other” America: Anti-Racist Resources for White People Taking Action for Black Lives Matter, as well as various online sources including Al Jazeera America. She believes in the future of the femme oligarchy and the power of portraits to tell stories. Please see images at www.dresscodecracker.com also!  Amanda’s art and activism has been informed and nurtured by online femme community. We talked about femme visibility and marginazation in queer and other spaces. She also talked about taking the conversation beyond queerness to include race, class, ability, emotional labour, privilege of butch and masculine of centre people –and letting femme stand alone—femme sex, and femme on femme relationships I liked hearing her perspectives on collaborating with vs exploiting femmes from marginalized groups. On the topic of privilege, she referred me to an article online by Cyree Jarelle Johnson,here.  ….also to a wonderful resource for femme articles and resources—intiated and collated by Blyth Barnow, reflecting the wisdom of  large community of facebook femmes! Of course in the bonus round I asked Amanda for her book and music recommendations.  She mentioned Amber Hollibaugh, whose book My Dangerous Desires is a favourite of mine too. The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader  She recommended work by  Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha whose most recent book isDirty River I totally recommend too! And…Amanda contributed to a recent book, Glitter & Grit: Queer Performance from the Heels on Wheels Femme Galaxy.  which I’m gonna try to get my hands on soon! Her music recommendation is GAYmous which you can find on FB Amanda’s latest project Y’all Come Back Now, is here, and looks amazing. Thank you so much Amanda! You’re a charmer for sure. ♥

Sri Lankan/Irish queer disabled femme writer Leah Lakshmi and I discuss her new memoir, Dirty River, racism in the publishing industry, and whether it's better to fight your way into the mainstream or just do your own thing on the outside. Photo by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes. Read the interview here. Support the podcast here.

Safety: every law enforcement officer and every politician tells us that they're for it. And yet for many, police are a problem in their communities, and today's policies are only making things worse. If what we're doing isn't the answer. What is? We explore this issue, and what we all need to learn from the disability justice movement, with this week's guest. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled writer, performer, poet, healer and teacher, inspired by poets and authors June Jordan, Suheir Hammad and Audre Lorde. She is the author of several books of poetry, including Consensual Genocide and the Lambda-award winning Love Cake. She has a new book of poetry called Bodymap, and a memoir, Dirty River. out this year. She also co-founded the performance group Mangos With Chili and is an editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities, a book that grapples with the difficult idea of addressing violence without police. All this, and Laura discusses the roads less traveled.

It's hard to imagine an American poet more celebrated than four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost whose most famous poem concludes: “Two roads diverged in a wood and I —I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” When the most celebrated poet's most well-known lines praise difference why is it that we're scared of it? Maybe we need more poets. That's what John F Kennedy said just weeks before his death, at the groundbreaking of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College. It was soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War was raging on, ten million Americans needed jobs, America needed strength, said Kennedy, but strength he said, “takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant.” The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation's greatness, the President continued, “but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable… for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.” Music and poetry and the arts push us, said Kennedy. (QUOTE) “When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence.” That was half a century ago. Today we have months dedicated supposedly to “diversity” including this one, June, LGBTQI Pride Month. Except mostly, we don't celebrate diversity, we celebrate sameness. We honor all the progress that we lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans Americans have made, becoming “accepted” as, well, just like everybody else. Now, I'm all for everyone enjoying the same rights in these United States. I support that – on-going - project. But I'd like to celebrate something else too: roads less travelled. Especially the roads less travelled that LGBTQI people take daily, opening up the possibilities for everybody. The same old roads will take us to the same old destinations. It's divergence, as the straight, white poet once wrote, that makes all the difference. You can watch my interview with poet and disability justice activists Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha this week on The Laura Flanders Show on KCET/LINKtv and TeleSUR and find all my interviews and reports at GRITtv.org. To tell me what you think, write to: Laura@GRITtv.org.