AWN hosted a fireside chat with Aimi Hamraie and Mimi Khúc about access-centered pedagogy and disability justice in February 2021.
Last spring, school went virtual for everyone from kindergarteners to grad students. Some college students had no safe place to go to. Parents and caregivers working in and outside the home have had to contend with competing and sometimes impossible demands on money, time, and energy. Some teachers, faculty, and staff have been pressured to return to in-person teaching in unsafe conditions. Many students have been craving in-person learning and community. Everyone has felt the demands to rush, and above all, to perform and achieve despite the collective trauma and mass death of the pandemic. And still the pandemic has hit disabled people at the margins of the margins the hardest, depriving us of resources, support, and care. This fireside chat between two leading scholar-activists will explore what access-centered pedagogy, rooted in disability justice, can offer us all.