Critical Social Justice Week 2016 is here!! Oct. 24-28.
Learn about our keynote & check out our events calendar.
Posted the CSJ Blog on October 10, 2016 by sdevora1
Get ready for Critical Social Justice: Home with our “What You Need to Know” series, starting with this primer on our keynote speaker 
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Her lecture, titled “Body/ Land/ Home: Disability Justice, Healing Justice and Femme of Color Brilliance,” will be held on Tuesday, October 25th at 6PM in the University Center Ballroom (event details here).
Based out of Toronto and Oakland, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer, disabled femme of color poet, performer, healer, and activist of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. Much of Leah’s work focuses on people and conversations that are often underrepresented, including disability justice, queer and trans people of color, and abuse survivors. In addition to her award-winning books of poetry, including Bodymap, Love Cake, and Consensual Genocide, she has alsowritten a memoir titled Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home.
“Stories create the world. Seeing stories that look like your own, that you’ve never read written down before, or that are stories you’ve never thought of before that change your whole idea of what is possible, are a big revolutionary deal.” †
art by Shira Devorah
Leah is also a co-founder and former director of Mangos With Chili, the longest-running performance art tour featuring queer and trans individuals in North America. She performs pieces with the disability justice collective Sins Invalid and is a co-director of the Toronto disability justice collective Performance/ Disability/Art.
…“[I]t was so inculcated in me that disability is this shameful story. And you know, if there’s not queer people of color space, queer people of color won’t perform. If there’s not disability space that centers queer and trans people of color, sex workers, poor people, all of the above, elders, young people, we won’t know that there’s similar stories.” †
For more on Leah, check out:
- Her blog, Brownstargirl
- This video of her performance in Sins Invalid
- Her interview with Bitch Magazine on disability, representation, and survivorhood
Critical Social Justice: Home will be held on October 24th through 28th, 2016. Follow the CSJ blog, Facebook, and Twitter for updates on scheduled events and other news. For more information about the Critical Social Justice initiative, or if you’re organizing a related event that week that might be included on the CSJ calendar, please email mosaic@umbc.edu or womens.center@umbc.edu.
Posted: July 25, 2016, 5:33 PM
