Join us for the first Spring DS brown bag presentation by Stephen Meyers!

Friday, April 14, 12-1pm
MGH 024 (the UW D Center)
“The Politics of Care in Prison”

We will have ASL and CART for this talk. Please be fragrance free.

Abstract: Persons with disabilities are overrepresented within the prison population. With the growing number of inmates with disabilities prisons are increasingly instituting inmate caregiving programs. Through these programs, inmates without disabilities are employed as personal assistants for inmates with disabilities,supporting them in daily activities. Disability studies has traditionally condemned the provision of care as a form of oppression and sought to take the “care out of care work” by reconceptualizing it as personal assistance. Feminist scholars, however, have historically focused on care through the prism of gender, uncovering the exploitation of caregivers, and seeking to recapture the concept by theorizing its emancipatory potential in the face of the dominant, masculine, market-based value system. Prisons are hypermasculine spaces often devoid of care, where positive, mutual relationships of concern (or care) are scarce and inmates are subjected to abuse and social isolation. We discuss the meaning and the potential of caregiving programs to become a form of even greater subjugation and oppression of both inmates receiving and giving care and, alternatively, its transformative potential in the lives of individual inmates and the larger prison environment as posing an alternative relationship to the hypermasculine imperative.

Bio: Stephen Meyers is an Assistant Professor at the Jackson School of International Studies and in the Law, Societies, and Justice Program.
His areas of research interest are Human Rights, Disability, and Global Civil Society. In particular, he focuses on grassroots associations of persons with disabilities working at the local level in Nicaragua and their interactions with international organizations promoting the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which was passed in 2006.

Please stay after this talk for a meet & greet (snacks provided) with attorney & activist Shain Neumeier.

*April 14, 1-3pm
Location: MGH 024
Meet & greet with Shain Neumeier, who's also giving a lecture later in the evening

Snacks will be provided. Stop by to chat with Shain & the ASUW SDC and D Center communities.

Shain M. Neumeier is an attorney, activist, and writer who has been working towards disability and youth liberation for the past eight years. Shain is a non-binary transgender and multiply disabled person, as well as a survivor of coercive treatment. They were awarded the 2015 Association of University Centers on Disabilities Leadership in Advocacy Award for their work to end abuse and neglect of youth and people with disabilities in institutional settings.

*April 14, 7-9pm
Location: Husky Union Building (HUB) 250

Shain Neumeier
"Institutionalization and the Continuing Struggle for Disability Liberation"

Hosted by ASUW Student Disability Commission
FREE + OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
https://www.facebook.com/events/188907561615427/

/// D MONTH EVENT /// 

The word "institution" has a wide array of meanings and associations, both good and bad. Accordingly, there is a lot of ambivalence, and many conflicting viewpoints, about the nature and role of institutions, including how they affect disabled people. However, there are many overlaps between all forms of institutions, ranging from those viewed as the most benevolent such as public schools and psychiatric hospitals to those explicitly designed for punishment such as teen "boot camps" and prisons. Many of these core features are rooted in coercion and violence, or inevitably lead to them. This talk will discuss how institutions harm the disabled people within their walls, the rhetoric that allows them to continue doing so, and alternative models that respect the human rights and autonomy of disabled and other currently institutionalized people.

The HUB is wheelchair accessible. CART captioning, ASL interpreting, and air purifiers have been requested.

This event is scent free so please do not wear perfume, heavily scented personal care products or other products with fragrance. To learn more about being fragrance free:
http://www.peggymunson.com/mcs/fragrancefree.html

Questions? Contact us at asuwswdc@uw.edu