Project: Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization, Disability Justice, Abolition

In this roundtable event, leading disability justice and abolitionist scholar Dr. Liat Ben-Moshe discusses her new book, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (2020), and the importance of centering disability justice in coalition-building and imagining a world beyond policing, criminalization, and incarceration. What are the disability justice frameworks for abolition? How do these frameworks help us to critically assess existing institutions and practices and effect transformative change? Dr. Ben-Moshe draws crucial connections between the histories of deinstitutionalization and decarceration, all the while conveying the importance of attending to the ways race, gender, sexuality, and disability figure in the operations of the carceral state. University of Minnesota colleagues Susanna Blumenthal and Nathan Stenberg join the conversation, moderated by Angela Carter, to discuss how we might engage with Dr. Ben-Moshe’s coalitional and abolitionist frameworks to promote institutional change here at the University and in the broader community.

Presented by the Institute for Advanced Study, Minnesota Transform: A Just University for Just Futures, Critical Disability Studies Collective, and University of Minnesota Law School. Recorded on October 21, 2021.