Disability Justice Centering Intersectionality and Liberation

Patty Berne, co-founder and Executive Artistic Director of Sins Invalid, will discuss the importance of intersectionality in disability justice and the need to address how diverse systems of oppression reinforce each other. Ms. Berne’s work creates a framework and practice of disability justice, which centers the voices and experiences of disabled people who are often marginalized and oppressed in multiple ways.

Ms. Berne will be joining us remotely for this moderated conversation.

Patty Berne is the Co-Founder, Executive, and Artistic Director of Sins Invalid, a disability justice-based performance project centralizing disabled artists of color and queer and gender non-conforming artists with disabilities. Berne’s experiences as a Japanese-Haitian queer disabled woman provides grounding for her work creating “liberated zones” for marginalized voices.

Berne is widely recognized for their work to establish the framework and practice of disability justice which centers on intersectionality and how diverse systems of oppression amplify and reinforce one another. As they explain, the disability justice framework was a reaction to the ways that the U.S. disability rights movement “invisibilized the lives of peoples who lived at intersecting junctures of oppression – disabled people of color, immigrants with disabilities, queers with disabilities, trans and gender non-conforming people with disabilities, people with disabilities who are houseless, people with disabilities who are incarcerated, people with disabilities who have had their ancestral lands stolen, amongst others.”

Berne’s training in clinical psychology focused on trauma and healing for survivors of interpersonal and state violence. Their professional background includes advocacy for immigrants who seek asylum due to war and torture, community organizing within the Haitian diaspora, international support work for the Guatemalan democratic movement, work with incarcerated youth toward alternatives to the criminal legal system, offering mental health support to survivors of violence, and advocating for LGBTQI and disability perspectives within the field of reproductive genetic technologies.

Sponsored by: The Graduate School, Disability Studies Program

Part of the 50th Anniversary of Section 504.