About the Series
IDHA organized our first-ever Decarcerating Care conversation in September 2020, in the midst of ongoing racial uprisings in the United States and globally. As abolitionists and organizers called to divest funding from the police and some advocated for reallocation to mental health care, IDHA sought to draw attention to the ways in which the mental health care system maintains white supremacist, racial hierarchies and operates on logics of surveillance, coercion, and control. In the two years since, IDHA’s four panels have reached more than 7,000 people with urgent dialogue about alternatives to policing that are rooted in the lived experience of mental health service users and survivors, movement leaders, and disabled community members. We have discussed the importance of taking policing out of mental health crisis response, the ways in which “reforms” uphold the ongoing coercion and control of marginalized communities, concrete steps and tools for decarcerating one's practice, and how to build community-based healing alternatives.
About the Event
At the two-year mark of this series, we are starting the Decarcerating Care lifecycle over. We reflect on the ways in which our landscape has intensified since the series began, bringing both new challenges and new opportunities to cultivate autonomy, self-determination, and liberation for those experiencing crisis and distress. Historically, mad, mentally ill, and disabled people have been surveilled at astonishingly high rates within hospitals and prisons; since deinstitutionalization, however, these populations have been increasingly surveilled by other means – in what scholar Liat Ben-Moshe has termed “carceral sanism.” Today, this pattern is evident in the expansion of mandatory reporting, particularly within Black, Native, and Latinx communities; the deployment of geolocation technologies by crisis hotlines in “active rescue” situations; and the advent of medications that utilize digital tracking systems to ensure compliance with treatment.
On October 17, 2022, IDHA will continue the conversation with Decarcerating Care: The Evolution of Mental Health Surveillance. This fifth installment will examine how systems of surveillance intersect with mental health and disability by reviewing historical examples and exposing present-day iterations. A panel of mad and disabled community members, mental health practitioners, activists, and scholars will explore responses within and adjacent to our mental health system that often result in coercion, confinement, and incarceration. Drawing on deep lineages of resistance – particularly by Black, Brown, Indigenous, disabled, mad, and queer communities – we will uplift ongoing resistance and movement efforts that respond to these covert forms of control and prioritize community-based frames for safety in pursuit of collective healing.
Please register via Eventbrite to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with details on how to dial into the Zoom webinar.
Donations
IDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by tiered suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. We appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give.
Access
ASL + CART will be provided in Zoom. If we reach maximum capacity (1,000 people), this webinar will also be broadcast live on IDHA’s Facebook page (note that the Facebook stream will have ASL interpretation visible, but not live captions). The session will be recorded and shared with all registrants. If you have any questions about access, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.
Panelists
Idil Abdillahi
Dr. Idil Abdillahi is an assistant professor in the School of Disability Studies, cross-appointed to the School of Social Work, and the advisor to the dean on Anti-Black racism at the Faculty of Community Services (2020-2021). Dr. Abdillahi is a critical Black Interdisciplinary scholar, researcher, policy analyst, grassroots organizer, and experienced practitioner across healthcare, institutional, policy, and social service settings. She is the author of Black Women Under State: Surveillance, Poverty & the Violence of Social Assistance, (2022), author of Blackened Madness: Medicalization, and Black Everyday Life in Canada (forthcoming), co-author of BlackLife: Post-BLM and The Struggle For Freedom (2019), and a co-editor of the forthcoming edition of Mad matters: A critical reader in Canadian mad studies.
Dr. Abdillahi is published widely on an array of topics, including mental health, poverty, HiV/AIDS, organizational development, and several other key policy areas at the intersection of BlackLife and state interruption. Most notably, Dr. Abdillahi's cutting-edge research and scholarship on anti-Black Sanism has informed the current debates on fatal police shootings of Black mad-identified peoples. Dr. Abdillahi is attentive to the tensions between data, research, communities, institutions, and monetization. Therefore, Dr. Abdillahi works to challenge the ways that research data about communities experiencing structural oppression—particularly Black communities—are increasingly used to further the oppression of those communities. In effect, these data are used by capital-oriented institutions while simultaneously serving socio-political ‘care’ spaces that range from community-based health care to hospitals and prisons. Dr. Abdillahi’s work integrates an understanding of how these institutions and ‘care’ spaces continue to disproportionately negatively impact Black women/people, leading to their disenfranchisement from ‘public’ services and supports in Tkaronto and beyond.
Azza a Black femme person dressed in warm hues and a yellow hijab sits against a dark and shadowy backdrop. She looks over her shoulder at the camera with a slight smile.
Azza Altiraifi
Born to Sudanese parents and raised in northern Virginia, Azza’s passion for community organizing and cross-movement solidarity stems from her upbringing. Over the past several years, Azza has immersed herself in Disability Justice learning, organizing, and advocacy, and they are committed to envisioning new approaches to movement work that value rest, sustainability, and joy.
In their full time capacity Azza is a senior policy manager at a national movement support organization working to advance economic justice. Previously, Azza worked in senior research and advocacy roles within the progressive policy space, working on issues spanning disability, carceral surveillance, poverty and economic security. In addition to their full time work, Azza has served as an advisor for various national disability and health equity policy and research projects, including most recently the Center for Democracy and Technology's disability and algorithmic rights project. Azza is also involved in local-level community organizing projects and formations, including volunteering to support public sector labor organizing campaigns in northern VA.
Yana Calou
Yana Calou (they/them) is a non-binary Brazilian-American organizer and storyteller leading Trans Lifeline’s campaign for safe hotlines - a campaign aimed at ending nonconsensual 911 interventions on crisis hotlines. Their work centers lived experiences in service of an abolitionist and anticapitalist future. They live in Brooklyn & Northern New Mexico.
Image of a gender fluid Black 30-something person seated in front of a blue wall wearing a black tee with white words: DISABILITY JUSTICE IS LOVE. There is a red heart masquerading as the O in love. The person is straight faced and there are gentle rainbow reflections across the shirt and deep brown skin from the sun reflecting off the glass in front of them. There are shadows on the blue wall behind the person.
TL Lewis
Talila “TL” Lewis (they/them), is an abolitionist community lawyer, educator, and organizer who is entering a period of rest, recovery, and redefinition. TL’s work has primarily focused on highlighting the inextricable links between ableism, racism, classism, and all other forms of oppression and inequity. TL co-founded and served as the volunteer director of the cross-disability abolitionist organization, HEARD for a decade (IG/Twitter @behearddc).
TL’s journey into working to abolish the medical-carceral industrial complex began with efforts to correct wrongful convictions of disabled people. This led TL to create the first national database of imprisoned deaf/blind people and spend nearly twenty years finding and supporting incarcerated multiply-marginalized disabled people while interrupting the cycles that feed medical-carceral systems. TL also serves as a consultant for social justice organizations and as an attorney and “expert” on cases involving multiply-marginalized disabled people. After graduating from American University Washington College of Law, TL served as the Givelber Public Interest Lecturer at Northeastern University School of Law and a visiting professor at Rochester Institute of Technology/National Technical Institute for the Deaf.
TL has earned awards from numerous universities, the American Bar Association, the American Association for People with Disabilities, National Black Deaf Advocates, and the Nation Institute, among others. TL is a member of the 2018 inaugural cohort for the Roddenberry Fellowship and the Atlantic Fellowship for Racial Equity. As of the time of editing this bio, TL loves to dance, bake, create and weave words and languages, spend time with chosen family, and is learning how to roller skate (on quads).
Shawna Murray-Browne
Shawna Murray-Browne works at the intersection of healing, ancestral wisdom, and deep support for organizations, corporations, and everyday humans seeking liberation. She is curious about what happens when we question colonial thinking and make space for indigenous ways of knowing in every aspect of life. She loves to be invited into warm learning spaces where people are ready to shed mainstream thinking and embrace what they have known all along.
In her hometown of Baltimore City, Shawna is known for holding grassroots healing circles to equip Black families and change-makers with the tools to heal themselves. Others know her best for her training intensive, Decolonizing Therapy for Black Folk, where she co-creates space for deconstructing and reimagining mental health care as we know it.
Shawna is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, School of Social Work where she is exploring oral histories as a site of inquiry around the healing ways of Black women advocates during the civil rights movement.
Shawna's clients have included human service and political advocacy organizations, foundations, and universities, but she's happiest at the block party, healing circle, or playdate in someone’s backyard. Dedicated to continued growth, her practice in Qigong, African spiritual traditions, and sitting at the feet of elders maintain. She lives in Baltimore with her husband and her five-year-old daughter.
Moderator
Selima Jumarali
Selima Jumarali (she/hers) is a queer, Indo-Caribbean, Muslim educator, researcher, and therapist committed to spreading radical care and revolutionary love. Selima is currently a fifth year PhD candidate in the Clinical-Community Psychology program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research focuses on the mental health experiences of queer and trans communities of color and the material needs of survivors of intimate partner violence.
As a therapist, her practice is shaped by the teachings of Black feminist scholars and disability justice activists who remind us of our inherent resilience, our right to joy, and our duty to strive for liberation. Selima believes that oppression is a driving force of trauma and that dismantling systems of oppression are a necessary part of healing trauma.
Selima previously co-led diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts during her 9+ year career in student affairs at NYU. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Psychology with a minor in Biology from the University of Miami, her Master of Arts in Student Affairs from NYU, and her Master of Arts in Human Services Psychology from UMBC.