The 2019 Hart House Hancock Lecture, titled “Moving Toward a Disability Justice Revolution”, took place on Thursday, March 14 in the Great Hall and was delivered by disability justice activist Sarah Jama. The annual lecture seeks to engage University of Toronto students and community members on pertinent societal issues. This goal is achieved through concurrent programming like the Talking Walls campaign featuring student experiences on disability, which was on display at Hart House over the past month.
Sarah Jama is a co-founder of the Disability Justice Network of Ontario and is a community organizer based in Hamilton. In her lecture, Jama centered her lived experiences with disability and emphasized common understandings of disability as burdensome. Jama also focused on unpacking the discriminatory structures and organizations that actively work to exclude people with disabilities, which results in the devaluation and disregard for the existence and worth of disabled people. By drawing on her identity as a racialized disabled woman, Jama spoke about the intersection between marginalized groups and the necessity of building coalitions for mobilization movements. Through dismantling ableist notions of productivity, Jama told the audience to organize from a place of love, instead of hate, and to rethink the foundations from which structural inequities stem. Jama concentrated on why just pushing for “access and inclusion aren’t enough” in policies like the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), and instead, a focus on organizing as a mandate is required.
She argued that in order to create a disability justice revolution, it would be crucial to be political and to advocate for marginalized populations. She also urged the audience to not consider people with disabilities as “perpetually screwed,” and emphasized that it is the onus of everyone to champion issues “we fundamentally care about” under a global disability framework.
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