Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization, Disability Justice and Prison Abolition

In this roundtable virtual event, leading disability justice and abolitionist scholar Dr. Liat Ben-Moshe will discuss 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. BenMoshe 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 join 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