Description:

• Comfy Cozy Community (CCC) teaching and learning is connected to disability justice tenet #4 of COMMITMENT TO CROSS-MOVEMENT ORGANIZING: Shifting how social justice movements understand disability and contextualize ableism, disability justice lends itself to politics of alliance.

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Prior knowledge reflection:

• Which multiply marginalized communities have you built relations with and/or want to build relations with?

• Are these relations charity or solidarity based?

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Essential questions:

• How can educators cultivate solidarity relations with multiply marginalized communities?

• How can educators continue to learn about and support CCC teaching and learning which showcases cross-movement relations and organizing?

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Objectives:

• To learn how to cultivate relations of solidarity with multiply marginalized communities.

• To continuously learn about, teach, and encourage cross-movement relations and organizing.

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Content:

• Within the Medicine Stories book, Aurora Levins Morales maps the connections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability based oppressions as intertwined with intersectional movements for collective liberation and sustainability. Personal and collective experiences of resisting race and gender based violence, Indigenous land and labor theft and exploitation, oppressors and the oppressed perpetuating cycles of oppression creating bodymind disabilities, and more are discussed. This book showcases for us the need to learn from our interconnected communities advancing cross-movement organizing in pursuit of liberation and sustainability for all. To learn more, read Medicine Stories by Aurora Levins Morales.

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Effective classroom strategies:

• Teachers can center the ways in which multiple communities come together to better society.

  • For example, within a Language Arts classroom, educators can teach about the Civil Rights Movement to Black Panthers movement and how people of diverse races and ethnicities worked together to co-create a society which seeks to free all people.

  • Within a Science classroom, educators can teach about scientists with intersectional identities who cross-movement organize, such as Dr. Jessica Hernandez who cross-movement organizes with Indigenous nations from South to Central to North America centering race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability justice and transformation for all to care for and protect our planet earth and waters.

• Educators and students can continue to learn about and support cross-movement organizing through researching, reading, and following disability justice leaders such as Aurora Levins Morales who engages in cross-movement organizing to end to race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability based violences rooted from histories and ongoing structures of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, borders, prisons, and walls. Aurora Levins Morales is involved with anti-war and Jewish Voices for Peace organizations educators can consider researching and getting involved with to continuously engage in lifelong education in support of cross-movement organizing.

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References:

• Morales, Aurora L. Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.