Food, Access Intimacy, and Community Care with Lydia X. Z. Brown @ Fireweed Collective

Food, Access Intimacy, and Community Care

Sick, mad, neurodivergent, and disabled people often struggle with food. Making good, safe food can be difficult or impossible with limited time, spoons, space, money, and knowledge. Many in our communities have precarious work and money, and many are impoverished. Grocery stores, delivery services, and meal kits are often expensive and inadequate for meeting disability-specific and culturally appropriate dietary needs. In this workshop, we'll talk about making/sharing food as access intimacy and community care, and ways sick, mad, neurodivergent, and disabled people can share strategies and spoons for delicious food as care and resistance.

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Lydia X. Z. Brown is an abolitionist advocate, organizer, attorney, strategist, and writer whose work focuses on interpersonal and state violence against disabled people at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, faith, language, and nation. Their other interests include carcerality and institutional violence, asexuality as queerness, algorithmic harm as an accelerating force of systemic injustice, and the ableism-racism nexus of transracial and transnational adoption. Lydia is an adjunct lecturer in the Women's and Gender Studies Program and the Disability Studies Program at Georgetown University. They are also an adjunct professorial lecturer in American Studies in the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies at American University. Lydia founded the Fund for Community Reparations for Autistic People of Color’s Interdependence, Survival, and Empowerment, a project of collective care, redistributive justice, and mutual aid, and they are currently creating Disability Justice Wisdom Tarot. Often, their most important work has no title, job description, or funding, and probably never will.

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Fireweed Collective offers mental health education and mutual aid through a Healing Justice lens. We help support the emotional wellness of all people and center the needs of those most marginalized by our society. Our work seeks to disrupt the harm of systems of abuse and oppression, often reproduced by the mental health system. Learn more about us.

For any questions, please contact Maya at administrator@fireweedcollective.org