Live Offerings
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“Mutual Aid for Survival and Resistance” with Dean Spade
Date: Saturday, November 22, 2025
Time: 3:00pm EST
Location: Virtual - Zoom
CART and ASL will be provided. Please register to join!
This lecture is a part of New Disabled South and New Disabled South Rising’s “Disability Unbound: A Lecture Series”
Times are very hard, with mounting attacks on our communities and the ongoing pressure of ecological crisis, widespread poverty, criminalization, and immigration enforcement. In this talk, Dean Spade, author of“Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next)” and “Love in a F*cked Up World,” will talk about what mutual aid is, how it is different from charity, and why we need it now to build big, strong resistance movements and take care of each other. What are the common obstacles to doing this kind of organizing together and how can we approach them? This workshop will include a discussion of common conflicts that come up between people organizing together and how we can build skills to stick together in tough times.
About our presenter:
Dean Spade has been working in movements for queer and trans liberation, anti-militarism, and police and prison abolition for the past 25 years. He’s the author of “Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, and “Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)” the director of the documentary “Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!.” His new book is “Love in a Fucked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up and Raise Hell Together,” and he is the host of a new podcast with the same name.
Past Offerings
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Care Webs with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
This session was recorded. View the recorded session here: Care Webs Lecture
Date: Tuesday, June 17, 2025
Time: 6:00pm EST
Location: Virtual - Zoom
CART and ASL were provided.
This lecture is a part of New Disabled South and New Disabled South Rising’s “Disability Unbound: A Lecture Series”
In collaboration with New Disabled South Rising, New Disabled South presents: “Disability Unbound: A Lecture Series!” Our first session kicks off Tuesday, June 17th with the incredible Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, where we’ll dive into Care Webs— what they are, why we need them, and how we can build them together.
Our presenter:
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (they/them) is a writer, your hot nerdy older cousin, cultural and memory worker, divinator ,writing teacher, space creator, low-tech survival technologist and structural engineer of disability and transformative justice work. Telling a story is still their primary form of tech.
An Aries/ Taurus four horns compulsive maker and documenter, they are the author or co-editor of ten books, includingThe Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs,Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon), Tonguebreaker, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Bridge of Flowers, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home,Bodymap, The Revolution Starts At Home (co-edited with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani), Love Cake and Consensual Genocide. Their work has been widely anthologized and self-published, including recent work in Eater, Disability Visibility Project andT he Massachusetts Review but with a long-ass CV before that. They make marvelous things/ performance/ ritual with other disabled mostly BIPOC creators/family, most recentlyKinetic Light’s Wired and the i wanna be with you everywhere crew. They curated Poets.org’s disabled and D(d)eaf poetry folio and created the disabled grief transformation portal altar, remembering the disabled beloved dead lost during 2020-2023, for i wanna be with you everywhere and (soon) elsewhere.
A Lambda Award winner who has been shortlisted for the Publishing Triangle five times, Piepzna-Samarasinha won Lambda’s 2020 Jeanne Córdova Award “honoring a lifetime of work documenting the complexities of queer of color/ disabled/ femme experience.” Since 2009 they have been a lead performer with disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid; since 2020 they have been on the programming committee of the Disability and Intersectionality Summit. They co-founded Toronto’s Asian Arts Freedom School(2005-2009) the QTPOC floating cabaret and performance tour/ art apocalypse Mangos With Chili (2006-2015) and Toronto’s Performance/Disability/Art (PDA)(2014- present.) A Disability Futures Fellow, they are currently building Living Altars, building power and space by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers/creators.
They are Jackie and Anna’s grandfemme, from Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Ukrainian/Galician/Rom lineage, sick, disabled and autistic, a nonbinary femme on the stoop, a survivor and a grown up runaway making home and family. Raised in Worcester, MA they are a new Philly resident after being a long-time visiting cousin.
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Virtual Support Space with Asha Purohit, LISW-CP, MPH
Due to the intimate nature of this support space, the session was not recorded.
Date: Wednesday, August 6th, 2025
Time: 6 PM EST.
Location: Virtual - Zoom
This lecture is a part of New Disabled South and New Disabled South Rising’s “Disability Unbound: A Lecture Series”
We’re building on the Care Webs lecture, and creating a space for disabled folks to process, share, and support each other.
About our facilitator:
Asha Purohit, a clinical social worker in Columbia, SC, works with folks by leveraging lived experience and clinical skills to provide therapy for other BIPOC, Queer, and Disabled individuals.Asha’s lived experience is marked by navigating healthcare systems in the south at the intersection of identities. As a person with congenital cranio-facial defects, congenital cardiac defects, and chronic pain and complications following over 20 surgeries, they are acutely aware of the intricacies of being a disabled queer person required to exist within these healthcare and social systems to access what is needed to live.
Asha holds a degree from UNC-Asheville in International Studies with a focus on human rights and immigration law, and Spanish. Her graduate education in Public Health and Social work was completed at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC, where Asha has been in the work ever since. Asha cut their teeth working for the state’s protection and advocacy agency, now Disability Rights South Carolina. Asha went on to work for multiple specialty pediatric clinics at Prisma Health providing direct case management, supervision, and training for other social workers prior to opening her own private practice, Building Resilience Counseling & Wellness, where she finds joy in holding space for every person who comes through the doors.