Emerge Fellowship Experience

Written by Jesenia a collaborator with Calling Up Justice and Founder of NeuroSpicy Networking and One Free Community.

I am honored to have been chosen for the prestigious Emerge Fellowship from the Longmore Institute focusing on scholar-activism in disability justice! Follow along as I recount the amazing experiences and share insights and updates from the 2024 Emerge Fellowship.

Launch Week with the 2024 Cohort

Being in San Francisco for the in-person covid-conscious Launch Week was a spectacular start to this amazing summer fellowship with my impressive Emerge Fellows 2024 Cohort!

Emerge seeks to promote scholar-activism, the bridges and relationships that allow academics, activists, and creatives to better support each other in the shared pursuit of social change. This initiative will cultivate relationships among the next generation of Disability Studies leaders, further diversify the conversation, and promote more scholar-activism in the field.
Emerge Summer 2024 Hybrid Disability Studies Workshop

I am honored to be part of this amazing group of emergent leaders in disability justice! My cohort fellows are all very impressive cultural producers, academics, artists, and disabled activists that I am excited to work in collaboration with and support each other through our project proposals.

Access is Love

The week was centering access and co-creating a space and program that centers the needs of our bodyminds as we work and meet throughout this summer intensive.

Ahead of the event we had several virtual meetings to discuss our group’s community agreements. We also met each other and shared our proposals. When attending the in-person hybrid event we were able to successfully integrate access for the digital attendees while making the space accessible to everyone in the space. We were able to rest and attend virtually or in person as needed throughout the week.

The great care and forethought from Emily & Alex, as well as the 2023 cohort, is evident they were centering disability justice to make this a successful accessible launch week! We reviewed the program goals, shared holding space, and honored our needs.

Dinner with Alice Wong

We got to meet and have dinner with Disability Visibility author Alice Wong!

It was incredible to get to have a delicious meal with Alice and feeling the access intimacy of spending time with disabled community! We ate wonderful Burmese food at Burma Love, outside patio with heaters, and exciting conversations as a wonderful end to our week in person.

As I have decided to stay in the Bay Area after the launch week, I am excited to connect to local organizations and organizers to learn more about community and coalition building from the best.

Week 1: Intersectionality, Leadership of the Most Impacted

The accessible structure of the program is clear and supportive. We have been having ongoing negotiations of making sure we are happy with the structure and breaks.

Dr. Sami Schalk

Our Community Partner Visit this week was with the incomparable writer, educator, pleasure activist Dr. Sami Schalk! They shared their journey to Disability Justice and writing their books, Black Disability Politics and Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. It was refreshing to hear about their luck and timing with stories like twerking with Lizzo, Janelle Monáe, and Jonathan Van Ness.

As a pleasure activist and artist who believes that pleasure is political and a measure of freedom and creating pleasure art in collaboration with Sam Waldron of Reverence Intimate Portraits, she recounted her experiences while also fighting the image of censorship in academic spaces. We were honored to have had time to ask questions about their process and conversations about disability justice with Dr. Schalk as part of this fellowship!

Week 2: Anti-Capitalism, Cross-Movement Solidarity

We spent time this week exploring conversations around Anti-Capitalist Politic & Cross-Movement Solidarity. The fellows shared their thoughts and experiences and how it can shape our work and our impact.

We also spent more time dreaming what our symposium can look like. Emerge has done an amazing job of inviting us as the fellows to co-create the process, project, and space in a way that is both accessible and empowering.

We spent more time in co-working this week, as we requested, and checked in about our mentorship process and progress. It is so valuable to be able to discuss the issues and praxis of disability justice with such an eclectic and care driven team!

Mel Y. Chen

We got to spend time with and learn from this weeks’ amazing community partner Mel Y. Chen, a Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Director for the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture at the University of California, Berkeley as well as Director of the Disability Studies Minor.

Mel shared about their experiences about working in academia and how their path was an a-typical one. They shared their experiences with finding a way to incorporated their interests into their work when it deviated so far from the expectations and norms of academia. It was refreshing to hear their story and lessons with us. We look forward to joining the book club they are launching soon!

Week 3: Sustainability, Wholeness, Cross-Disability Solidarity

Admittedly we were all a bit low energy in week 3 but we had some timely and impactful conversations around sustainability, wholeness and cross-disability solidarity.

Claudia Alick

Executive producer Claudia Alick of Calling Up Justice shared their process, experiences, and expertise with the cohort as this week’s community partner. Claudia is a performer, producer, designer, writer, and inclusion expert. She is currently a curator and access doula.

Week 4: Interdependence, Collective Access, Collective Liberation

We ended the final week of the intensive with a bang with discussion on topics of Interdependence, Collective Access, Collective Liberation.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha was so real with sharing their experiences and access needs while talking to us as our final community partner. They are the author or co-editor of ten books, including The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs, Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon), Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, and more. I’ve been resonating so much with Leah’s books especially Care Work and The Future is Disabled, on how hard the work is to keep going when there is so much in-fighting! I was glad to hear about the struggles as well as their joys because it makes me feel less alone on the path to collective liberation.

Symposium Aug. 16, 2024

Watch Reaction Video or the Full Replay of the Emerge Symposium on Friday Aug 16, 2024.

Stay tuned for more updates as the program year progresses!