User:Bhs3234/Mia Mingus

Known for[edit]
Mingus' approach to disability justice focuses on dismantling privilege: "We don't want to simply join the ranks of the privileged; we want to dismantle those ranks and the systems that maintain them" (Mingus, 2011, para. 5)

She is especially well known for her work on 'collective access.' Collective access emphasizes how disability interacts with other aspects of an individual's identities, making disability justice activism necessarily intertwined with anti-racist, feminist, reproductive justice, queer, and prison abolitionist activism. Emphasizing solidarity between movements, collective access focuses on community-supported access and mutual independence instead of individualized specific accommodations.

Mingus believes that ensuring access or participation for disabled people is not considered justice, but rather people must transform their subjective realities at the core of their humanity to ensure community. Mingus preaches the idea that a focus on exclusion causes people to lose focus on inclusion.

A key element of Mingus's work is her embrace of interdependence. She believes that people needed to rid the myth of independence as interdependency is what forms communities. This concept can be further broken down into the term "access intimacy". Access intimacy is a concept that Mingus formulated as she believed that people can understand and be there for each other, which will provide an unexpected amount of comfort. Mingus believed that the disabled community was missing access intimacy.

Through her work with the BATJC, Mingus developed a tool called pod-mapping, which allows individual to identify the individuals and organizations they could rely on for support to heal or take accountability were they to experience or cause harm, violence or abuse. Pod work is rooted in transformative justice principles of harm and accountability, including a community-based approach to intervening in and preventing violence at all levels.

Mingus has consistently spoken up about the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC) as well. She wrote a lot about all that the complex encompasses: its deep-rooted connections to various forms of oppression, and its complicated relationship with marginalized communities.

She specifically focused on how the MIC can connect to ableism. According to Mingus, while the Medical Industrial Complex can play a critical role in aiding people, it can also be incredibly harmful. In her blog, “Leaving Evidence”, Mingus described in-depth the major roles that eugenics, charity and ableism, population control, and desirability play within the complex and how it connects to the overall profitability of the MIC. She constructed a visual that was included on the blog post, listing all of the different ways that the Medical Industrial Complex intersects with other aspects of societal life. She specifically criticizes how people within the complex can constantly perpetuate ableism in everyday life, noting that as a result of ableism within the MIC, many disabled people can feel alienated within the complex, making them less likely to want to interact with the Medical Industrial Complex.

Mingus emphasizes the importance of people coming together in order to dismantle a strong system like the Medical Industrial Complex, stating that there is a need for people to “live out the simple truth that we need each other.” She recommends that people learn to contend with the pain and oppression brought by systems such as the MIC so that change can be created.