Fifty years since the passage of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, diverse people with disabilities continue to endure harms caused by pervasive health and healthcare inequities. This strand explores barriers and facilitators to advancing equity and justice, access and inclusion, and dignity and belonging for diverse people with disabilities – within public health, health care and the health professions. We wish to move beyond structurally violent policies – peppered with platitudes regarding “scarcity” and “sacrifice” – toward flexible public health and healthcare frameworks capable of holding space for our collective grief, safety, and survival. We especially welcome solution-focused proposals that seek to rectify power imbalances and center the priorities and leadership of persons multi-marginalized by systems of oppression (e.g., racism, ableism, colonialism, audism, sexism, transphobia, eugenics). And we embrace contributions and insights that emanate from lived experiences and embodied knowingness. Proposals that include community-designed practices, culturally-grounded approaches, and/or creative expressions are particularly encouraged.

We welcome explorations of how building an organizational culture of belonging creates new possibilities. Law professor john a. powell posits that a framework of belonging involves “expanding our circle of human concern” and “perceiving one another in our full humanity.” Central to powell’s concept of belonging is “the right to both contribute and make demands upon society and political and cultural institutions.”  Understood in this way, belonging is more than an intrinsic human psychological need; belonging is a pathway toward – and a positive outcome of – more just and equitable societies. Join us as we ready ourselves for an emerging world where diverse people with disabled bodyminds lead the way toward building cultures of belonging in public health, healthcare, and the health professions.