Spreading joy, liberation, and love through Disability Justice
Get to know Dr. Madeline
The collective’s founder and facilitator.
Mission:
Our acronym explains what we focus our work on Disability, Education, Fighting Interpersonal Abuse and Nurturing Trauma Survivors. We create a more liberated world together based on the principles of disability justice. We do this by critiquing our current reality, understanding how systems of oppression shape mental health and how we show up in our work, and centering lived experiences of people with intersecting marginalized identities. We believe that liberatory research requires that we interrogate how oppressive systems show up in our processes and as a collective, not just as external forces shaping participants lives. We are focused on humanizing the content and process of research. This means that we strive to engage in desire-focused research that restores cultural knowledge and memory. This moves our focus from fighting systems of oppression exclusively to thriving and finding moments of joy and wellness in the midst of the world’s hardness.
Vision:
The research in this collective is guided by disability justice (Sins Invalid, 2015). As such, we follow the leadership of the most impacted by systems of oppression. We aim to improve the lives of multiply marginalized disabled people, allow healers to enter the profession while minimizing harm during their training, and to support survivors of trauma. We practice what we preach.
Transforming Training
Psychologists are healers and it is unethical for them to be harmed during their doctoral training. Yet, many psychologists report having quite stressful and harmful experiences as graduate students. Our aim is to explore this phenomenon of harm (particularly for multiply marginalized students), to minimize the possibility of harm, empower students to address harm they have endured, and allow them to build the foundation of their professional careers on beneficial and supportive training.
Disability
We aim to increase the scholarship on disabled people using an affirming cross-disability cultural lens. Psychology as a field has not adequately attended to disabled people and has not yet reckoned the ways in which it promotes and upholds ableism.
Culture & Trauma
Living in an oppressive society harms all of us. We may experience this harm in different ways depending on one’s identity. Originally stemming from Madeline’s work in sexual violence and gendered violence stress, this area has been broadened to focus on the interplay of systems of oppression and mental health more broadly. We aim to explore how these systems of harm have been internalized and how they can operate as traumatic stressors, exacerbating the impact of trauma and mental health symptoms. We also focus on how recovering historical memory or using radical healing methods can assist people in thriving in culturally congruent ways.
Opportunities
The counseling psychology doctoral program at the University of Memphis accepts students as a cohort rather than to individual faculty members. If you are interested in working with Madeline and the DEFIANTS collective, please feel free to email her prior to submitting your application. For further details about the check out the program website.
Madeline is interested in working with students who have one or more marginalized identities, have prior knowledge of social justice issues, or are passionate about the collective’s research aims. Madeline is particularly passionate about disability, queer, gender, and racial justice issues.