Alice Wong | |
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 Wong at the White House via robot in 2015 | |
| Born | March 27, 1974 Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S. |
| Occupation(s) | Activist, journalist |
| Years active | Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (BA) University of California, San Francisco (MA) |
Alice Wong (born March 27, 1974) is an American disability rights activist based in San Francisco, California.
Wong was born in the suburbs of Indianapolis, Indiana, to parents who had immigrated to the US from Hong Kong. [1] She was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a neuromuscular disorder. [2] Wong stopped walking at the age of seven or eight. [1]
Wong attended Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, where she earned a BA in English and sociology in 1997. [3] She received a master's degree from the University of California, San Francisco in medical sociology in 2004. [4]
Wong is the founder and Project Coordinator of the Disability Visibility Project (DVP), [5] a project collecting oral histories of people with disabilities in the US that is run in coordination with StoryCorps. The Disability Visibility Project was created before the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. [6] As of 2018, the project had collected approximately 140 oral histories. [7]
Wong works the Disabled Writers project, which is funded by a grant from Wong and The Disability Project. [8] Disabled Writers is a resource to help editors connect with disabled writers and journalists. [8] #CripLit, is a series of Twitter chats for disabled writers with novelist Nicola Griffith, and #CripTheVote, a nonpartisan online movement encouraging the political participation of disabled people. [9] She discusses her activism in Narrabase. [10]
Wong serves as an advisory board member for Asians and Pacific Islanders with Disabilities of California (APIDC). She was a presidential appointee to the National Council on Disability, an independent federal agency which advises the president, Congress, and other federal agencies on disability policies, programs, and practices, from 2013 to 2015. [11] [12]
In 2015, Wong attended the reception at the White House for the 25th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act via telepresence robot. She was the first person to visit the White House and the President by robot presence. [13]
For her leadership on behalf of the disability community, Wong received the Mayor's Disability Council Beacon Award in 2010, the first-ever Chancellor's Disability Service Award in 2010, and the 2007 Martin Luther King, Jr. Award at her alma mater of UCSF. In 2016, Wong received the 2016 American Association of People with Disabilities Paul G. Hearne Leadership Award, an award for emerging leaders with disabilities who exemplify leadership, advocacy, and dedication to the broader cross-disability community. [9] Wong was selected as a Ford Foundation Disability Futures Fellow in 2020. [14] The same year Wong was on the list of the BBC's 100 Women announced on 23 November 2020. [15] In 2021 Alice Wong won "Best Supporting Actor" at the New Jersey Web Fest for her performance in Someone Dies In This Elevator. [16]
In 2024, Wong was named a MacArthur Fellow. [17]
The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California. It is part of the University of California system and is dedicated entirely to health science and life science. It conducts research and teaching in medical and biological sciences.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a Canadian-American poet, writer, educator and social activist. Their writing and performance art focuses on documenting the stories of queer and trans people of color, abuse survivors, mixed-race people and diasporic South Asians and Sri Lankans. A central concern of their work is the interconnection of systems of colonialism, abuse and violence. They are also a writer and organizer within the disability justice movement.
Judith Ellen "Judy" Heumann was an American disability rights activist, known as the "Mother of the Disability Rights Movement". She was recognized internationally as a leader in the disability community. Heumann was a lifelong civil rights advocate for people with disabilities. Her work with governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), nonprofits, and various other disability interest groups significantly contributed to the development of human rights legislation and policies benefiting children and adults with disabilities. Through her work in the World Bank and the State Department, Heumann led the mainstreaming of disability rights into international development. Her contributions extended the international reach of the independent living movement.
Nellie Wong is an American poet and activist for feminist and socialist causes. Wong is also an active member of the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women.
Harriet McBryde Johnson was an American author, attorney, and disability rights activist. She was disabled due to a neuromuscular disease and used a motorized wheelchair.
Laura Ann Hershey was a poet, journalist, popular speaker, feminist, and a disability rights activist and consultant. Known to have parked her wheelchair in front of buses, Hershey was one of the leaders of a protest against the paternalistic attitudes and images of people with disabilities inherent to Jerry Lewis's MDA Telethon. She was a regular columnist for the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, and on her own website, Crip Commentary, and was published in a variety of magazines and websites. She was admired for her wit, her ability to structure strong arguments in the service of justice, and her spirited refusal to let social responses to her spinal muscular atrophy define the parameters of her life as anything less than a full human existence. She was also the mother of an adopted daughter.
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Disability justice is a social justice movement which focuses on examining disability and ableism as they relate to other forms of oppression and identity such as race, class and gender. It was developed in 2005 by the Disability Justice Collective, a group including Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, Stacey Milbern, Leroy F. Moore Jr., and Eli Clare. In disability justice, disability is not considered to be defined in "white terms, or male terms, or straight terms." The movement also believes that ableism makes other forms of prejudice possible and that systems of oppression are intertwined. The disability justice framework is being applied to a intersectional reexamination of a wide range of disability, human rights, and justice movements.
Crip, slang for cripple, is a term in the process of being reclaimed by disabled people. Wright State University suggests that the current community definition of crip includes people who experience any form of disability, such as one or more impairments with physical, mental, learning, and sensory, though the term primarily targets physical and mobility impairment. People might identify as a crip for many reasons. Some of these reasons are to show pride, to talk about disability rights, or avoid ranking types of disability.
Mary Lou Breslin is a disability rights law and policy advocate and analyst. She is an adjunct faculty member at the University of San Francisco in the McLaren School of Business Executive Master of Management and Disability Services Program. She is the co-founder of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), a leading national civil rights law and policy center led by individuals with disabilities and parents of children with disabilities. She served as the DREDF's deputy and executive director, and president and chair of board of directors.
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Sky Cubacub is an American designer, activist, and founder of Rebirth Garments. They were born in Chicago, Illinois and identify as a non-binary Filipinx disabled queer. Cubacub graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015, and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Their fashion brand Rebirth Garments was launched in 2014. They also teamed up with the Chicago Public Library in October 2020 to create a fashion program called Radical Fit for the Chicago Public Library. Cubacub has held several performances, exhibitions, and lectures from Chicago, to New York City, and Ottawa. They’ve won several awards including the most recent Ford Foundation, United States Artist and Andrew W Mellon foundation Disability Futures Fellow in 2021.
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I served one term as a member of the National Council on Disability from 2013-2015.
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