Building More Intersectional Disability Activist Coalitions: A Community-Engaged Autoethnography

More than a decade after the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD) and 30 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), disabled people continue to experience systemic physical, economic, sociopolitical and attitudinal barriers to full and equal participation in all aspects of society. The issues faced by the disability community are multifaceted and complex with deep social and structural roots, making it unlikely that any single interest or advocacy group will be able to effect all necessary changes on their own. The creation of coalitions across disability and other social justice groups has been identified as one way to build collective power around important issues. Coalitions are not without their challenges as both leadership and grassroots members must work to build bridges across intersecting identities and axes of oppression. There is, however, limited understanding about the processes of building coalitions around disability across groups. The purpose of this 11-month community-based participatory research (CBPR) (Israel et al., 2012) autoethnographical study (Anderson, 2006) was to examine how a small disability rights coalition negotiated issues of power, thinking about multiple identities together, community, and group cohesion as it worked to achieve its activist agenda for economic justice for people with disabilities. A total of 15 total coalition members were recruited via maximum variability quota sampling. Data was gathered via multiple qualitative methods, including interviews, focus groups, observation, and document analysis. Data was analyzed via domain and taxonomic coding as well as theme analysis (Spradley, 1979). Strategies to enhance rigor were embedded in all phases of study design, data collection, and analysis. These findings highlighted the complexity of sustaining a disability coalition that thought about multiple identities was actively engaged in a legislative campaign during the COVID pandemic and the racially charged summer of 2020. Findings were discussed across three broad categories: 1) considerations for what it took to run a coalition for this group, 2) how relationships contributed to the sustainability of community organizing work, and 3) how interconnections between diversity, inclusion/exclusion, and humanness concepts affected the group’s perceptions and work. Implications for disability rights coalition building that considers multiple identities are discussed.