A Book Review by The PeerWorks Peer Book Club 

For our second book, the Peer Book Club read Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018), a powerful collection of essays by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha that delves into the lived realities and political vision of the Disability Justice movement. Within this book, focused on documenting “a movement that centres the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black and brown people,” many of us found kinship, solidarity, and shared lineage, despite our differences in identity.

Care Work provides nuanced and provoking descriptions of what the 10 Principles of Disability Justice look like in practice. Piepzna-Samarasinha skillfully weaves together personal narrative, political analysis, and cultural reflection, highlighting the relationship between art, culture, community care, and social movements. The book provided us with the opportunity to locate and orient ourselves within the lineage of the Disability Justice movement, as well as its intersections with peer support and mutual aid. One particularly notable chapter traces the origins of Toronto’s first Psychiatric Survivor Pride Day (now Mad Pride) in the 1990s, highlighting the connections between disability justice and psychiatric survivor organizing. 

For our book club, this text created a space for co-learning, consciousness-raising, and camaraderie. At our final meeting, members reflected on how our meetings served as a place to exchange “crip” (disability) knowledge and access “crip doulaship” – peer support and mentorship that guides people into disability culture and community as a form of rebirth. 

Interested in joining the Peer Book Club?

For our next book club, we will be reading Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) by Dean Spade (2020). Our first meeting will be on March 4, and we will meet every other Wednesday from 6-8pm (Eastern Time). Register for the Peer Book Club here.