Abstract
The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities marks a shift in international legal relationships to, and conceptions of disability. The Convention is the first binding international instrument of its kind related to disability. Its premises differ from the earlier World Programme on Disability, and more closely integrate the frameworks of domestic equal protection and disability civil rights law. Drawing on critical race and feminist theory, this Article critically examines the implications of internationalizing a U.S. disability law framework, with particular attention to the problem of “emergent disability,” or disability which is specifically produced as a consequence of social inequity or state violence.
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About the Author
Beth Ribet, PhD, JD received her law degree from the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), with a concentration in Critical Race Studies. She was awarded her PhD in Social Relations (Sociology & Anthropology) from the University of California-Irvine. Her doctoral dissertation was grounded in 75 interviews with Jewish daughters of Holocaust survivors in the United States, and addressed the role of “second generation” genocide survivors in communal healing, memory formation and survival. In 2014, she co-founded and continues to direct Repair, a health and disability justice organization based in Los Angeles, and sponsored by the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). Much of her work and time are vested in the non-profit sector, but she continues to engage in academic knowledge production and pedagogy. She teaches periodically for UCLA in Disability Studies, and has taught in past years for UCLA School of Law and Columbia University School of Law. Her publications and public talks address a range of intersecting disability, gender, and racial justice questions, including disability and reproductive policy, white nationalism and Nazism in the United States, sexual exploitation and sex trafficking, race and torture in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, sexual violence in United States carceral systems, and the nexus of critical disability theory and critical race theory. Most of her work engages questions of disablement — or the violent production of disabilities, illnesses, and injuries through systemic violence and exploitation.
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