Liat Ben-Moshe

Building Pedagogical Curb Cuts: Incorporating Disability into the University Classroom and Curriculum, edited by Liat Ben-Moshe, Rebecca C. Cory, Mia Feldbaum, and Ken Sagendorf, was published in 2005 through the graduate school of Syracuse University. The book was a “collaborative and interdisciplinary effort to examine how the university can better include the perspectives of scholars and students who have disabilities in the classroom” “through the combined efforts of the Beyond Compliance Coordinating Committee (BCCC) and the Graduate School, both of Syracuse University”.[3] Building Pedagogical Curb Cuts expands beyond strategies for compliance in the ADA and looks towards disability-inclusive pedagogy in university classrooms.[4]

Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada was published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN. The book was edited by Liat Ben-Moshe, Chris Chapman, and Allison C. Carey, with a foreword by activist and philosopher Angela Davis. Disability Incarcerated takes an interdisciplinary approach to connect the study of incarceration to disability studies while “expanding theoretical boundaries of each discipline”.[5] Jennifer A. Janechek, of the University of Iowa, writes for Disability Studies Quarterly that “Disability Incarcerated embraces "intersectionality" to expose how "disability, situated alongside other key lines of stratification … is central to understanding the complex, varied, and interlocking ways in which incarceration occurs and is made out to be normal, natural, politically necessary, and beneficial”.[6]

Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (2020) was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2020. In the book Ben-Moshe uses Michel Foucault's tactic to expand the concept of abolition using a genealogy of deinstitutionalization in the twentieth century. She explains how “abolition is not an unattainable goal but rather a reality.[7] Ben-Moshe coins this new version of abolition as dis-epistemology. She examines the prison industrial complex through discussions on how deinstitutionalization is wrongly blamed for the influx of incarceration, why race and disability are important to examine together (a theory she coins “raceability”), and the limits of inclusions discourses for disability rights.[8]

Disepistemology is an abolition theory created by Ben-Moshe that sees abolition as not a goal but a radical epistemological process. In her book, Decarcerating Disability, Ben-Moshe explains how, “that abolition is a radical epistemology of knowing and unknowing. Therefore the second meaning in which abolition operates as an epistemology is as giving way to other ways of knowing. I term this dis- epistemology, letting go of attachment to certain ways of knowing”.[8]

Ben-Moshe utilizes Michel Foucault's conception of genealogy to analyze the history of deinstitutionalization and the power structures that influenced it. Deinstitutionalization was a 20th-century movement to abolish psychiatric hospitals. In Decarcerating Disability (2020), Ben-Moshe conducts a “genealogical excavation of abolition within deinstitutionalization discourse” that “follows and nuances Foucault’s conception of genealogy, which is largely about uncovering subjugated, disqualified knowledge”.[8]

In her works Ben-Moshe examines the intersectional relationship between race, disability, and the prison industrial complex. She connects the work of prison abolitionists to, “begin understanding the ways in which criminalizing entails the construction of both race (especially blackness) and disability (especially mental difference) as dangerous”.[8] Ben-Moshe coins this frame of analyzing “race-ability”.