Our annual lecture for International Day of Disabled Peoples, which this year will be delivered by writer and artist, Khairani Barokka.

Khairani's lecture will be titled "Towards the Bodymind As Un-Colony" and will be followed by a panel discussion involving artists and activists from the Northwest.

The bodyminds of all of us in the UK, and of so many billions beyond, are shaped by processes of colonial extractivism—so many of us texting with, eating, moisturising, bathing with, and being furnished by materials procured via unjust, ableist, and genocidal practices. These realities are as vicious and violent as the ‘official’ heyday of British empire, and are too seldom covered adequately in western media. How do we disentangle ourselves from these processes, and how is disability justice (a term coined by Sins Invalid) fundamental to socio-environmental salvation? How do we angle our bodyminds, everywhere, towards anticolonial solidarities, and, very importantly, with joy?

The panel discussion will be chaired by Manchester based interdisciplinary artist Ngozi Ugochukwu, who will be joined by Khairani Barokka and Liverpool based artists / activists Amina Atiq and Rachel Gnagniko.

About Khairani Barokka:

Khairani Barokka is a writer and artist from Jakarta, and Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, whose work has been presented widely internationally, and aims to centre disability justice as anticolonial praxis.

Among her honours, she has been Modern Poetry in Translation's Inaugural Poet-in-Residence, a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, an Artforum Must-See, UK Associate Artist at Delfina Foundation, and Associate Artist at the National Centre for Writing (UK). Okka's work includes being author-illustrator of Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis), author of Rope (Nine Arches), and co-editor of Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches).

Her latest book is Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize.

DaDa Annual Rushton Lecture featuring Khairani Barokka