Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life, by Alice Wong

Join Women & Children First and Access Living for a virtual event celebrating Alice Wong’s Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life.

While Alice Wong is recovering from a recent hospitalization, her community will be stepping in to promote her memoir this fall. For this event, Akemi Nishida and Sandie Yi will be joining us on Alice’s behalf.

This event will be held via Zoom Webinar. ASL and live captioning will be provided. If you need additional accommodations, please contact us!

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About the Book

This groundbreaking memoir offers a glimpse into an activist’s journey to finding and cultivating community and the continued fight for disability justice, from the founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project, Alice Wong.

In Chinese culture, the tiger is deeply revered for its confidence, passion, ambition, and ferocity. That same fighting spirit resides in Alice Wong.

Drawing on a collection of original essays, previously published work, conversations, graphics, photos, commissioned art by disabled and Asian American artists, and more, Alice uses her unique talent to share an impressionistic scrapbook of her life as an Asian American disabled activist, community organizer, media maker, and dreamer. From her love of food and pop culture to her unwavering commitment to dismantling systemic ableism, Alice shares her thoughts on creativity, access, power, care, the pandemic, mortality, and the future. As a self-described disabled oracle, Alice traces her origins, tells her story, and creates a space for disabled people to be in conversation with one another and the world. Filled with incisive wit, joy, and rage, Wong’s Year of the Tiger will galvanize readers with big cat energy.

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About the Author

Alice Wong is a disabled activist, media maker, and research consultant based in San Francisco, California. She is the founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project, an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture. Alice is also the host and co-producer of the Disability Visibility podcast and co-partner in a number of collaborations such as #CripTheVote and Access Is Love. From 2013 to 2015, Alice served as a member of the National Council on Disability, an appointment by President Barack Obama. 

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About the Hosts

Sandie Yi is an assistant professor in the department of art therapy and counseling and the program director of Disability Culture Activism Lab (DCAL) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She has a Ph.D. in Disability Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago; a MA in art therapy from SAIC, and MFA from the University of California Berkeley. She is a disabled artist and disability culture worker whose work focuses on wearable art made for and with self-identified disabled people. As a part of the Disability Art Movement, Yi’s art, Crip Couture explores the issue of intimacy, desire and sexuality of the disabled bodymind. The latest rendition of Crip Couture researches and archives disability narratives by collecting bodily artifacts, including skin flakes and hair. Crip Couture aims to preserve and conserve disability culture and narratives as heritage. Her research interests include Disability Arts and Culture; disability fashion; accessibility design and programming for arts and cultural venues; and social justice-based art therapy. 

Akemi NishidaAkemi Nishida uses research, education, and activism to investigate the ways in which ableism are exercised in relation to racism, cis-heteropatriarchy, xenophobia, and other forms of social injustices. She also uses such methods to work towards cross-community solidarity for the liberation and celebration of community power. She is the author of Just Care: Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependency, and Desire (Temple University Press, 2022) in which she examines public healthcare programs as well as grassroots interdependent care collectives and bed-space activism. She teaches at University of Illinois Chicago, while also advocates for disability justice locally and nationally.

BUY THE BOOK

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This event is brought to you by the Arts and Culture Project at Access Living, an independent living center for people with disabilities, and the Disability Culture Activism Lab (DCAL), a teaching lab housed under the department of art therapy and counseling at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As a platform for creative disability art and advocacy projects, DCAL uses a peer support and collective care model in which disability community members and art therapy graduate students collaborate as disability culture makers for social change.


The contents of this event were developed under a grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR grant number 90RTCP0005).  NIDILRR is a Center within the Administration for Community Living (ACL), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).  The contents of this book event do not necessarily represent the policy of NIDILRR, ACL, or HHS, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.