One in four people across every gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and walk of life is disabled. This makes the disabled community among the most expansive and diverse cultural communities in existence. Yet the stories, knowledge, and everyday creativity of disabled people are too often absent from the cultural record, obscured by the fear, misconceptions, and stigma that mainstream society has long attached to disability and disabled experiences. Or, because of the built environment, disabled people are unable to access too many spaces of cultural and community activity.
Documenting, learning alongside & amplifying disabled ways of knowing
The Southwest Folklife Alliance believes that what gets documented, celebrated, and shared reflects what a community values. SFA’s Disability Cultures Folklife initiative is meeting community members where they’re at in order to expand people’s understanding of disability. By reaching out to multiple disabled communities in the Southwest and establishing reciprocal relationships by listening, learning, and amplifying, we hope to educate and implement better accessibility and inclusion for all people. This initiative is stewarded by a disabled person from the southwest who knows that the ways disabled people move through the world, the knowledge they hold, and the cultural forms they built sustain them on their own terms.
Cripping a community near you
Disability Cultures Folklife is building something that hasn’t existed before in our region: a sustained, community-rooted investment in the cultural knowledge and creative life of disabled people. This is not a specialized add-on to existing programs, but rather is a lens that changes how SFA works across all of its programs, festivals, and partnerships.
Alexis Wilkerson, Yvonne Montoya, Eli Yee, Emily Morel, and Alisha Vasquez
speak at Pajarito Panel and Performance, at Tucson MOCA.
Alisha Vasquez presenting at the Our Bodies are Full of Stories Odyssey Storytelling event in conjunction with the University of Arizona Museum of Art’s Bailey Doogan “Ways of Seeing” exhibit.
Wheelchair Loans at TMY
Culture and community development belong together
Your contribution helps sustain the fieldwork, honoraria, accessibility services, and community relationships that makes partnership with disabled communities possible. It ensures that disabled community members are compensated for their participation, that events are genuinely accessible, and that the stories, traditions, and knowledge held within disability cultures are treated with the same care and intention we bring to every community we serve.
Folklife begins where the community begins
Disability Cultures Folklife begins where all of SFA’s work begins — in the community itself. Disability Cultures Folklorist Alisha Vasquez is conducting an asset map of disability cultures across the Southwest, building relationships with disabled individuals, organizations, and knowledge-holders whose work may not yet be recognized as the cultural practice it is.
This research serves a dual purpose: to better understand the communities, organizations, and funders already working within disability culture in our region, and to locate existing disabled knowledge that may not yet be identified as such. A literature review of intersections between disability and folklore studies informs new methods of connection and intervention — grounding the initiative in both historical scholarship and present-day community reality.
The initiative is also expanding how SFA listens. By centering disabled ways of knowing within our own organizational practice, we are identifying gaps, strengthening relationships, and creating platforms where disabled community members are recognized not as recipients of service but as culture-makers with something essential to contribute.
In partnership with the UC Berkeley Disabled Ecologies Lab, this research will inform community events, educational programming, and new approaches to accessibility and inclusion across SFA’s broader network of festivals, artist services, and public programs. This partnership bridges the intersections of disability knowledge and community action to address today’s most pressing issues.
Our Disability Cultures Folklorist
Alisha Vasquez
Disability Cultures Folklorist
As a historian and fifth-generation Tucsonense, Alisha brings a distinctive lens to the socio-political landscape of the borderlands, pushing back against dominant narratives and centering voices that have been left out. She has taught across generations inside and outside the classroom, was shaped by punk rock, and co-directs the Mexican American Heritage and History Museum… Find out more
XAlishax@Arizona.eduOur Partner
Disabled Ecologies Lab
Beginning February 2026, SFA formally established a partnership with the UC Berkeley Disabled Ecologies Lab (DE Lab) to expand the fields of folklife and disability studies using Disability Justice principles as a core tool of analysis within already established cultural communities. The partnership is supported by a three-year Mellon Foundation grant establishing two DE Lab satellites — one at the Shelterwood Collective in Sonoma County, and the other here in Tucson. Though tied together by shared goals and a Disabled Ecologies framework, the three sites are intentionally distinct — each with its own ecology, community, and institutional context. That diversity is a strength, providing varied settings from which to demonstrate that disability plays a vital, too-often underexamined role in the environmental arena: whether the legacy of contamination, the impact of extreme weather, or the historical exclusion of disinvested-in communities from nature and the outdoors, disability is always part of the… Find out more
Four commitments at the center our partnership
The partnership between SFA and the Disabled Ecologies Lab centers localized community-engaged research, creativity, storytelling, cross-community collaboration, and building long-lasting relationships of trust, accessibility, and reciprocity.
Our Shared Goals
- Create innovative, boundary-crossing research rooted in environmental humanities, environmental justice, and disability studies.
- Elevate disabled people, perspectives, and needs in environmental contexts in order to expand understandings of who disabled people are and how disability affects communities.
- Provide opportunities to develop heretofore excluded expertise by mentoring and training future generations of disabled environmentalists and scholars.
- Promote public conversations about disability and the environment through publications, public events, and relationship building.
Where the work is happening
SFA Disabilty Cultures is actively building relationships across the region’s environmental, cultural, and disability communities. This work brings a disability cultures folklife framework into spaces where it has not yet been centered, and deepening connections where that work has already begun. This means convening people across disciplines and communities to share knowledge, locate solidarity, and create accessible public spaces where disability is a lens that sharpens everyone’s understanding of how communities survive, adapt, and care for one another.
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