Marxism and Disability Network (MDN)

Marxism and Disability - YouTube

If you'd like to catch up on some of our past events, our playlist with 33 video-recorded (and public) events is available here: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Poster with the list of all the events, written in white and yellow on a black background.

After a Workers' Inquiry workshop co-hosted with Notes from Below (in Jan) & a co-organised book review symposium event (in Mar), we're excited to announce 9 more events for 2026!

marxismdisability.wordpress.com/events-list/
Joining links will be shared on the MDN mailing list ahead of each event

Abstract: This paper investigates how the digitalisation of work reconfigures the understanding of workers, their labour, and their value. Drawing on technoableism theory, which foregrounds how technologies establish new normative, disabling standards of capability, we analyse the shifting ontology of the worker in digitally intensive workplaces. We base our study on extensive qualitative data collected with managers, workers, trade union representatives, technology providers, labour market intermediaries, and local authorities across 12 warehouses in three European logistic hubs. Our analysis shows how warehouse workers are problematized as fallible, defective productive resources through systematic comparison with digital technologies, and how these latter are conversely constructed as necessary to enhance, fix and “save” them. In this way, a negative ontology of the human as disabled, generic labour power, holding at best residual “soft” skills, is established, within which any claim to the value generated is pre-emptively undermined. Our study shows that technoableism offers a powerful theoretical lens to interrogate and demystify the worker empowerment trope at the core of Industry 5.0.

24th March 2026, 6:30pm UK time – Annelies Scheers & Patrizia Zanoni: The machinistic production of the ‘defective worker’: A technoableist analysis of labour in digitalized warehousing

marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2026/02/16/m...

Abstract: This paper investigates how the digitalisation of work reconfigures the understanding of workers, their labour, and their value. Drawing on technoableism theory, which foregrounds how technologies establish new normative, disabling standards of capability, we analyse the shifting ontology of the worker in digitally intensive workplaces. We base our study on extensive qualitative data collected with managers, workers, trade union representatives, technology providers, labour market intermediaries, and local authorities across 12 warehouses in three European logistic hubs. Our analysis shows how warehouse workers are problematized as fallible, defective productive resources through systematic comparison with digital technologies, and how these latter are conversely constructed as necessary to enhance, fix and “save” them. In this way, a negative ontology of the human as disabled, generic labour power, holding at best residual “soft” skills, is established, within which any claim to the value generated is pre-emptively undermined. Our study shows that technoableism offers a powerful theoretical lens to interrogate and demystify the worker empowerment trope at the core of Industry 5.0.

24th March 2026, 6:30pm UK time – Annelies Scheers & Patrizia Zanoni: The machinistic production of the ‘defective worker’: A technoableist analysis of labour in digitalized warehousing

marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2026/02/16/m...

Hope and refusal in an era of criminalized care: Responses to Pirate Care YouTube video by Max Haiven

The video recording of 'Hope and refusal in an era of criminalized care: Responses to Pirate Care' is now available online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSyF...

#Anticapitalism #PirateCare #Resistance #CollectiveAction @plutopress.bsky.social

Thanks to everyone who joined us today! Once the recording becomes available, we'll share it here

Our next event will take place on 24 March from 6:30pm GMT with Annelies Scheers & Patrizia Zanoni – The machinistic production of the ‘defective worker’
marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2026/02/16/m...

HM Newsletter Number 5 has just gone out. If you want to be a subscriber, sign up here: www.historicalmaterialism.org/newsletter/.

N.B. We will be gradually decommissioning the old email list.

3 days left (including today) to submit an abstract for the Notes from Below issue on Disability & Work!

Many thanks to everyone who submitted abstracts for our 2026 series of monthly online events! We will get back in touch with everyone in early March & looking forward to what's to come!

Pirate Care - Pluto Press Inspiring stories of real life and often risky activism resisting the global criminalisation of care

Pirate Care was publishd by @plutopress.bsky.social as part of the Vagabonds Series in early 2025. You can find out more about it here: www.plutobooks.com/product/pira...

And make sure you join the reviewers & authors for a discussion on 3rd March, 7pm GMT: vagabonds.xyz/hope-and-ref...

Printscreen of the video recording's cover page with the title of the presentation on a yellow background, alongside HM's logo

Our CfA for 2026 MDN events is open until 20 Feb!
marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2025/11/17/m...

From our archives - Georgia van Toorn and Karen Soldatić: Disability, Racism, and the Spectre of Eugenics in Digital Welfare
marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2023/10/18/n...
#Disability #Marxism

Printscreen of the video recording's cover page with the title of the presentation on a yellow background, alongside HM's logo

Our CfA for 2026 MDN events is open until 20 Feb!
marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2025/11/17/m...

From our archives - Sabine Fernandes & Rachel da Silveira Gorman - Care as white property: A Marxist intervention into disability care work
marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2023/09/20/o...
#Disability

Poster for the event featuring a tarot card with pieate carers, the invitation to join the event and the logos of the collectivee supporting the event - bsa, mdn, cas, rival, alternatives to capitalism research network, and the vagabonds book series of pluto books

Join us on March 3, 7pm GMT for an online discussion of Pirate Care by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak

This event is supported by various collectives & will launch a book review forum published in the Postdigital Science & Education Journal link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Printscreen of the video recording's cover page with the title of the presentation on a yellow background, alongside HM's logo

Our Call for Abstracts for 2026 MDN events is open until 20 Feb!
marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2025/11/17/m...

From our archives - Scott Ritchie: Holding mad kids in community: Resisting Capitalism’s Disabling Processes in a Primary Grades Classroom
marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2023/09/16/s...

Printscreen of the video recording's cover page with the title of the presentation on a yellow background, alongside HM's logo

Our current Call for Abstracts for 2026 MDN events is open until 20 Feb!
marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2025/11/17/m...

From our archive - Ioana Cerasella Chis: Disablement Subjectivation and the Reproduction of Capitalist Social Relations
marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2023/08/30/h...
#Marxism

Printscreen of the video recording's cover page with the title of the presentation on a yellow background, alongside HM's logo

Our current Call for Abstracts for 2026 MDN events is open until 20 Feb!
marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2025/11/17/m...

From our archive: Aaron Jaffe: Social Reproduction Theory, ‘Disability’, and the Reification of Labor Power
marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2023/07/04/j...
#Marxism #Disability

Printscreen of the video recording's cover page with the title of the presentation on a yellow background, alongside HM's logo

Our current Call for Abstracts for 2026 MDN events is open until 20 Feb!
marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2025/11/17/m...

From our archive: Blue Maignien: Researching Time at the Intersection of Marxism, Disability and Technology
marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2023/03/10/j...
#Marxism #Disability

Printscreen of the video recording

Our current Call for Abstracts for 2026 MDN events is open until 20 Feb!
marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2025/11/17/m...

From our archive: Ravi Malhotra and Jacqueline Moizer: Crip Time, Castoriadis and #Disability Rights in the Workplace
marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2023/03/10/m...
#Marxism

Printscreen of the video recording

Our current Call for Abstracts for 2026 MDN events is open until 20 Feb!
marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2025/11/17/m...

From our archive: Luke Beesley: Extract and abandon? Surplus populations & surplus value in Health Communism
marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2023/03/10/a...
#Marxism #Disability

printscreen of the video recording

Our current Call for Abstracts for 2026 MDN events is open until 20th Feb 2026!

marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2025/11/17/m...

From our archive: Leonard Grant – Marxism and the Medical Curriculum
marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2023/03/10/m...

#Marxism #Disability

Hope and refusal in an era of criminalized care: Responses to Pirate Care (3 March 2026, online) - VAGABONDS Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity contends that, today, our movements for collective liberation are increasingly defined by the calling to care for one another in defiance of...

More details about the event can be found on vagabonds.xyz/hope-and-ref...

Poster for the event. On the left half, a tarot-like imagery is featured, in black and white, of pirate carers by the sea. On the right side, it reads 'please join us on March 3rd, 2026 at 7pm (UTC+0) online for a discussion of the book Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalisation of Solidarity with the authors and with contributors to a new critical forum on the book that appears in the Postdigital Science and Education Journal. To register, visit vagabonds.xyz

Hope and Refusal in an Era of Criminalised Care: Responses to Pirate Care
7–8pm GMT, Tuesday 3 March 2026, online

Event supported by MDN & co-hosted with other collectives

Register here: lakeheadu.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Book Review Symposium link: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

February 2023 – Katharine Terrell: The fat* disabled Walmart shopper; or, how not to be a good consumer under capitalism This paper considers an everyday occurrence: going grocery shopping. The normative expectation is that everybody will enter a shop, reach the shelf with the item they need, pick it up and put it in a basket. Du Gay (2004, 157) describes this “autonomous” shopper being encouraged to spend in “the proper exercise of individual shopping liberty” – they are not free, ut they are sold the idea that they are. For disabled people, this becomes more complex. Jennifer Knapp Wilkinson, a disabled American, discovered that strangers were mocking a photograph of her (which had been taken without her permission and published on the Internet) in which she falls from her mobility scooter as she reaches for groceries from a shelf.

Our current Call for Abstracts for 2026 MDN events is open until 20th Feb 2026! marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2025/11/17/m...

From our archive: Katharine Terrell
"The fat* disabled Walmart shopper; or, how not to be a good consumer under capitalism"
marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2023/03/10/f...

Printscreen of the video recording's cover page with the title of the presentation on a yellow background, alongside HM's logo

Our current Call for Abstracts for 2026 MDN events is open until 20th Feb 2026! marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2025/11/17/m...

From our archive - Arianna Introna
"On Crip Compositionisms: Recognising Disability in Our Midst"
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPhy...

#Marxism #Disability #Anticapitalism

New deadline - 20th February 2026

Just a few hours left to submit your abstract!!

Worker Writing Workshop (Marxism & Disability Network + Notes From Below) · Zoom · Luma Join us for an online worker writing workshop! An open space to share your ideas for writing about work, we will draw on previous workers' inquiries to…

We are so looking forward to meeting everyone who's registered to attend the Worker Writing Workshop today!

luma.com/spnoc68z

It's due to start in less than an hour!

3 weeks left to submit your abstract for a 2026 MDN presentation at an MDN event!

MDN call for abstracts for 2026 events We hope you all have been keeping well amidst a year of struggle but also success. To continue efforts that heighten understanding while prefiguring the communities and society we want to live in, …

MDN call for abstracts for 2026 events

Deadline: 31 January 2026
marxismdisability.wordpress.com/2025/11/17/m...

#Marxism #Disability #DisabledSky #Marx #AntiCapitalism

Poster for the workshop that reads 'worker witing workshop online, 6pm January 21st 2026 Marxism and Disability Network // Notes From Below"

Have you registered to attend the Worker Writing Workshop due to be delivered by the MDN Steering Committee & Notes From Below on 21st Jan from 6pm GMT?

If you're interested in contributing to the upcoming NfB issue on Disability and Work, join us!

luma.com/spnoc68z #Disability #Work