Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Imprisoning Disability: Using CRT & DisCrit to Abolish the Carceral State
Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been a guiding principle in our work and how we think, teach, and transform communities. Alongside its intellectual sibling, DisCrit, we’ve deployed these frameworks in our scholarship, teaching, client advocacy, and policy work. The authors have worked for over thirty years as scholar-activists and advocates representing youth in delinquency and education proceedings. This panel will explore how CRT and DisCrit animate our advocacy, with concrete examples in the areas of dis/ability, education, and anti-racist, anti-prison work. Attendees will leave with practical tools and ideas for applying CRT and DisCrit in their studies, scholarship, and advocacy.
Subini Annamma will share how DisCrit was developed as a sibling to Critical Race Theory, similar to LatCrit and TribalCrit, and its unique affordances in advocacy, scholarship, policy, and teaching. She will share the findings of her
most recent work with incarcerated youth across eight states. Jamelia Morgan will share how she has employed a DisCrit lens to examine the ways in which legal doctrine and everyday police practices work together to render disabled people— particularly those at the intersection of race and disability—uniquely vulnerable to police violence. Jyoti Nanda will describe how CRT and DisCrit shape her research on carceral spaces, including a current study of 200 closed case files to trace pathways for girls and gender-expansive pregnant youth into the youth carceral system. Vivian Wong will discuss
how she reframes the school-to-prison-pipeline as a nexus of criminalization in schools, drawing from her youth client work, local policy efforts, and statewide legislative advocacy.
• Subini Ancy Annamma, Associate Professor, Stanford University
• Jamelia Morgan, Professor of Law, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
• Jyoti Nanda, Professor of Law, Southwestern Law School
• Vivian Wong, Director and Visiting Associate Clinical Professor, Youth Justice Education Clinic at the Center for Juvenile Law and Policy, LMU Loyola Law School, UCLA Law JD ‘17
Imprisoning Disability: Using CRT & DisCrit to Abolish the Carceral State
Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been a guiding principle in our work and how we think, teach, and transform communities. Alongside its intellectual sibling, DisCrit, we’ve deployed these frameworks in our scholarship, teaching, client advocacy, and policy work. The authors have worked for over thirty years as scholar-activists and advocates representing youth in delinquency and education proceedings. This panel will explore how CRT and DisCrit animate our advocacy, with concrete examples in the areas of dis/ability, education, and anti-racist, anti-prison work. Attendees will leave with practical tools and ideas for applying CRT and DisCrit in their studies, scholarship, and advocacy.
Subini Annamma will share how DisCrit was developed as a sibling to Critical Race Theory, similar to LatCrit and TribalCrit, and its unique affordances in advocacy, scholarship, policy, and teaching. She will share the findings of her
most recent work with incarcerated youth across eight states. Jamelia Morgan will share how she has employed a DisCrit lens to examine the ways in which legal doctrine and everyday police practices work together to render disabled people— particularly those at the intersection of race and disability—uniquely vulnerable to police violence. Jyoti Nanda will describe how CRT and DisCrit shape her research on carceral spaces, including a current study of 200 closed case files to trace pathways for girls and gender-expansive pregnant youth into the youth carceral system. Vivian Wong will discuss
how she reframes the school-to-prison-pipeline as a nexus of criminalization in schools, drawing from her youth client work, local policy efforts, and statewide legislative advocacy.
• Subini Ancy Annamma, Associate Professor, Stanford University
• Jamelia Morgan, Professor of Law, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
• Jyoti Nanda, Professor of Law, Southwestern Law School
• Vivian Wong, Director and Visiting Associate Clinical Professor, Youth Justice Education Clinic at the Center for Juvenile Law and Policy, LMU Loyola Law School, UCLA Law JD ‘17
