Hi y’all! 👋🏽 this week, I speak with Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Janelle Johnson, to get to the roots of the MAHA movement, disability justice, neurodiversity, and the societal perceptions surrounding disability. Naturally, we touch on joy and rest as essential components of resistance and resilience.

• Explore the impact of COVID-19 on today’s health landscape
• Disability can be a bridge builder
• The historical roots of ableism and racism
• The role of trauma in political corruption
• Navigating frontline activism in always “Unprecedented Times”
• Humanity, resilience, and community building in the face of fascism

"Hate is too heavy to carry." — Janelle JohnsonReferences / Resources

• 📚 Antiblackness and the Stories of Authentic Allies
• 📚 Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings
• 📚 Racecraft (2012) by Karen and Barbara J. Fields
• ✍🏾 Maya Angelou: What She Said Life Taught Her
• 🗞️ Understanding Gender, Sex, and Sexuality

"How can you build your community?" — Janelle Johnson

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About Janelle Johnson (she/her)

Janelle Johnson Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, is a wife, mother, and the Founder of Bridges Family Life Center - a neurodiversity-affirming family therapy and consulting practice in North Carolina. An award-winning mental health leader and neurodiversity advocate with lived experience, her pioneering methods for serving underrepresented families led to her election as the first Black president of the NC Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. Also her writing on neurodiversity and disability is featured as one of 30 international thought leaders in a 2024 Oxford University Press anthology on anti-racism. Janelle is now a doctoral candidate at NC State University, leading research on neurodiversity-affirming approaches to institutional policy change in higher education and healthcare. Janelle delivers engaging equity and inclusion consulting, training and speaking for leaders and researchers internationally.

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