Akemi Nishida
Community Engagement Award - Awardee (2025)
Associate Professor, Disability and Human Development
Gender and Women's Studies
Pronouns: she/her
About
Akemi Nishida uses research, education, and activism to investigate how ableism occurs in relation to racism, cis-heteropatriarchy, and other forms of social oppression. She also employs these methods to contribute to disability justice activism and scholarships on care. Nishida 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. Her ongoing project, “We Survive Together,” theorizes disaster ableism, and its website offers accessible translations of disability-inclusive disaster research, testimonials from disabled survivors of disasters, and resources. She is an associate professor of feminist disability studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, while advocating for disability justice both locally and nationally.