Lydia X. Z. Brown

Lydia X. Z. Brown (they/them) is a feminist disability studies and critical legal studies scholar. Currently they are Assistant Teaching Professor of Disability Studies at Georgetown University. They are also the Law and Public Policy Discipline Coordinator for the Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities (LEND) program at the Georgetown University Medical Center. They have also taught for Tufts University, American University, the University of Delaware, and CUNY. Brown’s work focuses on interpersonal and state violence against disabled people at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, faith, language, and nation; carcerality and institutional violence; asexuality as queerness; algorithmic harm as an accelerating force of systemic injustice; and the ableism-racism nexus of transracial and transnational adoption. They have recent publications in FUTURE/PRESENT: Arts in a Changing America, Autism in Adulthood, The American Journal of Law and Medicine, Critical Sociology, Critical Studies in Education, and Disability Studies Quarterly. 

Professionally, Brown is Director of Public Policy at the National Disability Institute, which works to advance economic opportunity and freedom for people with disabilities. They are also the founding Executive Director of The Autistic People of Color Fund, which advocates for disability, racial, and economic justice with a focus on building generative economies and just transition while providing mutual aid, peer support, and community-funded reparations. Brown serves as immediate past president and vice chair of the Disability Rights Bar Association and as a member of the National Lawyers Guild’s National Executive Committee, and was a past member of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Disability Rights. They previously led the nation’s only project focused on disability rights, AI, and tech policy at Georgetown Law’s Institute for Tech Law & Policy and later at the Center for Democracy & Technology. Brown is also a former Justice Catalyst Fellow at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, where they represented students with disabilities facing denial of civil rights in education, and former Chairperson of the Massachusetts Developmental Disabilities Council.