Mia Mingus

Mia Mingus is an American writer, educator, and community organizer who focuses on issues of disability justice. She is known for coining the term "access intimacy". She advocates for disability studies and activism to centralize the experiences of marginalized people within disability organizing. She is a prison abolitionist, and she advocates for transformative justice in her work against child sexual abuse. She was raised on the island of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. She has a younger sister who was also adopted.

When Mingus was a child, her mother and nine other women founded the Women's Coalition of St. Croix, the first organization on the island dedicated to helping victims of domestic violence, rape, and sexual assault. Mingus's childhood experiences with this organization and the feminist community on the island would later inspire her own work as an activist. These experiences also led her to understand that, as she wrote in a 2018 blog post, "violence...was systemic and more than just a couple of 'bad apples.' It was happening in every community."

Education Mingus attended school in the Virgin Islands until she was 17 years old.

Currently, Mingus has a popular blog titled Leaving Evidence, where she focuses on different social justice issues. Her articles have been showcased in numerous magazines and publications.

Known for Mingus' approach to disability justice focuses on dismantling privilege: "We don't want to simply join the ranks of the privileged; we want to dismantle those ranks and the systems that maintain them" (Mingus, 2011, para. 5).

She is especially well known for her work on "collective access". Collective access emphasizes how disability interacts with other aspects of an individual's identities, making disability justice activism necessarily intertwined with anti-racist, feminist, reproductive justice, queer, and prison abolitionist activism. Emphasizing solidarity between movements, collective access focuses on community-supported access and mutual independence instead of individualized specific accommodations.

Mingus believes that ensuring access or participation for disabled people is not considered justice, but rather people must transform their subjective realities at the core of their humanity to ensure community.

A key element of Mingus's work is her embrace of interdependence. This concept can be further broken down into the term "access intimacy". Access intimacy is a concept that Mingus formulated as she believed that people can understand and be there for each other, which will provide an unexpected amount of comfort. Mingus believed that the disabled community was missing access intimacy. Pod work is rooted in transformative justice principles of harm and accountability, including a community-based approach to intervening in and preventing violence at all levels.

Mingus has also consistently spoken about the medical industrial complex (MIC) and all that its encompasses: its deep-rooted connections to various forms of oppression, and its complicated relationship with marginalized communities.

She specifically focused on how the MIC can connect to ableism. According to Mingus, while the medical industrial complex can play a critical role in aiding people, it can also be incredibly harmful. She recommends that people learn to contend with the pain and oppression brought by systems such as the MIC so that change can be created. (2010) Forty under 40, The Advocate (2011) Femmes of Color Symposium Keynote Address (2013) Queer and Asian Conference Keynote Address (2013) API women's Champion of Change, President Barack Obama. (2013) 100 Women We Love, GO (2018) Disability Intersectionality Summit Keynote Address (2020) Ford Foundation Disability Futures Fellow (2021) Robert Coles "Call of Service" award