News – Mad Thinking

Changing the Script: A Story of Self-Advocacy in Peru

By Liliana Peñaherrera & Alberto Vásquez Movement Stories is a new series exploring how disability activists organise and work for change in different contexts. The aim is to look beyond success narratives and examine the politics behind their work: the strategies, alliances, tensions, and risks that shape it. We begin in Peru with a story…
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Launching Mad Café

Mad Thinking is launching a new space! Mad Café is a monthly virtual open-format space for disabled and Mad activists, organisers, and allies to connect, touch base, exchange, think together, be challenged, and play with new ideas. Or to simply hang out. At Mad Thinking, we believe that friendships, relationships, humour, and light-heartedness are not…
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A Year of Beginnings

2025 marked the first year of Mad Thinking. We began in April, reaching full operational capacity in June. It has been a year of beginnings: ideas taking shape, systems being set up, conversations opening, and connections forming across geographies, movements, and struggles. When we launched this initiative, we did so out of a shared conviction…
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La Yapa – Reflections from Care, Trust and Community During Crisis

In the final session of our series “Disability Activism Under Pressure: Resistance and Resilience in Authoritarian Contexts“, we turned inwards. After weeks of examining repression, surveillance, and the machinery of control, we closed by asking how we hold one another when everything else collapses. Care, trust, and community are often invoked as buzzwords, but in…
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Doing Hope in the Ruins

By Akriti Mehta Our webinar series on disability activism under authoritarianism has now come to a close. Hearing from people from such different contexts about the challenges they are facing has been difficult. It is clear that the forces of oppression and injustice are building momentum—authoritarianism is gaining ground from Argentina to UK to El…
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La Yapa – Reflections from Solidarity in the Face of Authoritarianism

Mad Thinking hosted the fifth session of its 6-part webinar series, “Disability Activism Under Pressure: Resistance and Resilience in Authoritarian Contexts” on October 15. Titled “Solidarity in the Face of Authoritarianism: What Cross-Movement Activism Demands”, the conversation explored the meaning and practice of solidarity across movements. The session was moderated by Negin Shiraghaei (Azadi Network).…
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La Yapa – Reflections from Re-thinking How We Come Together

On October 1, 2025, Mad Thinking hosted the fourth session of its webinar series, “Disability Activism Under Pressure: Resistance and Resilience in Authoritarian Contexts.” Titled “Re-thinking How We Come Together: Building Diverse Structures of Organising,” the conversation explored how movements can resist fragmentation and rethink the very ways we organise, lead, and sustain collective power.…
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Margins Are Not an Escape

By Alberto Vásquez Encalada Midway through our Mad Thinking webinar series, ‘Disability Activism Under Pressure,’ one idea keeps coming to mind: authoritarianism creates the temptation to stay on the margins. To lie low. To let others lead the fight you silently support. It can feel safer. And it’s often safer in the short term—especially when we know elites…
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La Yapa – Reflections from Funding Futures

We held the third session of our webinar series on “Disability Activism Under Pressure: Resistance and Resilience in Authoritarian Contexts” on September 18. This session, titled Funding Futures: Re-Thinking Current Models and Finding Alternatives, brought together Deya Bhattacharya (AWID), Marija Jakovljević (Dalan Fund), and Fredrick Ouko (ADD International). The conversation, moderated by Lizzie Kiama (This…
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La Yapa – Reflections from Operating in an Age of Surveillance

On September 3, we held the second session of our webinar series on “Disability Activism Under Pressure: Resistance and Resilience in Authoritarian Contexts“. Following on from our first conversation (you can find our reflections on our website), this instalment of La Yapa reflects on the session on Operating in an Age of Surveillance: Building Security…
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