Positionality Statement for a Scholar and Artist at the Intersection of Population Health and Critical Disability Studies

Table of Contents: Introduction | Autobiography | How Experiences and Location Informs Praxis | Principles and Commitments | Concluding Remarks | Publication Information | References

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Introduction

I offer this positionality statement to describe how my lived experiences and social location influence my scholarship, multi-media art, and related praxis in politics, social change, and other efforts. My positionality is one of both social marginalization and social privilege. I also share here some of the principles and commitments that underlie my approach to scholarship as a data analyst and writer as Dielle Lundberg [1] and art under the pen name Lyra McMahon [2].

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Autobiography of My Lived Experiences and Social Location

I am a white queer person who grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota. I am transfeminine, and I transitioned during my twenties. I was a gender creative child but was closeted as a teenager because I was taught that my Catholic faith was incompatible with expressing queerness. Throughout my twenties, I faced numerous experiences of gender-based violence, including sexual violence. I struggled with chronic suicidal ideation in my late teens through my twenties. I experienced significant gender dysphoria but had the privilege of accessing gender-affirming surgery covered by my health insurance, which positively impacted my life.

I did not outwardly identify as disabled until my early twenties, but my experiences of madness and neurodivergence shaped my lived experience long before I could name these experiences. I am a psychiatric survivor, who has experienced involuntary hospitalization, physical restraint, forced sedation, and other types of psychiatric harm. I identify as mad and have received numerous psychiatric diagnoses including bipolar disorder type 1, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), and alcohol use disorder (AUD). I was diagnosed with attention-deficit / hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as an adult and relate most closely with the experience of AUDHD. I self-identify as autistic based on my experiences, but I typically just identify as mad and neurodivergent. In 2021, I contracted Long Covid and developed disabling chronic fatigue and chronic pain. While my symptoms have improved some over the last five years, I continue to move around the world with walking sticks. I must also continuously pace my energy and limit my exposure to stressors to avoid debilitating flare-ups.

I grew up upper-middle-class through my father’s small business, and in middle school, my family relocated to an affluent suburb west of Minneapolis. One of my parents completed a vocational degree, and the other did not complete college. I had the opportunity to receive a private education, graduated from a Catholic high school, attended an elite university on an academic scholarship, and now hold an advanced degree. Specifically, I completed a master’s degree in public health (MPH) in 2019 and also completed a year and a half of doctoral training in health services research from 2022 to 2024 before departing due to issues related to disability and access [3]. I also had the privilege of university and family support that allowed me to spend my junior year of university in Accra, Ghana learning about disability activism. I returned to Ghana for another year after graduating in 2016 to co-found an upcycling partnership with a fashion designer in Ghana that remains active today.

My ancestry is predominately Scandinavian and Irish. Specifically, “my paternal ancestry is Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish, except for one of my great-great-grandparents who has English ancestry. My maternal grandfather’s ancestry is Irish, and my maternal grandmother is German and a mixture of Dutch, English, French, Irish, and Scottish” [4]. I have written about my family history in a publication entitled “Scandinavian, Irish, and Minnesotan: A Critical Autoethnography of Family History, Whiteness, and Settler Colonialism” [4], which positions my family history as “Minnesotans” living on land violently taken from Indigenous Dakota peoples within a broader history of settler colonialism and assimilation into whiteness.

While I was baptized Lutheran in line with my paternal Scandinavian background, I was formed spiritually and intellectually by my maternal Irish Catholic background. I attended Catholic junior high school, high school, and university and was deeply engrossed in Catholic spaces, social justice teaching, and faith in my teens and early twenties. While I severed ties with Catholicism due to my experiences as a queer and trans person and my critical views of its theology and institutional abuses, I began reconnecting with and reclaiming my faith in my late twenties. I view wrestling with my Catholic heritage, rather than adopting some other faith background, as a major ongoing spiritual and intellectual undertaking. Personally, I view having some ongoing connection to Catholicism as the most effective way for me to participate in critique and efforts to change the institution. As a scholar, I am interested in connecting my public health and disability studies work to Catholic social teaching as a means of reaching new audiences. I also often consider the role faith traditions have in constructing disability. Over time, I hope to cultivate a fuller understanding of my mental health and addiction experiences that pre-dates psychiatry by looking to my Irish Catholic and Irish Celtic background.

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How My Lived Experiences and Social Location Inform My Praxis

As a disabled person living with chronic illness and as a trans person, I have experienced firsthand the necessity and importance of health care. I have also had experiences where I’ve been harmed by medical ableism, psychiatric violence, and health system failures. This tension guides my scholarship and art, which often falls at the intersection of population health and critical disability studies [5]. Public health and health services often pathologize, stigmatize, and discriminate on the basis of disability and madness, and at the same time, disabled people are among the populations most hurt when health systems and health policies fail. My training has primarily been in quantitative population health research methods, which I attempt to apply a critical disability studies lens to via engagement with disability studies and disability justice scholarship. I know that I am among a relatively small number of disabled health scholars in my field, that trying to bring crip perspectives to public health can be difficult, and that despite my best efforts, I may at times do work that both public health and disability studies scholars do not like.

My perspectives on social and health issues have been influenced by the scholarly and activist traditions of disability justice, intersectionality, and mad liberation. It is important for me to recognize, however, how each of these traditions has roots in the community. Disability justice is a movement that has been led primarily by queer and trans disabled people of color [6–9]. Intersectionality emerges from a long tradition of Black feminist scholarship and praxis [10–12]. Mad liberation is rooted in the experiences and advocacy of psychiatric survivors [13–14]. While I do experience intersectional forms of oppression as a trans and disabled person, I am white and upper middle-class, and I do not truly belong to the traditions of disability justice or intersectionality. I am rather engaging with them as an outsider. Critical disability studies and mad liberation are both movements that align more closely with my lived experience; however, my writing and perspectives are not intended to be representative of these movements or fields. I am but one voice and writer.

Disability justice scholars have taught me that ableism is deeply intertwined with settler colonialism and anti-Black racism [6–9]. I recognize that I am a white settler descended from Scandinavian, Irish, and other settlers, which gives me a material responsibility to redistribute resources. I am racialized as white and have gained significant economic and other advantages because of my whiteness. At the same time, through my white identity development, I have come to believe that whiteness also dehumanizes white people and that my ancestors – especially my Irish Catholic ancestors – lost something important by assimilating into whiteness [15]. I believe that divesting from whiteness and supporting decolonization is in the true interest of people who are racialized as white. My perspectives on colonialism were also shaped by the nearly two years I spent living (noncontinuously) as a white American in Ghana and the relationships I formed there and the experiences I had. I strongly believe disabled people have a responsibility to care about and do what they can to take action on issues of settler colonialism, including the related genocides occurring in Palestine, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, and other places [16].

Finally, my experiences as a disabled and mad person, along with experiences of gender-based violence and sexual violence I have faced, have made me fiercely committed to noncarceral approaches to responding to harm at both an individual and societal level. Today, I am continuing to learn from traditions of abolitionist thought and organizing [17–18], and I am working to find the fitting ways for me to relate to these movements as an individual and as a scholar and artist. I view psychiatrization as deeply connected to carcerality, policing, and the military industrial complex, and I do not believe these systems make disabled or mad people safer or healthier. I think divesting from them is important. While I do identify as a feminist, I strongly reject any type of carceral or white feminism that does not center intersectional justice and restorative processes for responding to harm.

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Principles and Commitments Underlying My Scholarship and Art

A core commitment underlying my scholarship and art is ensuring that some of the resources I can access are redistributed back to the community, especially to multiply marginalized disabled people. At this time, my efforts in this area include a redistribution initiative and a social justice fund that serve different purposes.

The Lundberg-McMahon Redistribution Initiative [19] is a redistribution initiative related to my family’s history as white settlers in Minnesota, with predominantly Scandinavian and Irish ancestry. The initiative “seeks to redistribute financial resources toward (a) Indigenous-led initiatives for mutual aid, land reacquisition and related advocacy, wealth-building, and cultural preservation active on the Dakota lands where my family settled historically or relevant to the Dakota people whose displacement my family materially benefited from and (b) mutual aid and other initiatives that support the health care needs of disabled and transgender Black, Indigenous, and people of color, whose lives continue to be impacted by the settler colonialism and racism through which my Scandinavian and Irish family members historically gained access to and assimilated into whiteness. Over time, this initiative will redistribute funds roughly evenly between these two purposes.” The scope and mechanics of this initiative are described elsewhere [4, 19].

Next, here in this statement, I will introduce the Lyra McMahon Social Justice & Political Solidarity Fund [20], which is dedicated to supporting initiatives advancing disability justice, mad liberation, trans liberation, sex worker justice, abolition of prisons, policing, and related institutions, and efforts to dismantle and reduce harm from systems of ableism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. Formalized in 2026, the fund seeks to redistribute typically between $10,000 and $25,000 of my annual income per year from my work as a public health writer and data analyst under my name Dielle Lundberg and as a multi-media artist under the name Lyra McMahon. This fund redistributes to frontline response, projects, organizations, causes, and organizing efforts that align with activism, disruption, harm reduction, and/or mutual aid in the fund’s focus areas. I prioritize initiatives led by directly impacted people. If I encounter unemployment or financial adversity during a year, my minimum redistribution amount is 10% of my annual income. Since January 2026, the fund has redistributed $16,435 USD in its first eight months. This fund formalizes redistribution efforts that I practiced informally between 2017 and 2025.

One key principle underlying my scholarship is that I try to cite disabled people and in particular disabled people of color and disability justice scholars and activists. I do my best to cite thoughtfully and responsibly and credit ideas that originated in the community without necessarily implying endorsement of my other ideas and work. I recognize that this can be a delicate balance and that I may sometimes miss the mark. I am not a disability justice scholar, and while I believe deeply in disability justice, my scholarship should generally not be categorized as such.

A final related principle is that I view scholarship as an evolving conversation. Unlike most disciplinary norms, I do a lot of my scholarship on platforms where I can update my work and publish new versions that allow me to incorporate feedback, fix mistakes, and reformulate ideas. In peer-reviewed scholarship, this is not always possible. However, in this case, I view each subsequent publication as an update and advancement of the previous one. For this reason, when I receive feedback on a piece of writing, I typically view it in a forward looking way – how can I incorporate this in the next version or the next publication? While I do recognize the harms of epistemic violence, I also don’t support perfectionism and don’t believe the truth is the responsibility of any one author or publication. Truth is collective.

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Concluding Remarks

This positionality statement is a living document and is one that I plan to return to and update at least every few years. This statement published here represents at least my third formal attempt at a public positionality statement. Moving forward, by permanently archiving versions of this publication, I seek to both track and examine how my understanding of myself and how I speak about my experiences changes over time. Positionality is fluid, and I recognize that I will continue to change. As a scholar and an artist, I am leaning into that fluidity, not as a source of inconsistency but as a point of examination for how I will continue to grow.

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Publication Information

Version History

This article was originally published on August 23, 2026.

Funding Statement

The author received no external funding for this work.

Declaration of Interests

The author has no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

All text in this article was written by me, and its accuracy is my responsibility. I solicited critical feedback on this article from Claude (claude-opus-4-8; Anthropic, San Francisco, CA) as one of several tools used within my reflexivity process, alongside journaling, conversations with friends and colleagues over a period from October 2022 to August 2026, and critical engagement with prior literature. I discuss my perspectives on responsible use of AI elsewhere [21].

Disclaimer

The content in this paper is solely my responsibility and does not necessarily represent the views of any other individuals, institutions, funding agencies, community organizations, or other projects I am affiliated with or connected to presently, in the past, or in the future.

Preprint and Access Information

This working paper is Publication 3 of Volume 1 of Ableism & Healthcare Now, an independent research and analysis about structural ableism in public health and healthcare and serves as an entry that I am publishing about my positionality as a scholar. This publication has not been peer-reviewed. It is published open-access on the project website and available as a PDF preprint on Zenodo to facilitate citation, archiving, and indexing.

Suggested Citation

Lundberg DJ. Positionality Statement for a Scholar and Artist at the Intersection of Population Health and Critical Disability Studies. Working Paper. Ableism & Healthcare Now. Published online August 23, 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21797616.

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References

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4. Lundberg DJ. Scandinavian, Irish, and Minnesotan: A Critical Autoethnography of Family History, Whiteness, and Settler Colonialism. Working Paper. Ableism & Healthcare Now. Published online August 23, 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22017964.
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16. Bassily N. Empathy to fight colonial abhorrence and amnesia: global solidarity with and disability justice in Palestine, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo as moral imperative. Disability Visibility Project. July 22, 2025. Accessed August 19, 2026. https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2025/07/21/empathy-to-fight-colonial-abhorrence-and-amnesia-global-solidarity-with-and-disability-justice-in-palestine-sudan-and-the-democratic-republic-of-congo-as-moral-imperative/
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19. Lundberg, DJ. Redistribution Initiative. Dielle Lundberg. 2026. Accessed August 19, 2026. https://diellelundberg.com/redistribution-initiative/
20. McMahon L. Fund. Lyra McMahon Art. June 3, 2026. Accessed August 19, 2026. https://lyramcmahonart.com/fund/
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