Critical Disability Studies

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10315/28600

Browse

Now showing 1 - 20 of 25

Open Access
Accounting for Racialized Immigrant Workers: Historiography of the Colour Coded System of Disability Exclusion
(2023-03-28) Simpson, Yvonne Velma; Gorman, Rachel da Silveira
Canada’s quest and historical reliance on an immigrant labour force to sustain the nation’s economic and population growth are well established. This has been the case since the formation of New France, where the conquest of people and acquisition of lands and resources, in part, inspired the recording of the first North American census of 1666. However, record keeping practices that commenced in what is now called Canada were part of a larger scheme of a systematic power over governance structure in settler-colonial administrative edicts that cast the foundational structure for inclusion and exclusion criteria based on a colonial racist ideological model of who should be accounted for in the French settlement. As such, Indigenous People were not counted. Similarly, the records of people of Black African ancestry who were brought to New France through the inter-continental routes as enslaved labourers were obliterated from official administrative records. In this first-of-a-kind historiographical query, primary and secondary records of racialized immigrant workers were examined to determine the extent to which Indigenous and racialized immigrant workers existed in governmental demographic records and other sources over time, inclusive of contributions, incurred injuries, disability and fatalities in labour force participation. A purposeful, cross-regional selection of Canada’s occupational health policy experts was engaged in semi-structured interviews on the question of demographic identity, including the intersectionality dimension of race and immigrant status. Insightful findings on the gaps in evolving race-based data collection in the nation’s contemporary occupational health and safety systems were garnered, revealing significant implications regarding the vestiges of colonial determinism in a perpetual colonial system, which underlies the absence of Indigenous and racialized workers from the nation’s informatics on occupational health and safety. Ultimately, this project implicates an urgency for policy changes, aligned with the nation’s persistent reliance on racialized immigrant workers while relegating them to over-representation in work that is more dangerous and injury prone without visible accountability. Dismantling the current policy framework for health and safety by imposing meaningful strategic intervention measures and data collection on ethno-racial demographic identity in the nation's public reporting systems is the resounding outcome of this project.
Open Access
Chatter that Matters: A New Path to Progressive Understandings of Disability Through the Online Discussion of Popular Novels
(2015-08-28) Rankin, Joanna Caitlin; Radford, John P.
Looking to the novel as a source of information for real lives, this paper investigates the role of the popular culture book club and the informal discussion of novels in the recognition of and response to disability in contemporary society. Reviewing the books chosen for the Oprah’s Book Club as well as readers’ online posts about characters with disabilities are considered in this research. The online, middlebrow discussion of novels is assessed as a productive and developing public sphere related to the discussion of disability. Within this context readers demonstrate their interest in and ability to challenge ideas about disability. This research identifies three key areas which encourage the development of progressive dialogue around this topic including: (a) providing a challenge to traditional literary authority allowing for new and innovative ideas, (b) the recognition of the significant role of emotion and the emotional connection of readers’ with fictional characters, including characters with disabilities, and finally (c) the frequently overlooked existence of discussion surrounding disability within this sphere and the acknowledgment of the social role of disability by readers.
Open Access
Disability, Displacement, and the Biopolitics of Belonging
(2020-08-11) Spagnuolo, Natalie Rose; Reaume, Geoffrey
This dissertation is concerned with the multiple ways in which formal and substantive citizenship are regulated among migrants with disabilities and non-migrants with intellectual disabilities. The focus of this analysis is twofold and is centred on medicalized assessment practices supported by government agencies at the federal and provincial level. These are Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) and Ontarios Ministry of Community and Social Services (MCSS). A multi-layered and historically informed analysis that reads first-person interviews alongside legislative and policy developments situates lived experiences with assessment regimes within a broader theoretical discussion of displacement. First, access to developmental services among adults with intellectual disabilities in Ontario is addressed, with a special focus on the MCSS Passport Program and Ontarios implementation of the Supports Intensity Scale. Immigration medical testing and particularly the IRCCs medical inadmissibility criteria are then considered in detail. While careful attention is given to the unique ways in which immigration medical testing and developmental services assessments are experienced, these examples are treated through an integrated analysis that draws upon the inter-related concepts of (in)capacity and (under)development. The framework forwarded in this study suggests that hierarchical understandings of (in)capacity and (under)development organize opportunities for belonging in translocal and transnational contexts, impacting migrants with disabilities and non-migrants with intellectual disabilities. A governmentality of (in)capacity that emphasizes the intersectional potential of intellectual disability is proposed as a means of exploring decision-making within and across these contexts. To account for the similarities as well as the differences between various modes of exclusion, this study also builds upon previous work in critical migration and critical disability studies, contributing to the development of a displacement framework that encompasses spatial and subjective dimensions of translocal and transnational disability experiences. Through this framework, lived experiences with Canadian immigration practices and Ontario developmental services are analyzed to reveal how diverse and deeply marginalized but by no means mutually exclusive communities can be placed at risk of displacement.
Open Access
Discriminatory Behaviours Towards Employees with Disabilities: An Inductive Empirical Legal Research Approach to Ontario Human Rights Tribunal Cases
(2022-12-14) Waxman, Douglas Adam; Klassen, Thomas R.
Researchers have devised various methods to gauge employers’ perceptions of employees with disabilities. Most of these methods involve employer self-reports, with only a few studies examining the behaviour of employers. This study applied a unique, untapped data set—decisions from the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario—that captures retrospective information on the behaviour of employers. Forty-three decisions were analyzed, resulting in 16 cases with findings of discrimination, which were further coded and analyzed for iterative, emergent patterns of employer behaviour and for how employers socially construct disability. The first objective of the research was to discern patterns of employer behaviours towards employees with disabilities. Six patterns emerged from the data. First, employers deployed ten different explanations to excuse their discriminatory behaviour: (1) the employee had a high incidence of absenteeism, (2) the employee had abandoned their job, (3) the employee’s behaviour was inappropriate, (4) the employee was in the probationary period and could be fired at will, (5) the employee violated the employer’s zero-tolerance policy, (6) the employer’s decision to terminate was made before the disability was disclosed, (7) the employee’s safety was at risk, (8) the medical documentation provided did not provide sufficient information, (9) the employee’s performance was poor, and (10) employee had discipline issues. Second, all the accommodation requests ended with the ultimate employment penalty—termination of the employee’s employment, constructive termination, or resignation. Third, it was found that a significant number of the employees experiencing discrimination had either a combination of mental health issues, hidden disabilities, or precarious employment. Fourth, contact theory (Allport 1954) posits that contact between different groups will lead to attitude change, diminish intergroup prejudice and improve intergroup harmony. Contrary to contact theory, experience with an employee with a disability did not arrest the employers’ discriminatory behaviours. Fifth, the experience in these cases is contrary to the theory that suggests that organisations with more flexible structures are more likely to accommodate employees with disabilities (Baumgärtner, Dwertmann, Boehm and Bruch 2015). Lastly, unlike Beatty et al. (2019) findings that large, public-sector and unionised organisations are more inclusive, in the cases here, the size of the organisation, the presence of a union or the presence of human resource capacity in the organisation did not mediate inclusion and responsiveness to disability needs. The second objective of this research was to examine how employers socially construct employees with disabilities. Employers’ excuses socially construct employees with disabilities in pejorative ways. Moreover, the workplace is comprised of layers of social constructions (constructive discrimination, harassment, denial of nonapparent disabilities, construction of organisational culture, construction of psychological safety and organisational justice climates, notions of the standard worker, leadership style, belief in a just world, trust). The most significant conclusion is that discrimination was not driven by financial costs related to accommodations or other reasons employers typically give to explain their discriminatory behaviour. Most accommodation requests involved modifications of the scheduling but not financial outlays. When expense was required, none of the accommodations resulted in an undue hardship. However, it is hypothesised that discrimination of these employees results from managers’ implicit presumption that managing employees with disabilities would consume inordinate amounts of managers’ time. In reality, some accommodations might require additional manager time, such as flexible scheduling but no time commitment remotely approaching undue hardship. The implication is that misinformation about managers’ time commitments to manage employees with disabilities adds a layer of complication in creating disability confident employers, particularly as it likely operates at an unconscious level.
Open Access
From the "Living Dead" to the "Walking Dead": How Modern Zombie Culture Reflects, Challenges and Perpetuates Implicit Negative Bias towards People with Disabilities
(2022-12-14) Jackson, Anne B.; Reaume, Geoffrey
The modern zombie culture has been popular in the West since World War II as an allegory for what ails modern society. Yet, the zombie narrative has not been used in academic scholarship to explore the fears and misunderstandings that society holds towards marginalized communities. To uncover possible connections, this research examined how the reflection of disabilities and other minorities in popular zombie culture influences the audience’s perspectives about disability, inclusion, religion, and the zombie apocalypse. Data gathered through an in-depth survey, follow-up interviews with a sub-group of survey participants, and transcripts of the AMC television series The Walking Dead and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead were analyzed using statistical and content analysis methods. Traditionally, the study of bias in the portrayal of the disabled community has focused on how audiences react to disability representations, including the level of disability portrayed. This research adopts a unique approach, situating the zombie itself as a representative of the nameless, faceless horde of those in society that do not conform to the social norms of today. The zombie is established as a representation of our unconscious biases, and it is argued that the zombie apocalypse can bring about positive change. The zombie narratives, with characters adapting to living in a world dominated by the disabled zombies that is not unified by religious practices, are seen as a depiction of hope for a post-apocalyptic societal rebuild into a more cohesive, inclusive, and empathetic community that sees the worth of all bodies, regardless of their abilities, with collective responsibility for making sure that nobody is left out.
Open Access
From the Standpoint of People with Disabilities: An Institutional Analysis of Work in the Non-Profit Sector
(2018-05-28) Buettgen, Alexis Edith Isabel; Rioux, Marcia H.
Employment can be a pathway to increased income, empowerment, quality of life and well-being. But for people with disabilities, job opportunities are limited, and employment supports often are inadequate. Despite legislative changes in recent years and a push toward employment as a solution to poverty among people with disabilities, there is a gap in knowledge, research, services and supports to meet the socioeconomic interests and needs of this diverse group of people. This study stems from a concern about how the current economic and political environment influences forms of employment available to people with disabilities; and to explain how and why the non-profit sector can be a potential site for inclusive employment. This institutional analysis critically investigated how three Ontario non-profit service providing organizations provided inclusive employment opportunities by examining institutional documents and policies, the perspectives of organization staff responsible for such practices and the everyday experiences of people with disabilities working in these organizations. This study draws from institutional ethnography as an emancipatory, critical theoretical method of investigation to analyze employment and disability within capitalist society. This relationship is examined from the standpoint of people with disabilities working in the non-profit service providing sector and extends upward to map the social relations between the individual and the organizations and institutions that influence their everyday experiences at work. Participating organizations were found to be places where employees could develop their capacities, re-present the image of disability and social service worker, and contribute to their communities. Many employees expressed a strong commitment to social justice and were working directly on issues related to poverty, personal care, social inclusion, well-being and diversity. However, it was also evident when organizations reproduced individualizing and medical conceptualizations of disability that constrained the subjective experience of inclusion at work. Findings from this dissertation explicated how various reading practices of the Ontario Human Rights Code contributed to the abstraction or valued recognition of the subjectivities of employees embodied experiences; and highlighted how employment in the non-profit sector, from the standpoint of people with disabilities, very much implies the enrichment but also the sacrificing of ones individual being.
Open Access
Gender and Disability Consciousness Among Community Organizers and Self-Advocates
(2020-11-13) Bernasky, Tammy Michelle; Gorman, Rachel da Silveira
This dissertation approaches oppression of women and trans people in the disability community from the vantage point of resistance movements. Research in this area has, so far, largely excluded gender-based violence. I begin to fill this gap through research with self-advocates and community organizers. My project asks, under what conditions do movements for women and trans people with disabilities emerge? I also propose that movements to end violence can transform individual and collective consciousness about disability and gender oppression. Participants were recruited by networking with organizations in Canada and internationally. Snowballing and social media outreach were also used as recruitment methods. Semi-structured, face-to-face and virtual interviews were conducted with thirteen participants from nine countries. An objectivist grounded content analysis identified experiences of gender and disability oppression as well as transformative conditions for individual and collective consciousness. I use an intersectional analysis to help frame movement from and between disability oppression, consciousness, and empowerment a process that is not necessarily cyclical, parallel, or linear. Through this research I propose two aspects of social movement organizing. The first is the individual aspect, whereby an individual experiences oppression, but with support and education a raised consciousness about disability and gender oppression emerges and from that there is resistance. Individuals may also participate in the second aspect, which is social movement organizing, whereby the group is equipped with a collective understanding of their circumstances and an awareness of the possibilities to take action. I conclude that individuals and movements organizing around gender-based violence in the disability community can experience oppression, resistance, and empowerment in a number of ways; whether it is linear, cyclical or simultaneous. In short, in order for social movements to be ongoing and progressive, they require supporters and actors who individually and collectively recognize a common struggle, share a desire to ensure better for themselves and others, and exhibit a propensity to act.
Open Access
It is Easy to Skew the Issues: An Analysis of Parents Deemed not Criminally Responsible on Account of Mental Disorder for Committing Filicide of Children with a Disability
(2021-11-15) Mack, Tracy Lynne; Reaume, Geoffrey
The media rarely reports on Not Criminally Responsible on Account of Mental Disorder (NCRMD) cases but when they do it is on the statistically rare cases that are violent and heinous in nature, which are then covered in a sensationalized and excessive manner depicting the individual as an innately dangerous criminal who will always be a public danger and who is escaping punishment. This dissertation analyzes a highly under-researched area: NCRMD cases where the parent commits filicide of a child with a disability. The cases in this dissertation were not covered as every other NCRMD cases but were instead covered as mercy killings where the parent became the victim. The importance of this research is highly significant for Critical Disability Studies and Mad Studies to understand the widespread societal ableism against children with disabilities and how that impacts how these specific NCRMD cases are framed by the media, legal system, and forensic mental health legal system: as mercy killings. Reporters turned to family members and neighbors for their initial quotes when they came upon a murder which led to highly prejudicial remarks being featured and setting the narrative for the murder. These were not balanced by engaging local or national disability rights self-advocates and experts. Many of the stories linked the decision to murder with the difficulty of caregiving by quoting neighbors, friends and other parents of children with disabilities. Meanwhile, the actual victims, the children with a disability, were depersonalized by the focus being on the extent of their disabilities and how much caregiving was required by the parent ultimately excusing the murderer and the murder.
Open Access
Love is a Line that Doesn't End: A Rumination on Ghosts and Unreason in Search of Care Without Violence
(2023-12-08) Ki, Patricia Hoi Ling; da Silveira Gorman, Rachel
This body of work contemplates and explores the question, how can care be practiced without replicating violence? Methodologically, it can be understood as an arts-based, multi-site project that focuses on service systems that claim to care, including mental health, social service, and education settings. This work unfolds through five storytelling and arts-making projects, each created with a collaborator who, along with me, brings to this process the experiences of providing services and accessing services, of perpetrating violence and being violated as racialized, femininized, and/or queer people in the care work systems that produce the very privileges we benefit from. At its heart, this body of work is a practice of unforgetting. It is compelled by the lives and deaths of the people we have worked with and the violence we have witnessed. Drawing on the collaborative arts-making projects as well as scholarships in disability and transformative justice, critical feminist and race theories, and feminist ethics of care, this work unpacks the discourse of trauma as a dominant story about violence through the concept of ghosts: the colonial ghosts that live in the bones of people who are labelled with trauma as well as people who provide care for trauma; the ghosts rendered as such through the casting out of belonging from the category of human but persist in appearing; the ghosts about whom tales of horror are constructed as warnings to protect the boundaries of the norm. Ghost stories led this work to a contemplation of grievability as a way of love and the basis of transformative, interdependent relationships, with those who are living and the ghosts we do not forget and remain accountable for – those already dead from colonial, ableist, racist, gender-based violence, from whom we learn to build a less violent future for those not yet born.
Open Access
Mad Children: Stories of Youth in Canadian Insane Asylums, 1880-1930
(2024-11-07) Smith, Kira Aislinn; Reaume, Geoffrey
Mad Children stories the lived experiences of youth who were placed in Canadian insane asylums from 1880 to 1930. The author uses archival materials and creative writing to move away from the medical model of understanding mad histories towards a focus on the children institutionalized across Canada. The author begins with an interrogation of the land the asylums were built on to engage with the settler colonial foundations of Canadian insane asylums. This chapter immediately situates the history of asylums within the displacement of Indigenous people and colonization. Additionally, this archival project is situated in a decades long call to do mad histories differently in a way that centres the experiences of the people held within the institutional walls. In situating the historiography and archival materials related to mad history, the author positions the use of blended writing to tell different kinds of stories. The stories that make up the bulk of the chapters come from archival records of children from British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and Prince Edward Island. Each chapter focuses on different elements that influence the lives of children within these facilities. The first story situates the reader in the development of eugenics, child psychiatry and wellbeing, and moral therapy. From there, the author details two different encounters with the forces that deported asylum inmates, the influence of anti-Asian rhetoric, the impact of settler colonialism, the interconnection with juvenile delinquency, what children thought of their surroundings, and the formulation of girlhood in the context of empire. In telling specific stories in their wider context, the author weaves in moments of discussion about other children who share similarities to the stories. Ultimately, the author reveals the consequences of systems that placed children in asylums and imagines what these encounters may have looked like for different inmates. As she moves through the stories, the author reveals not only how kids resisted and complied with colonial treatments of madness, but also, she argues that institutionalization is never the appropriate choice when considering how to care for people, especially children.
Open Access
Materializing a Mad Aesthetic Through the Making of Politicized Fibre Art
(2019-07-02) Reid, Jenna Allison; da Silva Gorman, Rachel
The field of Disability Studies not only acknowledges the value of creative production, it also turns to it as a way to craft knowledge. However, this project asserts that it is not enough for the field to support and promote Deaf, mad, and disabled artists by documenting and analyzing our practices through qualitative and/or quantitative research. Calling into question the focus that Disability Studies puts on access and inclusion, this studio-based project interrupts this discourse with the methodological approach of research-creation and the theoretical frameworks of Mad Studies and Critical Craft Praxis. My creative work intervenes in the text, positioning the knowledge created as knowledge in making based in the provocation of change and movement. Instead of looking inward at my own experiences, as mediated through my identity, I make to look outward. I turn to craft, specifically fibre-based practices like quilting and nature-based dyeing, as a way to make sense of the world around me. Craft is what makes me feel things. It forces me to see big pictures, look outside of myself, get raw, question my long-held beliefs, be uncomfortable, desire to do better in this world. Craft can be that space where we come together, commune with each other, hold one another, see the beauty and the ugly together, and struggle through the really tough shit. Key themes that have emerged from this performative research include the significance of commodifying identity as a process of depoliticizing creative work, the transformative possibilities of disrupting simplified notions of community, the role of the audience in the creative process, the role of nature in the vulnerability of craft as object and anti-colonial praxis, and the ability for quilts to be sculptural and layered with meaning. In my final reflection I feel as though I have ended with more questions than concluding statements. And yet with more questions than answers, this dissertation has accomplished what it set out to do: use Mad Studies and Critical Craft Praxis as a way to create ruptures, open up space for exploration, engage with ideas, and create new lines of inquiry.
Open Access
Modernity, Hegemony and Disability: A Critical Theoretical Exploration of the Historical Determinants of Disability
(2017-07-27) Mapp, Anthony Michael; Reaume, Geoffrey
Adopting a historical analysis methodology, this critical theory dissertation demonstrates how social, economic, political, cultural and intellectual developments associated with the historical period known as modernity gave rise to many of the disabling forms of oppression that continue to exist in contemporary society. The dissertation asserts that an understanding of the ongoing impacts of the past is necessary if progress is to be made in the present and future tasks of creating a more egalitarian and inclusive society. Because modernity has been understood in many different ways using very distinct criteria, this research project begins by clarifying the works use of the term. Drawing upon extensive Critical Disability Studies literature as well as Gramscian, postmodern, psychoanalytic, Marxist and feminist frameworks of analysis, this dissertation then explores the hegemonic role of the white, able-bodied heterosexual male in perpetuating oppressive aspects of modernity such as hierarchy, inequality, dehumanization and the psychology of domination. Embracing a broad definition of disability, the dissertation exposes modernitys disabling impacts on women, Jewish people and members of the black, gay and disabled communities. In addition to exploring the past roots of contemporary forms of disability, this research project examines contradictory elements within modernity that have the potential to promote positive social change. The final section of this dissertation suggests that the concept of community has the potential to add to disability discourse by generating counter-hegemonic perspectives and social policies that support equality, inclusion and social justice for all those social groups that have been subjected to the disabling impacts of hegemonic power in the modern era.
Open Access
Narratives of Separation: Institutions, Families, and the Construction of Difference
(2015-01-26) Burghardt, Madeline Catherine; Rioux, Marcia H.
Parents of children with intellectual disabilities born in Ontario in the era following World War II found themselves obliged to make significant yet misinformed decisions regarding their child’s long-term care. Immersed in postwar discourse which promoted the normative construction of the Canadian family, in combination with limited community support and generalized misconceptions of intellectual disability, many families had to choose between two principal options: keep their child at home and raise a child with needs divergent from the “norm” with few resources, or place the child in a segregated institution. Dating back to the latter half of the mid-nineteenth century, large-scale institutions for people with intellectual disabilities had become the predominant model of care for people with intellectual disabilities in Ontario outside of the family home. Many thousands of individuals were admitted to institutions; this bore significant consequences both for those admitted and for the families who decided to send them there. To date, scholarly work on institutions has focused on historical, political, and social factors which contributed to their development, as well as the more recent address of the narratives and histories of people who have lived there. Little is known, however, about the effect on family relationships and understandings of disability when one member of the family is institutionalized. The purpose of this project is to explore family relationships and understandings of disability when a family member with an intellectual disability is institutionalized for an extended period of time. Its principal body of data stems from thirty-six in-depth interviews conducted with the members of several families, including parents who institutionalized their children, siblings of those institutionalized, and those who were themselves institutionalized in Ontario in the years following World War II. Family members had widely divergent experiences in regards to institutionalization processes. Interpretations of the impact institutionalization had on the family were dependent on one’s location in relation to institutionalization. Findings demonstrate how relations of power were manifested in the family though institutionalization processes, and show the significant role that discursive constructions of intellectual disability have had on participants’ understandings of disability and of their family member.
Open Access
Neurodiversity in Relation: An Artistic Intraethnography
(2020-08-11) Klar-Wolfond, Este Helen; Davis Halifax, Nancy Viva
We move research creation by inventing with neurodiversity. Neurodiversity is relation. This moves autism away from the concept of dis-order and as non-relational and we untether from the pathology paradigm (Walker) to express and language otherwise. As my non-speaking son and collaborator suggests, this is a new way of languaging neurodiversity through art and movement to consider the question: can a good body feel without another body? to address concepts of independence and agency as it is imagined by neurotypicality. Invention allows us to remain open, without goal and directive, letting movement, relation and creation unfold to think of what we may not have yet conceived. We extend the idea narrative towards artistic experimentation and relational expression to blast (Wolfond) form, inspired by Melanie Yergeaus call to queer the lines of rhetoric, humanity and agency (Yergeau, 2018, 25). We create the concepts of aligning and wayfaring to think about relation and support as a way of lining to pace (Wolfond) with perceptual and expressive diversity, and also to experiment. We question notions around authorship and intelligibility that forces to a dominant neurotypical body and form; a form that is instrumental and directional. We propose the notions of relation and support as mutual, and also, incorporeal (Grosz) thereby eliding the false binary between dis/abled and my supposed hierarchical role to fix my son or direct this project. An ecology of practices as a tool for thinking through what is happening: a co-becoming as a habitat of practices (Stengers, 2005; Manning, 2016; Massumi, 2015b), becomes within the relational event as artistic intraethnography that thinks about the conditions and techniques for neurodiversity. We think that creative and collaborative speculation through the arts to find our own language. Our practices think with sticks, (Wolfond), rubber bath toys, tics, hums and hand-flaps, space and pace, and our work emerges through improvisation, movement and poetry in our film S/Pace (Klar & Wolfond, 2019). Synesthesia and proprioception are the intramodal-relational expressions that shift our thinking about support, care, and research-creation outside the pathology paradigm, moving us toward mutual attunement that changes the way we intrarelate.
Open Access
Not All Disability Is Created Equal: A Comparative Historiography Of Workers' Compensation And Disability Benefits In Ontario, Canada
(2024-11-07) Heath, Bonita Lee; Raphael, Dennis
This dissertation establishes that work injury and injured workers are relatively neglected in Critical Disability Studies (CDS). A further observation is that CDS tends to avoid a class analysis of disability politics in favour of identitarian approaches. This research focuses on income security. Through a Marxist critical policy historiography, I compare workers’ compensation benefits and state-sponsored benefits for disabled people whose disabilities originated outside of the workplace in Ontario. I argue that the workers’ compensation program is superior to the state-sponsored program because of the class location and politics of the respective groups of people with disabilities seeking income security. The discussion also highlights some of the reasons for the missing injured worker in CDS. Specifically, injured workers experience disability as a loss worthy of compensation rather than a positive identity. Further, rather than viewing prevention measures as the erasure of disabled people, injured workers support the prevention of disability through occupational health and safety laws and workplace practices. By focusing on the political economy of each program, the historical narrative suggests that disability benefit programs in Ontario were developed less by moral suasion and more because of their role in capital accumulation. Although the argument holds for the early history of the two programs in their early history. the negative impact of neoliberalism on both workers’ compensation and the current benefits program in Ontario (the Ontario Disability Support Program) has created a convergence of interests between permanently impaired injured workers and other disabled people, underscoring the importance of including injured workers’ perspectives in CDS.
Open Access
Sankofa: Disability and the Door of Return
(2020-11-13) Kissi, Evelyn Folake; da Silveira Gorman, Rachel
This dissertation is organized as sets of related essays that explore the concept of Sankofa (return to the source) as a method to revisit, resurge and reclaim Nkrumah's ideology to better understand the structures that continue to create disablement in Ghana. Disability studies as a field has come to acknowledge that the majority of disabled individuals live in the global south, however, the field does not yet account for how Europe underdeveloped Africa, how it continues to do so, and the impact it has on Her children. African Indigenous studies scholars such as Nana George Dei, charges new scholars to revisit the past in order to design the future of Africa for Africans. Heeding this call, I returned to the revolutionary anti-colonial ideologies of Julius Nyerere, Amilcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah and Frantz Fanon in order to center their approaches within the discourse of disability. Applying their ideologies, this dissertation draws particularly on Nkrumahism as a framework to engage and critique western biomedical approaches to disability and disablement. I argue for a Nkrumahist resurgence that views disability and disablement from a cultural-social-political-economic perspective, and examine their pre- and post-colonial historiographic contexts which allow for a critical engagement and a space to write Akan spirituality into critical disability studies. Through creative theorization this dissertation creates a Door of Return to Indigenizing African/Ghanaian ways of knowing and rewriting the histories which includes ancestors who were silenced due to several complex relationships; therefore, this dissertation partially concludes that, it is not our culture to stigmatize against persons with disabilities particularly those who are classified as insane; instead they should be viewed as being one with the spirit world, interpreting messages from ancestors which in itself is a gift that the Akans hold with pride. It also concluded the main argument of this dissertation that institutionalization of the Indigenes due to their African spirituality led to an increase in formalized confinement of Indigenous bodies. To further interrogate this inconclusiveness from the European archive, I propose further research that will allow the Indigenes themselves to speak on how, why and if those considered insane/mad and not able were banished or erased during pre-colonial Ghana.
Open Access
Social Citizenship and Disability: Identity, Belonging, and the Structural Organization of Education
(2015-01-26) Parekh, Gillian Grace; Killoran, Isabel M.
The framing of disability is an ongoing, negotiated discourse in which participants build upon, challenge, and reject the political, social, economic, and cultural influences that lead to constructions of impairment. Experiences of racialization, poverty, immigration, gender, and sexuality juxtaposed against defined institutionalized norms and dominant narratives speak to how disability is not only conceived but also experienced. Drawing upon transnational and citizenship theory, this thesis proposes employing a new framework of analysis, centralizing the experience of social citizenship and belonging as an indicator of broader structural equity. Situated in the field of education, theoretical considerations also explore how growing market fundamentalism shapes public schools and contributes to the systematic exclusion of poor and racialized students through mechanisms of disablement such as reduced academic programs and special education placement. This body of work includes three separate, but related, studies exploring historical and current incidences of institutional exclusion. In particular, the nuanced relationship of exclusion to race, class, gender, generational status, and sexuality, complicated with the identification of impairment, is explored. One of the most profound findings of this research is that, although there is much discussion in Disability Studies of the construction of impairment labels, this is the first quantitative analysis to substantiate these claims. Results also indicate that the classroom represents the most stratified space in which student groups defined by race, exceptionality, class, and generational status experience the greatest sense of exclusion. Evidence shows that employing a lens of citizenship and belonging is an authoritative tool in identifying the existence of inequities distributed among myriad identity groups. Furthermore, evidence lends credence to the notion that identification of disability is intimately linked to race, gender, and class contexts.
Open Access
Stories of Disablement and Displacement - Experiences of Syrian Refugees and their Families: A Qualitative Narrative Research Inquiry
(2022-12-14) Dada, Sukaina Essak; da Silveira Gorman, Rachel
The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes, "If you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and start with, ‘secondly’" (Adichie, 2009). First-person accounts can inform and educate, clarify misconceptions, and challenge existing policies and practices (Atkinson, 1998; Greenhalg, 2016). Narrative research allows participants to take back their own stories by starting with ‘firstly’. Dominant groups have often appropriated the telling of stories, particularly of those who are vulnerable and marginalized (Dossa, 2013). I interviewed ten Syrian families to provide a glimpse into the narratives of disabled Syrian refugees and the material and social conditions that shape their experiences. The stories of these ten families led to fourteen themes of disablement and displacement. Through this dissertation, I examine the critical relationship of disablement and displacement through stories of hope, pain, resilience, fear, oppression, and resistance. I explore disablement and displacement through concepts of citizenship, otherness, and intersectionality. This research contributes a unique and vital perspective to academic literature by challenging and disrupting the dominant narrative around disabled refugees, a narrative which overshadows spaces in academia and popular culture, and that strategically segregates disablement from displacement.
Open Access
The Right to be an Artist: Operationalizing Studio Art Practices for People with Cognitive and Intellectual Disabilities
(2021-03-08) Yarmol, Christina Maria; Halifax, Nancy Viva Davis
This dissertation, The Right to be an Artist: Operationalizing Studio Art Practices for People with Cognitive and Intellectual Disabilities examines the practical, philosophical, fiscal and social policy realities of people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities (CIDs) who want to live as artists in the community. It investigates the art practices of 16 local artists working in an urban studio endeavoring to realize their dreams against the barriers mounted by existing disability policies and the art world. Due to the nature of the participants disabilities, the research also looks to eight individuals who support these artists journeys, deepening the readers understanding of studio processes and supports. This multi-methods study weaves Narrative Inquiry and Arts-Informed methodologies into an intricate tapestry employing methods such as review of literature, face-to-face interviews, participant observation, collaborative artwork, art creation, art analysis and the researchers journaled personal experiences as an artist, an art educator, and a researcher. Since artmaking is central to knowledge-building in this dissertation, each chapter begins with an artwork and an artists statement by the artist-teacher-researcher to orient the reader toward the authors thinking. The chapter outlining the narrative data of the participants also highlights a collaborative drawing project between the researcher and an artist at the studio. A series of seven handmade books entitled Coffee Talk hold graphically designed artists statements written in conjunction with the studys artist-participants accompanied by a selection of artworks commending and crediting their knowledge. All pages can be inserted into the books concertina bindings and viewed privately or withdrawn and mounted alongside artists physical artworks in a formal, public-exhibition setting. Although society often labels their work under many banners such as Art Brut, Outsider Art, Nave Art, it is the researchers belief that this work should be labelled simply as Art whose unique style and rationale stem directly from each of the artists who created it.
Open Access
Theorizing Encounters with Southern Disabled Others: The Reproduction of Disablement in International Experiential Service Learning and Global Citizenship Education and Invitations for Disruptions
(2018-03-01) Vorstermans, Jessica Ann; Killoran, Isabell
In this study I seek to understand the way disability is employed to work towards the construction of normative subject-making in the field of International Experiential and Service Learning and Global Citizen Education (IESL and GCE). I theorize the way disability is constructed and responded to in IESL and GCE programs through interventions into the lives of disabled people. I explore how certain bodies are imagined as needing protection, care and interventions and other bodies are imagined as entitled to do that labour. I argue that these pedagogical processes reproduce certain subjectivities under Capital, and I query the ways in which the imagined Southern disabled body is integral in constituting Northerners able-bodied global citizenship identity. I then turn to a case study analysis of a small Canadian IESL organization, Intercordia Canada, founded by Jean Vanier that operates a relational North/South model of being with rooted in the experience and pedagogy of LArche. I analyze narratives from Intercordia student participants, centering their learning in a larger systemic analysis of neoliberalism and ways learning, relating, and care is structured. I use this case study as a way to get at the tensions and cracks in neoliberal education. I am not interested in countering the dangerous and damaging IESL and GCE narratives with good ones. I am interested in exploring the complexity of working with young people in this space, and identifying moments of disruption to the reproduction of disabling narratives. I draw from interdisciplinary fields, including critical pedagogy, critical IESL and GCE, critical disability, critical feminist and postcolonial theory to understand this complex and diverse space. I ask how we can envision this space in different ways, rejecting simplistic binaries and disabling discourses that marginalize and oppress certain subjectivities while celebrating others. This study extends the critical scholarship by employing critical disability theory to think through these encounters through in different ways, understanding how the disabled Southern other is essential in the forming of caring able-bodied Northern global citizens, imagined as desired subjects in the current phase of capitalism (Vrasti 2012). The critical literature in this field has thus far built a very rich and textured intersectional analysis using gender, race, class, but the attention to disability has yet to be taken up. Decolonization of this space cannot be realized without a deep consideration of disability and impairment. This study takes up two broad fields of inquiry. Firstly, I ask how disability is utilized in the broad mainstream neoliberal field of IESL and GCE programs as a depoliticized and individualized fixed identity embodied in an imagined Southern othered body that can be cared for, intervened on, and helped, which works to constitute the imagined able-bodied, caring, benevolent, and helping global citizen from the North. I then work through alternative ways of imagining the Southern disabled other, through interviews with Northern student participants and mentors. I completed semi-structured qualitative interviews with former Intercordia Canada student participants and mentors who accompanied student participants in the program. All of the research participants were Northern student participant alumni of Intercordia, had completed the program between 2012 and 2014 and lived with host families and worked with small grass roots NGOs in various countries in the Global South for three months. They came from diverse identity positions and were geographically spread across the country. Through the narratives of the Intercordia student participant alumni, I identified four areas of disruption to the disabling and uncomplicated IESL and GCE narratives of encounters with Southern others; vulnerability and mutuality as disruptions, disruptions to disability as individual and I explored their own responses to disruptions from the Southern other. I end by exploring the themes of uncertain subjectivities and future(s), speaking to the uncertainty that Intercordia student participants were left with after the program, which I contend signals to the unstableness of difficult learning. My interviews with Intercordia student participants demonstrated that even programs with critical pedagogies are not attending to disability in a critical way. Student participants are not equipped with the analytical and theoretical tools to understand encounters with the disabled Southern other in ways that uncover complex disablement and the production of impairment. The narratives from Intercordia student participants demonstrated disruptions into normative learning that reproduces disablement; their narratives included attention to larger structures that disable and oppress Southern others, but their learning did not include the uncovering of the production of impairment. This uncovering needs analytical tools that the Intercordia model does not employ. There is fertile ground for deeper, more intersectional learning to be integrated into the Intercordia model. The lack of a focused Critical Disability lens means that those who enter into the space of being open to unknowing, to receiving the Southern other as teacher and knowledge-holder do not have the skills to engage in a more complex critical disability analysis. This study ends by taking up four ways that this uncovering can be facilitated: that international experiences need to be proceeded and followed by academic courses that are housed in critical and intersectional programs of study like Critical Disability Studies; vulnerability and mutuality must be integrated into pedagogy; there is a need for deeper preparation with Southern hosts to allow them to challenge Northern students when they engage in hurtful or damaging ways, this preparation needs to be driven by their needs and desires, to deepened their participation; and pedagogy needs to be uncomfortable and destabilizing, with Intercordias model of mentorship in placement is posited as a way to facilitate and support this. Opportunities to destabilize knowledge, ideas of and who can hold knowledge, and the creation of spaces to create new narratives for hope and a future resisting and decolonizing the project of dehumanizing neoliberalism is necessary work for educators to be actively engaging in. Educators in the field must remain unapologetically radical and work towards engaging otherwise.