CGDS members include faculty, researchers, graduate students, and staff across the three campuses of the University of Toronto.
The following list is organized alphabetically by last name and is not differentiated by role or status.
Learn more about courses in Disability Studies at UofT here.
Susan Antebi
Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Toronto
Pronouns: She/Her
Susan Antebi is Professor of Latin American Literature in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on disability and corporeality in the contexts of contemporary and twentieth-century Mexican cultural production. Her most recent book is Embodied Archive: Disability in Post-Revolutionary Mexican Cultural Production (U of Michigan Press, Winner of the Tobin Siebers prize, 2021). She is also the author of Carnal Inscriptions: Spanish American Narratives of Corporeal Difference and Disability (Palgrave-Macmillan 2009). Her co-edited volumes include Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies, with Beth Jörgensen, (SUNY, 2016); and The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect, with David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, (U of Michigan Press, 2019). Her work has been funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant and a Chancellor Jackman Faculty Research Fellowship. Her current research projects centre on eugenic legacies in contemporary Mexico and the Americas, and on para-abnormal agency in literature and spectacle.
Keywords: disability; eugenics; latin america; literature; film; spectacle; materiality
[Image description: A photo of a middle-aged light-skinned woman with chin-length brown hair. She is smiling at the camera with her head tilted to one side. She wears a neutral colored blouse with small flower pattern and stands in a room with light blue walls and sunshine coming through the windows.]
Chloë G. K. Atkins
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto
Pronouns: She/Her
Atkins is the primary investigator of The PROUD Project on Employment and Disability (funded by SSHRC, DNDRC, TechNation, The Catherine and Frederik Eaton Family Charitable Foundation and other private donors). It is a multinational, multiyear study looking at the conditions which encourage and sustain the employment of qualified disabled persons in the workplace. She is a previous CIHR grant holder for a project about the management of rare and difficult-to-diagnose illness. Atkins is the author of My Imaginary Illness (Cornell 2010), awarded three prizes including The American Journal of Nursing’s Book of The Year (2011). She has held Clarke, Fulbright and SSHRC Fellowships.
Keywords: disability; bioethics; vulnerable minority identities; human rights; phenomenological research; narrative scholarship
[Image description: A photo of a middle-aged woman with short brown hair, and with gray at the temples. She is smiling at the camera with her head tilted to one side. She wears a cream-coloured, cable-knit sweater with a pale blue scarf around her neck. She stands in front of green vines in a woodland]
Hilary Brown
Assistant Professor, Department of Health & Society, University of Toronto Scarborough and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health
Hilary Brown, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health & Society at the University of Toronto Scarborough and in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. She is cross-appointed to the Temerty Faculty of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry and is an Adjunct Scientist at Women’s College Hospital. Dr. Brown holds a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Disability and Reproductive Health. Her research program uses epidemiologic methods to examine maternal and child health and health care access across the life course, with a focus on populations with disabilities and chronic illness. You can read more about her research here: https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/people/hbrown/
Teaching interests: Dr. Brown teaches courses in public health, epidemiology, and reproductive health at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Key words: disability; chronic illness; health care access; health equity; maternal and child health; sexual and reproductive health
[Image description: Hilary, a white woman with long brown hair, wears a light blue shirt and navy blazer, and smiles at the camera]
Ron Buliung
Department of Geography, Geomatics and Environment, University of Toronto Mississauga
Graduate Chair, Geography and Planning
Professor Ron Buliung holds a Ph.D. (2004) in Urban Geography from McMaster University. He is a faculty member in the Department of Geography, Geomatics and Environment at UTM, and the former Graduate Chair of the tri-campus graduate programs in Geography and Planning. His interest in disability scholarship and the problem of ableism is motivated by family experiences with disabling institutions and environments. Recent published works have focused on access to education, disability and school transport, and food insecurity for disabled persons.
Teaching Interests: Professor Buliung teaches the graduate seminar, “Disability, Ableism and Place” (JPG1820) in the Graduate Program in Geography and Planning. Students interested planning, geography, public policy tend to find their way to this course.
Key words: intersectional ableism, childhoods, education, disability justice, climate justice, disability rights, fiscal policy, planning, transportation.
Recent Work:
Buliung, R., & Solomon, R. C. (2022). Leaky Bodies and Broken Bathrooms: Stories about Ableism and Going to the Loo. PLANNING THEORY & PRACTICE, 23(1), 112-115.
Stafford, L., & Buliung, R. (2022). Disability Justice Meets Climate Justice. PLANNING THEORY & PRACTICE, 23(1), 128-131.
Schwartz, N., Buliung, R., Daniel, A., Rothman, L. (2022). Disability and Pedestrian Road Traffic Injury: A Scoping Review. Health & Place, 77, 1-13,https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2022.102896
Norcliffe, G., Buliung, R., Krause, A., Radford, J. (2022). Disability and cycling technology: A socio-historical analysis. Disability Studies Quarterly, 42(1), https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v42i1.8276
Buliung, R., Bilas, P., Ross, T., Marmureanu, C., El-Geneidy, A. (2021). More than Just a Bus Trip: School Busing, Disability and Access to Education in Toronto, Canada. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 148: 496-505. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2021.04.005
Schwartz, N., Buliung, R., Wilson, K. (2019). Disability and food access and insecurity: A scoping review of the literature. Health and Place. 57: 107-121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2019.03.011
[Image description: Headshot of Professor Ron Buliung from the shoulders up smiling wearing a grey collared shirt and clear framed glasses.]
Leslie Carlin
Senior Research Associate, Department of Physical Therapy, University of Toronto
I am a medical anthropologist with an undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Between 1994 and 2010, I lived in the UK, where I taught anthropology at the University of Durham for four years, and then joined the research staff first at the University of Newcastle and later at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. Since 2011 I have been based in the Health Services Outcomes and Evaluation Research Unit within the Department of Physical Therapy at the University of Toronto, where I am a senior research associate. Current topics of interest include knowledge translation, osteoporosis and risk assessment, supporting primary care practitioners in managing patients with chronic pain (through UHN’s Project ECHO Ontario / Chronic Pain and Opioid Stewardship program), aging and technology (with AGE-WELL-NCE), and spinal cord injury. In my spare time I write fiction and creative non-fiction.
Keywords: chronic pain; osteoporosis, knowledge translation; spinal cord injury; medical anthropology
Email: leslie.carlin@utoronto.ca
[Image description: a head shot of an older white woman with dark, curly, chin-length hair. Trees and the CN Tower are visible but out of focus in the background]
Deanna D’Souza
Centre Coordinator, Centre for Global Disability Studies
Deanna D’Souza is the Centre Coordinator for The Centre for Global Disability Studies. She has over 5 years of experience providing program coordination support, 3 of which have been in Equity and Diversity work. In addition to her role as Centre Coordinator, Deanna also supports the Toronto initiative for Diversity and Inclusion (TIDE), a grassroots service group consisting of University of Toronto (U of T) faculty members from across disciplines, with a focus on advancing equity, diversity, and inclusion at U of T.
Prior to working at U of T, Deanna supported a national program of work on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at National Health Service (NHS) in London, England. Deanna holds a Bachelor of Arts in Arts and Contemporary Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University, with a Major in Global Studies and a Minor in Politics.
Email: cgds.utsc@utoronto.ca
[Image Description: Coloured headshot of a brown skinned woman with brown eyes and medium length dark brown hair. Her head is tilted to one side and she is smiling at the camera.]
Maddy De Welles
PhD Student, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto
Madeleine (Maddy) De Welles is a PhD student in disability studies in the Social Justice Education department at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE, University of Toronto). Maddy’s research and writing focuses on disability studies and childhood studies, and she is guided by phenomenology and interpretive sociology. She is especially interested in writing about children’s artefacts, such as storybooks, dolls, television shows, and young adult novels. Maddy also loves teaching and working with children of all ages.
Keywords: disability studies; childhood studies
[Image description: a female-presenting, white woman looks, smiling at the camera. She has long dark brown hair. She is wearing round glasses and a burgundy short-sleeved shirt]
Tina Doyle
Director of AccessAbility Services at the University of Toronto Scarborough
Sessional Lecturer, Department of Health & Society
Pronouns: she/her
Tina Doyle is the Director of AccessAbility Services at the University of Toronto Scarborough where she provides leadership on accommodation and accessibility. Tina has worked to address systemic barriers and social justice in education for over twenty-five years. She has an interest in coalition forming between disability services and disability studies and advocacy approaches to disrupt systems and create positive social change.
With ten years’ experience participating on Ministry Working groups, the Minister for Seniors and Accessibility appointed Tina to lead the province’s legislated AODA Post-Secondary Education Standards Development Committee. The committee developed recommendations to address systemic barriers in education provided by Ontario publicly funded colleges and universities. Tina was also appointed to the Government of Ontario’s Accessibility Standards Advisory Council and isa member of the Ministry of Colleges and Universities Disability Issues Financial Aid Working Group.
Tina holds a Master of Science in Disability Services in Higher Education from CUNY and completed a Graduate Certificate in Postsecondary Disability Services from the University of Connecticut.
Keywords: disability, disability services in higher education, accommodation, accessible education, accessibility, universal instructional design
[Image Description: Close-up colour portrait of Tina Doyle smiling. She has long blond hair, below her shoulders, with blue/green eyes. She is wearing a black turtleneck with a cream background.]
Jose Miguel (Miggy) Esteban
PhD Candidate, Social Justice Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto
Jose Miguel (Miggy) Esteban is a dance/movement artist and educator based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Miggy is currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, where his research is oriented through disability studies and dance/performance studies to reimagine educational praxis. Influenced by disability arts and culture, Black radical traditions, Indigenous storytelling, and queer performance, his dissertation project engages in embodied practices of improvised research-creation to re-interpret curriculum as a choreographic site for inspiring pedagogies of/through dance. His work has been published in Canadian Theatre Review, Disability Studies Quarterly, Journal for Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Liminalities, and in various edited volumes.
Keywords: disability studies, dance/performance studies, educational studies, research-creation, critical and creative interpretive methods
E-mail: miggy.esteban@mail.utoronto.ca
[Image description: A side profile of Miggy, who crouches amidst bushes and white flowers that recede blurrily into the background. His fingers gently crawl up from his long-sleeved maroon shirt, over his chin and lips, and toward his black, wavy hair. The brown skin of his cheek is caressed by his palm as he looks down with eyes closed in contemplation.]
Jessica Fields
Professor and Chair, Department of Health and Society, University of Toronto Scarborough
Jessica Fields is Professor and Chair of the Department of Health and Society and Professor of Sociology at University of Toronto Scarborough. Fields’ research focus on racialized and gendered discourses of vulnerability and risk, with a particular focus on sexual health education’s gendered and racialized lessons about the array of relationships, identities, desires, and behaviors that people imagine and pursue for themselves and others. With Laura Mamo and Jen Gilbert, Fields leads The Beyond Bullying Project (funded by the Ford Foundation), a community-based storytelling project that interrogates policymaking that challenge perceptions of LGBTQ sexualities and youth as problems for schooling. Fields is currently completing her monograph, Problems We Pose: Feeling Differently about Qualitative Research (University of Minnesota Press), in which she welcomes emotion and feeling as a source of insight—not an obstacle to understanding—into the racialized, gendered, and sexual inequities that compromise health and well-being.
Keywords: sexuality, gender, race, education, vulnerability and risk
[Image description: a light-skinned person with short gray hair and black and tortoise-shell cat-eye glasses looks at the camera over her left shoulder. She is smiling with light pink lips and her teeth showing. Her face is lightly wrinkled with brow lines and laugh lines. She wears a black turtleneck and small silver earrings]
Marlene Goldman
Professor, Department of English, Institute for Life Course and Aging, University of Toronto
Marlene Goldman is a writer, filmmaker, and English professor at the University of Toronto. Her most recent book, Forgotten, which traces the history of Alzheimer’s disease, was nominated for both the Gabrielle Roy Prize (2018) and The Canada Prize (2019)—the top scholarly book published in the Humanities. She is currently writing a book entitled Performing Shame that examines and challenges the connection between shame and stigma, with an emphasis on literary portrayals of disability. Her first short film, Piano Lessons, adapted from Alice Munro’s In Sight of the Lake offers a rare, first-person account of deep dementia. Her second film, Torching the Dusties, an adaptation of the Margaret Atwood short story of the same name, explores intergenerational tensions as well as the effects of age-related macular degeneration. Both films serve as accessible viewing as well as a case studies for clinicians, caregivers, and people living with age-related disorders. Dr. Goldman hopes her interdisciplinary approach will serve to broaden awareness of a spectrum of challenges including dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and vision loss. Her current film—funded by the Canada Council and based on the short story by Souvankham Thammavongsa entitled “Manipedi”—is in pre-production, and focuses on the effects of brain injury on a professional boxer. Please see her website for more information: http://www.marlenegoldman.ca
Email: mgoldman@chass.utoronto.ca
Key words: literature; age studies; Alzheimer’s disease; brain injury; film
[Image description: A smiling, light-skinned woman with short, red-blond hair looks at the camera. She is wearing glasses with red, rectangular frames]
Cassandra Hartblay
Director, CGDS
Assistant Professor , Department of Health & Society , Graduate Faculty in the Department of Anthropology and the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies
She/her or They/them
Dr. Hartblay was appointed the inaugural director of CGDS in 2020, after spearheading the centre’s proposal development. Dr. Hartblay is a cultural and medical anthropologist working at interdisciplinary intersections with disability studies, performance studies, critical design studies and global postsocialism, with a regional research focus on Russia and the Russian-speaking former Soviet Union. Her recent book, I WAS NEVER ALONE, OR OPORNIKI (University of Toronto Press 2020) presents a play script based on ethnographic interviews with adults with mobility and speech impairments in one Russian city, developed in conversation with research participants, and considers the theoretical implications of disability access as an aesthetic as well as political element in theatrical productions, and offers performance ethnography exercises for other ethnographers. The play has been staged at UNC-Chapel Hill, UC San Diego, and Yale University. She is currently at work on an ethnographic monograph about the globalization of the concept of disability access in post-Soviet Russia. Dr. Hartblay’s publications appear in journals including American Ethnologist, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Current Anthropology.
Dr. Hartblay teaches Introduction to Disability Studies, Global Disability Studies, Documentary & Memoir Workshop, and other courses in disability studies and health humanities in the Department of Health & Society at UTSC. At the graduate level, Dr. Hartblay teaches Disability Anthropology, Anthropology of Gender & Sexuality, and other courses.
Keywords: disability studies; Russia; postsocialism; theatre; performance ethnography; anthropology
[Image description: Portrait color photo from the mid-chest up. Dr. Hartblay is standing on a beach on a cold and overcast day wearing a grey wool coat, black sweater, and gold earrings. Their hair is short on the sides and long and swoopy medium brown on top. They are smiling just a little bit so that you can see dimples but not teeth]
Devon Healey
Assistant Professor, Disability Studies Department of Social Justice Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto
Devon Healey is an Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. All of her work is grounded in her experience as a blind woman guided by a desire to show how blindness specifically and disability more broadly can be understood as offering an alternate form of perception and is thus, a valuable and creative way of experiencing and knowing the world. She is the author of, Dramatizing Blindness: Disability Studies as Critical Creative Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Devon is an award-winning actor and the co-founder of, Peripheral Theatre. In 2020 she was awarded a commission by Outside the March (Dora award-winning Toronto theatre company) to both write and perform in, Rainbow on Mars, a sensory reclamation of blindness. Her publications include:
Chapters, Peer Reviewed
Healey, D. (2022). Blind perception: DisAppearing blindness . . . with a twist. In, T. Titchkosky, E.Cagulada and M. DeWelles (Eds.), DisAppearing DisAbility: Encounters in Disability Studies.Canadian Scholars/Women’s Press. https://canadianscholars.ca/book/disappearing/
Healey, D., & Titchkosky, T. (2022). Primal scene: Goffman and disability studies. In, Jacobsen Hviid, M., & Smith, G. (Eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of Goffman studies. Routledge.https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-International-Handbook-of-GoffmanStudies/Jacobsen-Smith/p/book/9780367750718
Healey, D. (2022). Sighted blindness consultants and the manyness of blindness. In, Bolt, D. (Ed.), Finding blindness: International constructions and deconstructions. Routledge Autocritical Disability Studies Series. https://www.routledge.com/Finding-Blindness-International-Constructions-andDeconstructions/Bolt/p/book/9781032229928
Healey, D., & Michalko, R. (2021). The Metanarrative of blindness in North America: Meaning, feeling, and feel. In, Bolt, D. (Ed.), The Metanarratives of disability: Culture and the normativesocial order. Advances in Disability Series, Routledge Press.https://www.routledge.com/Metanarratives-of-Disability-Culture-Assumed-Authority-and-the-Normative/Bolt/p/book/9780367523190
Article Publications, Peer Reviewed
Healey, D. (2022). Eye contact and the performative touch of blindness. Performance Research 27(2) On Touch. pp.56-63. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2022.2117362
Healey, D. (2022). The Accessibility of the language of blindness and its rapport with sight: Immersive descriptive audio and Rainbow on Mars. PUBLIC: Art, Culture, Ideas. Vol. 33(66). pp. 130 142. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/public_00127_1
Healey, D., and Esteban, M. (2022). The Breath and movement of blindness. Liminalities: A Journal of performance studies. 12(2). http://liminalities.net/18-2/breath.html Titchkosky, T., Healey, D., and Michalko, R. (2019). Understanding blindness simulation and the culture of sight. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 13(2). pp. 123-139. https://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/jlcds.2018.47
Healey, D. (2017). Eyeing the pedagogy of trouble: The cultural documentationof theproblem-subject.Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 6(1). pp. 85-104. *1st Place winner of the Canadian Disability Studies Graduate Student Paper Awardhttp://cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjds/article/view/334
Book Reviews, Peer Reviewed
Healey, D. (2020). Book review:Blindness through the looking glass: The Performance of blindness,gender and the sensory body by Gili Hammer.London School of Economics (LSE) Review ofBooks. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2020/05/29/book-review-blindness-through-the-looking-glass-the-performance-of-blindness-gender-and-the-sensory-body-by-gili-hammer/
Keywords: Disability Studies, Blindness, Theatre and Drama, Perception, Autoethnography
Links:
Twitter – @DevonKHealey
Peripheral Theatre – https://peripheraltheatre.com
Academia.edu – https://utoronto.academia.edu/DevonHealey
Research Gate – https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Devon_Healey2
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/feed/
Research Overview Disability studies marks the occasion for all of us to engage with the intrigue of disability. I approach disability, including my own blindness, as the dynamic life of performance. As such, disability studies allows us to socially locate instances of disability in the theatre of everyday life. Social actors, disabled and non-disabled actors alike, participate in this theatre to create a multi-version image of disability. My work aims at unravelling this multi-image character of disability and to reveal critical and creative ways of reimagining disability – imagining blindness as perception rather than distortion, for example. I make use of phenomenology together with various critical fields of inquiry such as Indigenous Studies, Black Studies and Queer Studies as a way to develop a performative and theatrical sense of disability. Finally, my work is consciously committed to the cultivation of Blind Studies as a legitimate form of inquiry.
[Image description: Devon has medium brown shoulder-length hair that has a slight wave to it in this photo. She has blue eyes and white skin. Her head is slightly titled down with her eyes raised looking directly toward the camera. The photo is a tight shot of Devon’s face and shoulders]
Nancy Johnston
Associate Professor, Teaching, in The Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and Women’s and Gender Studies at UTSC
Nancy Johnston is a writer, fibre artist, and Women’s and Gender studies professor at UTSC. For the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL), she develops writing support across the disciplines, and I teach courses in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her areas of research interest are writing pedagogy and inclusive design, disability advocacy in Canada, and disability arts and writing. Her most recent publication explores responses of Canadian disability arts organizations to the pandemic, “Rethinking Access” (2020) for Studio Magazine: Craft and Design: https://www.studiomagazine.ca/issues/2019/vol-15-no-2
As a coordinator and in CTL, she designs teaching resources for faculty to support dialogue on inclusive design in higher education. She has co-presented workshops and campus events to support new teaching faculty and TAs on inclusive practice in the classroom. She co-authored with Tina Doyle, director of AccessAbility Services, on student perspectives on inclusive pedagogy. Johnston, Nancy, and Tina Doyle. 2011. “Inclusive Teaching: Perspectives of Students with Disabilities.” Open Words: Access and English Studies 5.1: 53 – 60. https://uwaterloo.ca/english/sites/ca.english/files/uploads/files/open_words-spring_2011.pdf
Her course Gender and Disability (WSTC40), launched in 2010, is an introduction to disability advocacy with an intersectional perspective on human rights and social justice movements, and disability representation and media. My courses integrate opportunities for students to explore creativity as a tool for self-expression and advocacy and research on disability arts. https://rethink.utoronto.ca/student-mental-health-advocacy-in-the-classroom/
Keywords: disability advocacy, disability arts, access and inclusion, inclusive teaching and design
Contact: Nancy.johnston@utoronto.ca
[Image description: a light-skinned white woman with short red hair wearing cat-eye purple glasses looks into the camera. She is smiling with laugh lines around her eyes. Her partially visible a grey dress has a design of small blue typewriters.]
Gyuzel Kamalova
PhD Student, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto
Gyuzel entered a PhD program in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at the University of Toronto in 2019. She completed her MA in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver and MA in Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her PhD research focuses on disability diagnosis and implications diagnosis has for people with disabilities in their everyday lives in highly medicalized post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Her research interests include critical disability studies, care, post-socialism, ethnographic fiction, performative ethnography and feminist ethnography.
Her doctoral research focuses on cognitive disability diagnosis in highly medicalized post-Socialist context.
Keywords: disability, Kazakhstan, Central Asia, stigma, institutionalization, care, post-Soviet
[Image description: A picture of Gyuzel outside by a lake on a sunny Fall day. She has brown straight mid-length hair. She wears a green parka over a white sweater and a grey jacket. Her head is turned slightly to the left]
Vanessa Maloney
PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto
Vanessa Maloney is a fourth year PhD candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at the University of Toronto who has conducted ethnographic research with disabled adults and care services in the Cook Islands, as well as past projects in New Zealand and Tonga. Vanessa’s current work traces how networks of care are carved out within global flows of power, people, and money, and how these care economies unevenly shape disability experiences globally. This work draws on critical disability studies, feminist theories of care and anthropological understandings of interdependency to look at how care is negotiated within the constraints of global capitalism and neocolonialism.
Selected teaching and research interests: feminist and anthropological theories of care; global critical disability studies; the Pacific region; anthropology of exchange and personhood; cross cultural studies of ageing
[Image description: photo shows a person with short curly brown hair, light skin and blue eyes with a bright blue T-shirt standing in front of a sunny backdrop of green foliage]
Anne McGuire
Associate Professor, program for Critical Studies in Equity and Solidarity at New College, University of Toronto
Professor McGuire’s areas of teaching and research draw on anti-racist and decolonial theories in disability studies, queer/crip theory, child studies, and feminist science and technology studies to study the structural and material conditions of human vitality and precarity. Her current research traces the emergence of broad spectrum approaches to health and illness and reads these against the backdrop of neoliberal social and economic policies. Professor McGuire’s 2016 monograph, War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence (University of Michigan Press), was awarded the 2015 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities. She is the recipient of the June Larkin Award for Pedagogical Development and U of T’s Early Career Teaching Award for her work advancing accessibility in post-secondary classrooms. She is also the co-author of We Move Together (AK Press, 2021), a children’s book on disability, access, and community.
Keywords: critical disability studies; sociology of the body; child studies; queer and crip theory; pedagogy and accessibility; sociology of mental health and illness
[Image description: Anne is smiling to the camera, wearing glasses, red lipstick, and a black shirt.]
Aparna Raghu Menon
PhD Student, Social and Behavioural Health Sciences, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto
Pronouns: she/her
Aparna Raghu is currently a PhD candidate at the Social and Behavioural Health Sciences at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. Her research on autism and autistic non-verbal communication is oriented through a disability studies and social justice framework. Influenced by disability arts and culture, communication theory, posthumanism and feminist-queer theory, Aparna’s dissertation project examines the norms and assumptions that underpin medicalized approaches to non-verbal communication. In doing so, she hopes to open up space within disability studies for an exploration of autistic communication that takes into account the materiality of communication, relational embodiment, the environment and the perspectives of autistic communicators.
Keywords: disability studies, autism, autistic communication, critical and creative interpretive methods
E-mail: aparna.menon@mail.utoronto.ca
[Image Description: A brown-skinned woman with black shoulder-length hair and dark brown eyes is looking at the camera. She is wearing a white blouse, a grey hoodie and a necklace with sky-blue beads and a silver coin. She is standing in front of a dresser that holds a blue and white vase and two ceramic cats.]
Adrianna Michell
PhD candidate, Department of English Literature, University of Toronto
Pronouns: she/her
Adrianna completed her MA in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory at McMaster University. Adrianna’s SSHRC-funded dissertation addresses temporality in contemporary North American fiction via the intersecting fields of disability studies and ecocriticism, or what can be termed eco-crip theory. Her past research in the digital humanities and critical health humanities informs her current interests in literary and cultural representations of non-normative bodyminds and environments. Outside of her academic work, Adrianna contributes to ongoing work in anti-oppression and sexual violence prevention in the student community.
Keywords: critical disability studies, contemporary fiction, eco-criticism, eco-crip theory, crip time
[Image description: Adrianna, a white woman, stands outside backgrounded by an iron gate and brick wall. She is photographed from the waist up and is smiling while turned away to look to the side of the camera. She has long auburn hair and wears a blue and purple blouse.]
David Pettinicchio
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto Mississauga
I am an Associate Professor of Sociology and affiliated faculty in the Munk School working at the intersection of politics and inequality. I am specifically interested in the interaction between disability, politics and policy, and the production of labour market, wealth, and health inequality. Some of my more recently published papers include Trading Blame: Drawing Boundaries around the Righteous, Deserving and Vulnerable in Times of Crisis in Sociology, Findings from an online survey on the mental health effects of COVID-19 on Canadians with disabilities and chronic health conditions in Disability and Health Journal, and “Hierarchies of Categorical Disadvantage: Economic Insecurity at the Intersection of Disability, Gender, and Race” in Gender & Society. I am author of the book, Politics of Empowerment (Stanford University Press, 2019), and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Disability (Oxford University Press, 2023)
Key words: politics; policy; inequality; health
[Image description: Colour headshot of a white male with dark, medium-to-long hair, and facial hair]
Hannah Quinn
PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology & Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto
Hannah is a 4th year PhD Candidate in Anthropology and Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. She is working with intellectually disabled adults in Montréal, Québec to build consent cultures and dismantle ableism. Hannah is currently ‘in the field’ where she is conducting ethnographic research at day centres that provide social and education services to the anglophone disability community in Montréal. By focusing on presumptions about (in)capacity to consent, Hannah’s research explores the disproportionate levels of sexualized violence and ableism experienced by intellectually disabled adults, the regulation of their intimate and lives, and the limits of the consent model for solving the problem of sexual and structural violence. Her work emerges at the intersection of anthropology, disability justice, and queer studies. As an applied anthropologist, Hannah is committed to community-driven work, feminist research methods, and accessibility as a research and interpersonal ethic. Hannah is also an educator and facilitator with expertise in sex education, consent practices, and accessibility.
Key words: ethnography; ableism; intellectual disability; intimacy & sexuality; ethics of consent; settler colonialism
Email: Hannah.quinn@mail.utoronto.ca
[Image description: A white women with short curly red hair smiles at the camera. She is wearing a brown and black leopard print silk shirt. The trees in the background are autumnal yellow and green leaves]
Tim Ross
Scientist, Bloorview Research Institute, Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital
Assistant Professor (Status), Department of Geography & Planning and the Rehabilitation Sciences Institute, University of Toronto
Tim Ross, PhD, RPP, MCIP, is a Scientist and Director of the Engagement and Planning for Inclusive Communities Lab (i.e., EPIC Lab) within the Bloorview Research Institute at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital. He is also an Assistant Professor (Status) in the Department of Geography & Planning and the Rehabilitation Sciences Institute at the University of Toronto. Tim’s research is focused on understanding the experiences and critical perspectives of families living with childhood disability and using their input to help advance more diverse and inclusive communities. His research examines a range of topics, including transportation and mobility, inclusive play, housing, institutional ableism, access to education, and access to paediatric health care. Questions about experiences of disability, the normalcy of ableism, and how they relate to the planning and design of our built environments, services, and systems are central to Tim’s research.
Tim holds a PhD in Planning from the University of Toronto and is a Registered Professional Planner with private sector consulting experience in land use planning and international master planning.
Keywords: childhood disability, inclusive play, transportation, institutional ableism, education access, pediatric health care access
Email: tross@hollandbloorview.ca
[image description: Tim, a white man with short light brown hair, is smiling. He is wearing glasses, a white collared shirt, and a navy sport coat.]
Andrea Marie Whiteley (Matishak)
PhD
Pronouns: She/Her
Dr. Whiteley received her PhD from the University of Calgary in Communication Studies. Andrea is currently a postdoctoral fellow for the PROUD Project (Phenomenological Research/Remedies on (Un)Employment & Disability (PROUD) Project, working with Dr. Chloe Atkins, at the University of Toronto. As a caregiver of a person with a disability, she is passionate about improving the quality of life for people with disabilities. Andrea and Chloe were recently awarded a SSHRC Connections grant to produce podcasts with the participants from the PROUD Project. The PROUD research team considers the sharing of research results with participants and the public extremely important. We believe that knowledge mobilization efforts should be ongoing throughout the life of a research project, rather than something done at the end as an afterthought. We are also grateful for funding from the CGDS for this podcast project entitled “Broadcastability.”
Dr. Whiteley’s extensive research expertise focuses on open access to social sciences research and the public good, knowledge mobilization and research impacts. Her dissertation addressed the importance of open access to social sciences and humanities research for people outside of academia working in social sciences and humanities related fields. She has also written about climate change fiction and has participated in many qualitative research projects in the fields of communication, health and the environment. She has worked previously as a research coordinator for the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Communication and Culture (currently the Department of Communication, Media and Film) and has many years of research grant writing experience. Andrea has recently completed a post-doctoral internship project at Simon Fraser University evaluating the Community Scholars Program that allows community-based and non-profit organizations to access academic research. This project was funded by Mitacs and the United Way of the Lower Mainland and supervised by Dr. Juan Alperin, Director of the ScholCommLab at SFU.
[Image description: Andrea is a white, middle-aged woman that is smiling. She has light brown shoulder-length hair and green eyes. Behind her is a painting of the sunrise over the ocean. She is wearing a pink sweater and a silver chain around her neck.]
Katherine Schaap Williams
Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Toronto
Dr. Williams is a scholar of literature and performance whose research and teaching focuses on early modern English drama, critical disability studies, and performance theory. Her forthcoming book, Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater (Cornell UP, 2021), explores how disability becomes a lightning rod for the theater’s work with the body of the actor—and how theatrical performance, in plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Rowley, Dekker, and others, changes how we think about disability.
She has published essays and book chapters about Richard III as a “dismodern” subject (Disability Studies Quarterly); the vibrant early modern concept of deformity (English Studies); the temporality of cure in early modern medicine and theological ritual (Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body); the character of Cripple and early modern disability in the unattributed play The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607) (English Literary History); the rhetoric of disability in the early modern theater (Early Theatre); and an overview of critical disability studies for Shakespeare scholars (The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism). She edited the 1605 play Eastward Ho, by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, for The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama (2020).
She has also written an article for the British Library “Discovering Literature: Shakespeare” resource (“Richard III and the Staging of Disability”) and she wrote the programme note “Representations of Richard,” for the Donmar Warehouse production of Teenage Dick by Mike Lew, which premiered in London in 2019. She is currently at work on essays about dramatic character, repetition, and disability in modern performance, and is beginning a new project on disability and early modern discourses of sovereignty.
Research keywords: Shakespeare and early modern drama, Critical disability studies, Performance theory, Renaissance history of medicine
Email: ks.williams@utoronto.ca
[Image description: a white woman with short brown hair and glasses, wearing a black dress and colorful necklace, smiles at the camera. She stands on grass, under a tree, in front of a building of brick and glass]
Tanya Titchkosky
Professor, Department of Social Justice Education, OISE, University of Toronto
Dr. Tanya Titchkosky is Professor in Social Justice Education at OISE teaching and writing in the area of disability studies for more than 20 years. Her books include Disability, Self, and Society, as well as, Reading and Writing Disability Differently and The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning. She is also co-editor with Rod Michalko of Rethinking Normalcy: A Disability Studies Reader. Tanya works from the position that whatever else disability is, it is tied up with the human Imagination — interpretive relations steeped in unexamined conceptions of “normalcy. Pursing an interpretive version of disability studies that questions Western ways of knowing, Tanya relies on critical approaches such as phenomenology influenced by Black, Queer and Indigenous Studies. Following this work, she hopes to reveal the restricted imaginaries that surround our lives with disability, especially in University settings. This approach is throughout Tanya’s work including courses, such as, such as “Disability Studies and the Human Imaginary,” “The Cultural Production of the Self as a Problem,” as well as “Disability Studies: Interpretive Methods.” Tanya’s research is aided by an Insight SSHRC grant, “Reimaging the Appearance and Disappearance of Disability in the Academy”.
In 2019, Tanya she was the recipient of the OISE Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award. In 2014 she was awarded The Canadian Disability Studies Association-Association Canadienne des Études sur Le Handicap, Tanis Doe Award for Canadian Disability Study and Culture.
https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/sje/People/1995/Tanya_Titchkosky.html
A few recent publications include:
The Bureacratic Making of Disability in New Formations https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/new-formations/100-101/the-bureaucratic-making-of-disability
Disability Studies in Education with Maddy DeWelles in Journal of Disability Studies in Education https://brill.com/view/journals/jdse/aop/issue.xml
The Educated Sensorium and the Inclusion of Disabled People as Excludable. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 21(1), pp. 282–290. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/sjdr.596
The Cost of Counting Disability: Theorizing the Possibility of a Non-Economic Remainder,” Critical Readings in Interdisciplinary Disability Studies: (Dis)Assemblages, Edited by Linda Ware. New York, New York: Springer. 25-40. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35309-4
Blindness: A Cultural History of Blindnesswith Rod Michalko in Cultural History of Disability in the 20th Century: Volume 6 edited by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, DOI: 10.5040/9781350029323.ch-005
Keywords: Disability Studies; Interpretive methods; Cultural Studies; Sociology of Knowledge
Email: tanya.titchkosky@utoronto.ca
[Image description: Logo for Reimagining Disability in gold and turquois.]
Walter Rafael Villanueva
PhD Student, Department of English, University of Toronto
Walter Rafael Villanueva is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and holds research positions at the Centre for Global Disability Studies and the Department of Health & Society at the University of Toronto. Using a critical disability studies and mad studies framework, his work explores the metaphorization of madness in contemporary Canadian memoirs and novels written by racialized authors.
Research interests: post-WWII Canadian literature, critical disability studies, mad studies, history of psychiatry in Canada
Email: walter.villanueva@mail.utoronto.ca
[Image Description: Walter, a Filipino-Cuban man with shaggy, curly brown hair, smiles meekly in a red hoodie.]
Zoë H Wool
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto Mississauga
Zoë H Wool is assistant professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, where she teaches courses on topics ranging from the anthropology of toxicity to gender and disability. Professor Wool’s work spans anthropology, disability studies, queer theory, and feminist science and technology studies, with a focus on the materialities of post-9/11 warmaking and military harm and the tyrannies of normativity in the contemporary United States. Her first book After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed (Duke UP, 2015) is an ethnography of ordinariness among injured US military members and the family members that live with them as their bodies are medically stabilized. Among other things, it tracks the encounter between disability and heteronormative masculinity, and intimacy in a context freighted with national significance. Professor Wool is currently working on three new book projects, including The Significance of Others, a collection of ethnographic essays about experiments and inequities in disability worldmaking which creates traffic between veteran worlds and queer disability work. For more on her research, see www.zoewool.com. You can read some of her other disability-related work here [https://anthrodendum.org/2018/08/13/check-your-syllabus-101-disability-access-statements/] and here [http://somatosphere.net/2014/life-support.html/].
Keywords: anthropology; critical disability studies; gender and sexuality; toxicity; US military
Email: zoe.wool@utoronto.ca
[Image Description: Black and white photo of a white person with short curly hair, nose and ear piercings, and blocky glasses. The person is standing next to a palm plant in front of a wooden fence bedecked with a string of lights. She smiles and looks sideways at the camera while gesturing to the black text on her light grey shirt. It reads: ” ‘All these crackers…and no soup’ Dr. Bianca Lauriano #CiteBlackWomen.” ]
Alumni
Elaine Cagulada
Alumni, Department of Social Justice Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto
SSHRC postdoctoral fellow, Department of Gender Studies, Queen’s University.
Dr. Elaine Cagulada researches and writes in the fields of disability studies, black studies, and sociology, and she also teaches in these areas. Animated by a will to notice the magic of interpretation, Elaine’s work is concerned with stories as sites of containment and possibility. Indebted to the wisdom of Black, Indigenous, racialized, queer, disabled/Mad storytellers, she understands the urgency of rupturing and disturbing carceral logics and enclosures through the constitutive force of narrative. Heeding this call nourishes dreams of being together through, with, and in disability differently. Currently, Elaine is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at Queen’s University where she explores stories of race and disability as un/told through the memorialization of Canada’s carceral institutions.
Keywords: interpretive disability studies; philosophies of race; deafness; policing; carceral practices
Email: elaine.cagulada@mail.utoronto.ca
[Image description: A person is standing and smiling with their hands tucked into their back pockets. Their head is slightly turned away from the camera.]
Efrat Gold
Alumni, Department of Social Justice Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto
Post-Doc Fellow, York University
Dr Efrat Gold is a postdoctoral fellow at York University, engaging in mad and disability studies. Using interpretive and critical theory and methods, Gold critiques the psy-complex, moving toward contextualized and relational understandings of suffering, crisis, and distress, and foregrounding those most vulnerable and marginalized by psychiatric power, discourse, and treatments. Her scholarship focuses on constructions of psychiatric legitimacy that naturalize and reproduce medicalized understandings of human suffering, thereby casting off all other possibilities. Through explorations of norms and meaning-making, Gold unsettles psychiatric ideology by unearthing the present absences of those deemed mad and exploring life-affirming possibilities for mad inclusion. Gold’s publications appear in scholarly and community venues, indicating her commitment to producing research and pedagogy that is accessible to and includes mad and disabled people through consultation, activism, and solidarity. Using archival material and artefacts related to mad and disabled people’s history, Gold’s unique scholarly approach unearths the often-overlooked active role of mad and disabled people in pushing back against oppressive boundaries of normalcy and creating affirmative alternatives and potentials. Motivated by social justice-informed approaches to madness and disability, Gold works across difference, moving towards an emancipative politics that recognizes the entwined landscape of oppression within efforts to build different futures.
To read more on her position on psychiatry and alternative approaches see: https://health.yorku.ca/health-profiles/index.php?dept=&mid=2086118
Keywords: creative disability studies, critical dance/performance studies, improvisation, interpretive methods of research-creation, curriculum and pedagogy
[Image description: a light-skinned person with medium-length wavy brown hair and clear-framed glasses looks at the camera, smiling slightly, wearing a white shirt and pin-striped blazer. The background is blurred graffiti in an alleyway, with the sun shining through]
Celeste Pang
Alumni, Department of Anthropology , University of Toronto
Associate Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies, Mount Royal University.
Celeste is a sociocultural and medical anthropologist whose research, education, and community work focus on aging, disability, and care access and equity, with significant focus on 2SLGBTQIA+ issues. Celeste completed a PhD and Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Anthropology and was a Graduate Student Research Assistant Fellow and Program Coordinator at CGDS. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies at Mount Royal University.
Key words: aging; disability; care; consent and capacity; gender and sexuality; ethics; ethnography
Website: https://celestepang.ca/
Email: ncpang@mtroyal.ca
[Image description: A tan skinned person with short dark hair smiles into the camera. They are wearing a dark green blazer and standing outside against a dark blue textured wall.]
Lesley A. Tarasoff
Almuni, Department of Health and Society, University of Toronto
Program Manager, Provincial Council for Maternal and Child Health
Pronouns: She/her
Lesley A. Tarasoff, PhD, completed a CIHR-funded Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in summer 2023 (Department of Health and Society, University of Toronto Scarborough; and, Azrieli Adult Neurodevelopmental Centre, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health). Under the supervision of Dr. Hilary Brown, she led the qualitative component of a NIH-funded project on the perinatal health of women with disabilities in Ontario as well as engaged in research on the preconception health and reproductive life plans of women with disabilities.
She holds a PhD in Public Health Sciences, with a specialization in women’s health, from the University of Toronto. Primarily drawing on qualitative methodologies, her program of research aims to understand and address disparities and inequities in reproductive and perinatal health and health care experiences among often-stigmatized and marginalized populations, notably women with disabilities and sexual minority women. You can read more about her research here: http://www.latarasoff.com
Keywords: Community-based research; disability; feminist disability studies; health equity; LGBTQ health; perinatal health; qualitative research; reproductive health
Email: lesley.tarasoff@utoronto.ca
Twitter: @latarasoff
[Image description: A head shot of a light-skinned woman, with green eyes and long brown hair, who is wearing brown glasses, bright pink-red lipstick, and a maroon shirt. She is smiling but no teeth are showing. A brick wall covered in green ivy is visible but out of focus in the background