Critical Conversations

Date: Tuesday, October 15, 2pm – 4pm EST

Session Overview:

The concept of crip time circulates widely in disability studies and disability advocacy communities. This panel attends to the way that thinking with the concept of crip time offers compelling provocations for the study of literature, especially narrative temporality and formal qualities of fictional texts. 

Panelists:

• Crystal Yin Lie (Cal State Long Beach)
• Drew McEwan (TMU)
• Adrianna Michell (UofT)
• Sami Schalk (UW Madison)

Moderator:

• Katherine Williams (UofT)

Host:

• Aparna Nair (UTSC) 

Full Bios

Moderator: Dr. Katherine Williams is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. Her work has appeared in English Literary History, English Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, Early Theatre, Shakespeare Bulletin, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and several edited collections. She edited Chapman, Jonson, and Marston’s 1605 play Eastward Ho for The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama (2020) and is currently editing Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part 2 (Cambridge). Her monograph, Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater (Cornell University Press, 2021), was shortlisted for the ASTR Barnard Hewitt Award and the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award, and received Honorable Mentions for the MRDS David Bevington Award and the ATHE Outstanding Book Award. With Gregg Mozgala and Kim Weild, she is Co-Artistic Lead of The Apothetae residency at The Public Theater (NYC), which foregrounds the virtuosity of Deaf and disabled artists and theater-makers through Shakespeare’s plays.

Host: Aparna Nair is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough, at the Department for Health and Society/Center for Global Disability Studies. From 2015 to the end of 2022, she worked as Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma-Norman, in the History of Science department. Her upcoming book “Fungible Bodies” (2024) with the University of Illinois Press’ Disability Histories examines the relationship between disability and colonialism in British India. Professor Nair also works on the histories of technologies for disabled people (vision aids, hearing aids, prosthetics, etc); the histories of vaccination and quarantine in India; the material histories of vaccination (specifically the history of the vaccination certificate); and also work on the changing representations of disability and difference in popular culture. She also builds exhibits as part of her public history/humanities work.

Panelists: Dr. Drew McEwan is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Mellon Foundation-funded Communities of Care project at the University at Buffalo. She researches and writes on rhetorical and cultural representations of madness, disability, and queerness from a position of lived experience. Her academic work has appeared in The Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, and the anthology Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health. She is also the author of the poetry collections Repeater, If Pressed, and Tours, Variously (forthcoming, 2025).

Adrianna Michell is a PhD candidate in the department of English at the University of Toronto and a Research Assistant Fellow with the Centre for Global Disability Studies. Her research concerns disability, Madness, the environment, and temporality in contemporary American and Canadian fiction. She previously completed her BA in English & Cultural Studies and MA in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory at McMaster University. Her publications include work in Media, Culture & Society and the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (forthcoming). 

Dr. Sami Schalk is a professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on disability, race and gender in contemporary American literature and culture. She is the author of Bodyminds Reimagined (2018) and Black Disability Politics (2022), both available free open access from Duke University Press.

Crystal Yin Lie is Assistant Professor of Comparative World Literature at California State University Long Beach and previously received her PhD from the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. Her current research focuses on dementia in contemporary literature and life writing as well as disability in comics and graphic narratives. Her recent work can be found in The Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, and Graphic Medicine (University of Hawai’i Press). She was also co-editor of Sex, Identity, Aesthetics: The Work of Tobin Siebers and Disability Studies (U. Michigan Press) and is currently co-editing a volume on disability in comics.

Date: Thursday, October 17, 2pm – 3:30pm EST

Session Overview:

This panel conversation will offer an introductory conversation to the richness and complexity of a/Autistic non-verbal communication. The focus of the conversation will be on what the panelists wish neurotypical and neurodiverse people and anyone else knew about ‘communication’ – -about what it feels like and means. In a relational act of resistance, the panel will trace acts of communication across academia and poetry, slowly exploring how communication is perceived and experienced by people living with autism / Autistic people. 

Panelists:

• Dr. Aparna Nair (UTSC) 

• Sid Ghosh (Autistic poet), he/him 

• Dr. Vaishnavi Sarathy, PhD (Educator and advocate), she/her 

• Aparna Raghu Menon (UofT), she/her 

Moderator:

• Dr. Tanya Titchkosky, PhD (UofT), she/her 

Host:

• TBD

Full Bios

Moderator: Tanya Titchkosky is a Disability Studies Professor in the Department of Social Justice Education in OISE at the University of Toronto since 2006. Her books include Disability, Self, and Society, as well as Reading and Writing Disability Differently and The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning. Tanya works to understand the ways that disability is tied to the human imagination.  This orientation is reflected in her co-edited collection DisAppearing: Encounters in Disability Studies   (2022) in which Sid Ghosh’s poem, “Tuning goes Frig” is published. Tanya’s research and teaching engages Black, Queer and Critical Indigenous Studies as ways to reveal the restricted imaginaries that influence every day, bureaucratic, medical and other disability encounters.  Her work is support by a SSHRC, by the Wellcome Trust, and by an Institute for Pandemic grant.

Host: TBD

Panelists: Sid Ghosh is a levitator of language, easy in his style, fast in his lie, and light in his tale. He is also a poet, not by choice, but by accident. Just your autistic boy-next-door with Down Syndrome. He is 17 for now. His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine and two chapbooks: Give a Book (Push Press, 2022) and Proceedings of the Full Moon Rotary Club (State Champs of San Francisco, 2023). Sid lives in Portland, Oregon and you can find him at www.instagram.com/downlikesid. Sometimes he struggles to find himself, though. 

Vaish Sarathy, Ph.D. is a Learning Strategist and Math/Science Educator. She works with kids with disabilities using principles derived from her decade of experience – she calls this Non Linear Education. Her mission is to reframe health and learning for children with disabilities.  Her perspective is shaped by her autistic, non-speaking 17 year old son Sid who also has Down Syndrome and is a published poet and author. Vaish hosts a podcast – Non Linear Learning – where she interviews thought leaders from Education, Learning, Functional Medicine, as well as Disabled people using alternative non-speech communication. She believes that Sound Nutrition and an Equal Education are the birthright of every child.

Aparna Nair is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough, at the Department for Health and Society/Center for Global Disability Studies. From 2015 to the end of 2022, she worked as Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma-Norman, in the History of Science department. Her upcoming book “Fungible Bodies” (2024) with the University of Illinois Press’ Disability Histories examines the relationship between disability and colonialism in British India. Professor Nair also works on the histories of technologies for disabled people (vision aids, hearing aids, prosthetics, etc); the histories of vaccination and quarantine in India; the material histories of vaccination (specifically the history of the vaccination certificate); and also work on the changing representations of disability and difference in popular culture. She also builds exhibits as part of her public history/humanities work.

Aparna Raghu Menon 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.

Date: May 10^th 2023, 3:00-4:30pm EST / 12:00-1:30pm PST 

Session Overview:

Pilipinx/Filipinx Studies presents a way to critically engage the question of “the global” within Disability Studies. In turn, Disability Studies invites Pilipinx/Filipinx communities to reinterpret our diasporic movements and gestures. How might bringing together these two orientations offer theoretical spaces to reveal the imperial and colonial intimacies that shape diasporic being? How could work committed to weaving together these two orientations create the embodied spaces to release different intimacies of crip becomings? This panel conversation brings together a group of Pilipinx/Filipinx scholars, educators, artists, and activists engaging within Disability Studies to explore what a Pilipinx Disability Studies could work and dream toward.

Panelists: 

• Dr. Sony Coráñez Bolton (he/him/his), Assistant Professor, of Spanish and Latinx and Latin American Studies, Amherst College 

• Dr. Pau Abustan, Ph.D. (they/siya), Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, California State University, Los Angeles 

• Walter Rafael Villanueva (he/him), PhD Candidate, Department of English, University of Toronto 

• Jose Miguel (Miggy) Esteban (he/him), PhD Student, Department of Social Justice Education, OISE, University of Toronto 

Moderator:

• Elaine Cagulada (she/her), PhD Candidate, Department of Social Justice Education, OISE, University of Toronto 

Host:

• Hilary Brown, Interim Director CGDS,  Assistant Professor, Department of Health & Society & Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto

Date: May 25th, 7:00-8:30pm EST

Session Overview:
This panel engages with disability and disablement in the context of those who lack status in Canada. We will be examining the various dynamics that put undocumented communities at a high risk of acquiring disability. Our panel brings together academic analysis, lived experience and legal expertise to discuss the history and experience of indefinite detention. We will question how disability and dynamics of disablement are human rights issues, as well as what recourses undocumented detainees can access after they become disabled at the hands of the state (either through direct violence and/or neglect). This event will be empowering and educational! 

Panelists: 

• Kyon Ferril (he/him): artist, activist, Migrant and prisoner justice community organizer and educator.  
• Tania Ruiz-Chapman (she/her): PhD student in the Social Justice Education Program at OISE. 
• Julia Sande (she/her): Juris Doctor (JD), Law, does in human rights law and policy work for Amnesty International Canada.

Moderator: 

• Lou Tam (they/them): PhD, MIT Postdoctoral Associate in Women and Gender studies, Disability, Migrant and Prisoner Justice Organizer.

Host: 

• Hilary Brown, Interim Director CGDS,  Assistant Professor, Department of Health & Society & Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto

Date: June 16th, 9:30-11:00am EST

Session Overview:

This panel brings together scholars who engage in both disability studies and anthropology, to explore what ethnography can bring to our understanding of key questions in global disability studies. Ethnographic methods and frameworks provide a unique window into disability studies, offering insight into how disability is both constructed in local contexts and caught up in global flows of power. The panelists will discuss the possibilities, compatibilities, and tensions that can arise from this disciplinary intersection, using their own ethnographic writing as a way into these issues. How can we study disability globally without feeding into universalising conceptualisations of disability? How does ethnography allow disability theorists to engage with themes such as kinship, value, and care? And how do we place everyday disability experiences in local and global structures of power?

Panelists:

• Prof. Nilika Mehrotra: Professor at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University
• Prof. Michele Friedner: Associate Professor at the Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago
• Vanessa Maloney: PhD candidate at the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto

Moderator:

• Hannah Quinn: PhD Candidate at the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto

Host:

• Hilary Brown: Interim Director CGDS,  Assistant Professor, Department of Health & Society & Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto

Date: May 25^th 10:00-11:30 am (Toronto/Eastern Standard time)

Session Overview:

What is transnational disability studies and what are the foundations needed to foster its growth? This discussion will focus on building bridges between disability studies and the global, highlighting the concepts of solidarity, multilingualism, the politics of intervention, and cultural relativism. Speakers will discuss their own efforts and projects that bring together disability studies in transnational contexts, highlighting the tensions, possibilities, and foundations of solidarity that arise through working across difference. This includes a discussion with the editors of the multilingual global section of the Review of Disability Studies journal; a research team developing a transnational multilingual archive of disability; and the role of the arts in facilitating difficult conversations. How can we begin to have difficult conversations while making space for the tensions necessary in building towards a transnational disability studies rooted in difference and solidarity? How can we push towards more careful and critical conceptualizations of the particular and the universal? How can the messy territory of developing a transnational disability studies shape the work, teaching, and allyship of disability studies scholars in the global north? Through a discussion of these topics using concrete examples, this panel invites a deep grappling with the foundations and implications of building towards global solidarity. 

Panelists:

• Efrat Gold, PhD candidate, Ontario Institue for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto

• Hemachandran Kara, Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras
• Sona Kazemi, Assistant Professor in the department of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
• Dr. Nicole Schott, Lecturer and recent PhD, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and Sociology, University of Toronto

Moderator:

• Efrat Gold, PhD candidate at the University of Toronto

Host:

• Cassandra Hartblay, Director, CGDS

Date: June 1^st, 12:00-1:30pm (Toronto/Eastern Standard time)

Session Overview:

This panel conversation will act as an introduction of sorts to abolition, decarceration, and to how conceptions of the human are wrapped up in policing disabled lives. The focus of the conversation will be on how various institutions attempt to police disability, that is by managing, correcting, regulating, and containing disabled people/bodyminds. Guiding this panel is the question, how are disability and ableism related to policing? The conversation will begin with discussing how the question of human must necessarily not appear as a question, but as something already known and determined within carceral institutions. By tracing stories of disabled lives criminalized across time and space, we will move from revealing the concept of ‘normal’ as central to institutionalization, incarceration, and policing to then asking, “How is disability studies, and its reckoning with old and new stories of disability, pivotal to the project of abolition? How do you understand abolition as necessary to pursuing disability justice?”  

Panelists:

• Idil Abdillahi, Assistant professor in the School of Disability Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU)
• Elaine Cagulada, PhD Candidate, Department of Social Justice Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

• Liat Ben-Moshe, Associate Professor, Criminology, Law and Justice, University of Illinois at Chicago (territory of the Three Fire people)

• Talila (TL) Lewis, HEARD, Executive Director; Freedom Mapping Consulting, Director

Moderator:

• Celeste Pang, CGDS Graduate Alumni member

Host:

• Cassandra Hartblay, Director, CGDS