Critical Conversations

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