Graduate Student Summer Research Fellows

Tania Ruiz-Chapman (PhD Student, Social Justice Education, OISE) and Walter Villanueva (PhD Candidate, Department of English) received the 2023 Summer Research Fellowship from the Centre for Global Disability Studies.  

Ruiz-Chapman’s dissertation presents a sociological analysis of migrant labour and disability. Incorporating critical race theory, Marxist theory, and critical disability studies, Ruiz-Chapman argues that the social conditions of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program systematically disable and compromise the health of many temporary foreign workers. Ruiz-Chapman led a public roundtable featuring activists and scholars working on this topic as part of the CGDS Critical Conversations series in May 2023.  

Villanueva explores representations of Asian Canadian experiences of madness in contemporary Canadian literature. In a dissertation chapter prepared over the summer of 2023, Villanueva analyzes Larissa Lai’s novel Salt Fish Girl through a mad studies lens, to examine how non-Western logics of neurodiverse experience coexist with medical diagnosis in the novel. This contributes to his larger dissertation project of exploring how narratives of ‘overcoming’ mental illness, and representations of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the standard medical and psychiatric text for diagnosing mental illness), appear in contemporary Canadian literary texts written by racialized authors.  

Ruiz-Chapman and Villanueva shared outcomes of their summer research projects with graduate students and faculty in the Centre for Global Disability Studies Core Lab in early fall.  

The CGDS Summer Research Fellowship is designed to support UofT graduate students conducting critical, anti-colonial, anti-ableist disability studies research. Each year, awardees are granted $5,000.00 each to support summer research endeavors that further the completion of the dissertation, either writing or supplemental research not covered by other funding. The Centre for Global Disability Studies is dedicated to promoting global, transnational, anticolonial disability studies at the University of Toronto and beyond.  

[Image description: photo of CGDS Summer Fellowship awardee Tania Ruiz-Chapman]

[Image description: photo of CGDS Summer Fellowship awardee, Walter Villaneuva]