We’ve all heard the phrase ‘best practices,’ but what are ‘better practices’? 

We know from principles of disability justice and Relaxed Performance that there is never one way to meet everybody’s access needs. Access requires flexibility and creativity as we figure out how to be together in supportive ways.

As many people across the world are working online, we’d like to share some of what we’ve learned about more accessible arts, activism, and communications from and with our communities. 

The following educational memes were produced in 2021 by Kayla Besse during her tenure as the Public Education Coordinator with Bodies in Translation, Creative Users Projects, and Tangled Art + Disability.

Accessible Curation

Deaf Interiors is a multidisciplinary online exhibition presenting six Deaf Canadian artists whose featured work is the culmination of a three-month online incubator.

In response to the world health crisis and to social distancing measures that exacerbate feelings of isolation, artists gathered online with facilitators Peter Owusu-Ansah and Sage Lovell to share stories, generate ideas and create work that demonstrates the interior world of Deaf culture, activism and human connection.

Presented by Creative Users Projects and Tangled Art + Disability, Deaf Interiors is a digital adaptation of Crip Interiors, a site-specific installation of grid-like arranged containers that individually and collectively highlight the ways that Deaf and disabled artists negotiate accessibility in the cityscape.

Deaf Interiors was produced by Creative Users Projects in partnership with Tangled Art + Disability, and is a Signature Project of the Cultural Hotspot, produced in partnership with the City of Toronto, with support from Bodies in Translation, Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts.

The reach of intersectionality continues to grow and resonate in a variety of fields, raising theoretical methodological and practical issues. In short, how does one “do” intersectionality in ways that honour its history and social justice aims? Knapp (2005) calls intersectionality a “fast travelling” theory with shifting meanings and applications. For Knapp, intersectionality has been reified “into a formula merely to be mentioned, being largely stripped of the baggage of concretion, of context and history.” This formula does not necessarily lead to transformative politics, but “keeps the mantra going: mention differences – and continue doing what you’ve always done.” This panel shares papers from a range of research contexts, including research in long-term care, research in knowledge translation (a field that brings empirical health research evidence to health care practice), and mad, d/Deaf and disability art. The papers uncover issues and opportunities about how intersectionality can be used to transform research praxis and knowledge-creation, and also points where it becomes diluted into supporting business as usual.

Hosted January 29th, 2021 by Women’s and Gender Studies et Recherches Féministes (WGSRF), this panel, Moderated by Claire Carter, University of Regina, includes the following three presentations:

Mapping Critical Relations for Quality in Long-Term Care Research. Presented by Katie Aubrecht, St Francis Xavier University.

‘Doing’ or ‘Using’ Intersectionality? Opportunities and Challenges in Incorporating Intersectionality into Empirical Health Research and Practice. Presented by Danielle Kasperavicius, Unity Health Toronto, and Christine Kelly, University of Manitoba.

Intersectionality through the Embodied and the Embedded: What Art Offers. Presented by Carla Rice, University of Guelph, Eliza Chandler, Ryerson University, and Nadine Changfoot, Trent University.

The Roundtable on Translation explores artists’ reflections on how accessibility impacts experiences of art and art making. Co-presented in September 2020 by ArtsEverywhere and Bodies in Translation, and co-curated by Elwood Jimmy and Tracy Tidgwell, the Translation Roundtable features a provocation by Eliza Chandler and artistic interventions by Alex Bulmer, Taeyoon Choi, Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Elwood Jimmy, Carmen Papalia, Jenelle Rouse, Gloria Swain, and Sky Stonefish. 

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Excerpt from the Introduction to the Translation Roundtable by Eliza Chandler

Disability art, a burgeoning artistic practice in Canada / this north part of Turtle Island, takes the experience of disability as a creative entry point. Drawing on the insights of disability scholar and activist Catherine Frazee (2008), not all disability art explicitly represents disability, but all of it springs from the experience, politics, and culture of disability. To fully appreciate and engage disability art requires us to directly take up and appreciate disability cultures, identities, politics, and practices…

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Continue reading Eliza Chandler’s provocation and find the artists responses to it on the Translation Roundtable page on the Arts Everywhere platform.

With employment rates among people with disabilities at less than 50 percent, and a resulting reliance on government transfers, we ask: how do people with disabilities in Canada survive, let alone thrive? People with disabilities continue to respond imaginatively by finding alternatives to paid work to sustain themselves and their families. This disjuncture between policy and lived experiences suggests an important and under-explored research area.

The Disability and Livelihoods partnership will 1) examine how livelihoods interact with diverse experiences of disability in Canada and 2) begin to develop a strong, practical, and conceptual livelihoods approach to work and families research. Partnership: This partnership brings together key national and local organizations (DisAbled Women’s Network of Canada, Canadian Council for Rehabilitation and Work, Lakeside Hope House Guelph, People and Information Network, and Accessibility Advisory Committee of Guelph), with the University of Guelph’s Centre for Families, Work and Well-being, Re-Vision: Centre for Arts and Social Justice, the Community Engaged Scholarship Institute, and researchers, to contribute to three pilot projects: volunteering, arts and artistry, young women and pre-employment supports, and a broader livelihoods framework.

The partnership focuses on three areas of livelihoods which build on the strengths of our partners, recognizing that these will help identify important questions and intentionally gather what we learn into a broader framework for understanding and using a livelihoods approach. The governance structure enables partner organizations to contribute to the leadership and intellectual direction of the partnership in addition to contributing to the pilot project most aligned with their work.

Sustainable Livelihoods: Livelihoods describe means to secure the necessities of life — through paid work, caregiving, volunteering, market gardens, fishing, artistry, among others. Livelihoods are not only the capabilities, assets, and activities required to maintain life, but also the ability to sustain these in the context of stress and shocks, over time and for future generations, and contribute benefits at the local and global levels over the short and long term.

A sustainable livelihoods framework has been developed in relation to the global South, and increasingly used in Canada to assist front-line service organizations to understand and address poverty.

Guiding Questions and Goals:

The partnership will answer questions that fill the gap between policy and lived experiences and create a sustainable livelihood framework to inform future social policy and organizational decisions.

These questions include:

How do definitions of disability shape one’s livelihoods?

How do other social locations (e.g. gender, race, immigration status, language) interact with disability to shape experiences of livelihoods?

To what extent does managing impairments affect experiences and livelihoods choices?

What are the relationships between income support and other forms of livelihoods?

Do one’s livelihoods allow them to thrive, not only survive?

How do different forms of livelihood work together to enable getting the necessities of life?

How do they work together to allow for flourishing?

How do livelihoods shape and change our understandings of culture?

How do Canadian society and economy rely on diverse livelihoods in the lives of people with disabilities (e.g. unpaid volunteering to implement accessibility legislation, unpaid caregiving by people with disabilities)?

In what ways does this reliance on unpaid livelihoods reinforce ableism in Canadian society?

How does practicing diverse livelihoods contribute to new ways of thinking about, imagining and living disability.

-PI Deborah Steinstra. 

Episode 4.22 of Secret Feminist Agenda: “Disability Art is the Last Avant-Garde,” with Sean Lee! From host Hannah McGregor: “This week I sat down virtually with Sean Lee, Director of Programming at Tangled Arts + Disability, to talk about radically accessible curation, the transformative possibilities of disability as disruption, and the exciting work of Tangled Arts and Bodies in Translation.”

Available wherever you get your podcasts. Full transcript and links to resources mentioned in the episode here.