The Roundtable on Translation explores artists’ reflections on how accessibility impacts experiences of art and art making. Co-presented in September 2020 by Bodies in Translation and ArtsEverywhere 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. 

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…

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.

Art in Translation serves to document and publish projects, exhibitions, artistic projects and research initiatives co-produced by Bodies in Translation and collaborating artists, scholars, and community members.

Using a digital platform, Art in Translation aims to provide artistic content in a range of accessible formats, including giving our readers the option to customize their viewing experience using a user interface tool designed by the Inclusive Design Research Centre at the Ontario College of Art and Design University.

Visit catalogue here: http://artintranslation.ca/

Meet Max Ferguson! Max is Tangled Art + Disability’s 2020 Curator-in-Residence. The Tangled Art + Disability Curator Residency is an opportunity for Mad, Deaf and/or Disability-identified curators to think critically about and develop accessible, crip curatorial practices through a disability cultural lens and crip aesthetics. This residency is co-developed and supported in partnership with Bodies in Translation.

Max (Sarah) Ferguson has been a practicing artist since 1996 and received his BFA from the University of Regina in 2001. He graduated with an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies (Visual Art and Women’s and Gender Studies) in 2017 and is currently pursuing his PhD in Art and Women’s and Gender Studies at York University. His artistic explorations involve disability studies, gender, non-neurotypical and trans-queer sexualities, activism, the body, surrealism, anti-colonial approaches to artmaking, and psychoanalysis. Max has worked with a variety of media, ranging from computer-based works and readymades, to paintstick, graphite, and digital collage. His practice blends high and low art approaches, and draws from a mixture of art and academic theory, pop culture, and other influences. Currently, his work revolves around hybridized notions of photography, sculpture, music, sound, installation and performance, and involves psychoanalysis, the body, activism, queer/trans theory, assumed whiteness, internalized racism and Indigeneity, and issues of madness and non neurotypical ways of being. He is also a published poet and writer, holds a degree in journalism, and has worked as a political, legal, military and arts writer in four different provinces over the past decade.

You can check out some of his work here (take care for sensitive images of bodies), and read about his work at FLOURISHING, here.

Vital Practices in the Arts is a resource guide for documenting, producing, and sharing arts and knowledge in ways that are accessible, collaborative, and disruptive. 

How to use

The guide is provided as a live google document that reflects the ongoing, evolving and emerging activities we see practiced in communities everyday. The document is tagged and screen reader friendly. You can download the document to use for professional and personal purposes.

How to contribute

The practices in this guide expand on how we can all do this work, individually and collectively. We now hand it over to you, its users, and welcome your contributions in helping to build, improve, and expand this living resource.

We envision Vital Practices as a living resource that moves and shape-shifts as you contribute to it. Our aim is for the list of authors to grow, just as we aim for vital practices to grow in and with arts and culture.  

You can contribute in audio, visual, textual, or other forms that are meaningful to how you communicate in the world. For example, you may document your accessibility processes and practices, or offer feedback on what you learned from this document, or what you feel is missing. We acknowledge that this resource is a work in progress and understand it as we do accessibility, as open to continual changes and additions.   

For any questions or expressions of interest, please contact Lindsay Fisher, Artistic Producer at Bodies in Translation: lindsay.fisher@ryerson.ca. 

Link to Vital Practices in the Arts here.

Authors

This guide is produced by Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life (BIT) with collaborating partners Tangled Art + Disability and Creative Users Projects. Our understanding of accessibility is iterative, intersectional, and led by the disability community. We seek to move accessibility beyond a logistic concern to a disability justice framework.

The first edition of this publication was written by: Eliza Chandler (Assistant Professor, School of Disability Studies, Ryerson University), Carla Rice (Professor and Director, Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice, University of Guelph), Lindsay Fisher (Artistic Producer, Bodies in Translation and Founder and Director Creative Users Projects), Tracy Tidgwell (Research Project Manager, Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice, University of Guelph), Andrea LaMarre (Lecturer, Critical Health Psychology, School of Psychology, Massey University), Nadine Changfoot (Associate Professor, Political Studies, Trent University), and Susan Dion (Associate Professor, Indigenous Education, Faculty of Education, York University).  

Full citation: Eliza Chandler, Carla Rice, Lindsay Fisher, Tracy Tidgwell, Andrea LaMarre, Nadine Changfoot, and Susan Dion, Vital Practices in the Arts, (Guelph, ON: Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice, University of Guelph, 2020). 

Pretty, Porky, and Pissed Off (PPPO) is a digital archive of Fat art and activism in Ontario. BIT has partnered with Dr. Allyson Mitchell, Associate Professor in and Graduate Program Director of the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, as well as Dr. Alison Crosby, Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, and Director of the Centre for Feminist Research at York University, on the exciting work of digitizing the art and activism of Pretty, Porky, and Pissed Off. PPPO was a feminist performance art and activist collective based in Toronto, ON from 1996-2005. Check out our Instagram page for some sneak peaks, and stay tuned for more info!

Welcome to the Bodies in Translation year-end digital collages, which compiles the art, activisms, and reflections of artists and researchers throughout the project. Using visuals, text, and audio, these collages reveal the interwoven ideas, and admired works explored by our valued collaborators and artists.

Each year, we invite artists and members of our community to respond to the question: How has your idea of access or inclusion changed in the last year?

2019-2020

2018-2019

2017-2018