Authors: Evadne Kelly and Carla Rice
A brief overview of gaining access to the University of Guelph’s archives to develop a co-created, multimedia and multi-sensory exhibition at the Guelph Civic Museum called Into the Light: Eugenics and Education in Southern Ontario which explored the University’s history of teaching eugenics.
Authors: Carla Rice and Kayla Besse
A discussion of relaxed performance in theatre performance.
Authors: Eliza Chandler, Megan Johnson, Becky Gold, Carla Rice, Alex Bulmer
Throughout this article, we take up works of disability artists whose practices engage with the act of walking/traversing as a method and form of sense-making. Specifically, we take up two performances by blind theatre artist Alex Bulmer—May I Take Your Arm (2018) and Blind Woman in Search of a Narrative (2018-2020) —in which walking, specifically ‘walking-together,’ is embedded as both a performative element and an integral mode of inquiry. We think about what Bulmer’s works, along with works by Carmen Papalia and Arseli Dokumaci, teach us about knowing and being known through an urban landscape, creating a “cripistemology” (McRuer & Johnson 2014) that builds on David Serlin’s (2006) notion of “disabling the flâneur.” Throughout this arts- based inquiry, we suggest that Bulmer advances a practice of “cripping the flâneur” (Campbell, 2010) as she demonstrates how we might come to know ourselves, our cities, our neighbours, and blindness through the epistemological vantage-point of blindness.
Authors: Phyllis Montgomery, Sharolyn Mossey, Carla Rice, Karen McCauley, Eliza Chandler, Nadine Changfoot, Angela Underhill
Little is known about the experiences of healthcare providers as research participants in qualitative studies employing methods that encourage disclosure of their own disabilities. In this paper, we describe the experiences and implications of creating personal stories of disability and difference for healthcare provider participants in an arts-based study. The study design is a supplementary secondary analysis of a subset of data from a larger study focused on transforming negative concepts of disability and difference entitled, Mobilizing New Meanings of Disability and Difference: Using Arts- Based Approaches to Advance Healthcare Inclusion for Women with Disabilities. This supplementary study explores the experiences and perspectives of 17 healthcare provider participants who completed semi-structured interviews following creation of a multi-media story about their experience of disability or difference. Using creative non- fiction methods, two narrative streams are identified about healthcare provider experiences and the impacts of participating. The first addresses shared positive experiences about the research. The second entails more ambivalent reflections on their involvement as participants. The tension between the two experiences generates considerations to forward a mutually beneficial alliance to disrupt ableist understandings in healthcare and reveals new meanings of disability that are agential and integral to the stories and storytellers themselves.
Authors: Eliza Chandler
Disability arts are political. Disability arts are vital to the disabled people’s movement for how they imagine and perpetuate both new understandings of disability, Deafhood, and madness/Mad-identity and create new worldly arrangements that can hold, centre, and even desire such understandings. Critically led by disabled, mad, and Deaf people, disability art is a burgeoning artistic practice in Canada that takes the experience of disability as a creative entry point.
Authors: Carla Rice and Ingrid Mündel
In this article, the authors examine the impact of using their evolving multimedia storytelling method (digital art and video) to challenge dominant representations of non-normative bodies and foster more inclusive spaces. Drawing on their collaborative work with disability and non- normatively embodied artists and communities, they investigate the challenges of negotiating what ‘access’ and ‘inclusion’ mean beyond the individualizing discourses of neoliberalism without erasing the specificities of differentially-lived experiences. Reflecting on their experiences in a variety of workshops and on a selection of videos made in those workshops, they identify and analyze three iterative ‘movements’ that mark their storytelling processes: from failure to vulnerability, from time to temporality, and from individual voice to collective concerns. The authors end by considering some of the ways they have experimented with developing an iterative workshop method that welcomes difference while simultaneously allowing for an examination of the terms of the shared space and of the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion operating within that space.
Authors: Patty Douglas, Carla Rice, Katherine Runswick-Cole, Anthony Easton, Margaret F. (Meg) Gibson, Julia Gruson-Wood, Estée Klar, Raya Shields
This paper presents and analyzes six short first-person films produced through a collaborative multimedia storytelling workshop series focused on experiences of autism, education and inclusion. The aim of the project is to co-create new understandings of autism beyond functionalist and biomedical ones that reify autism as a problem of disordered brains and underpin special education. We fashion a body becoming disability studies in education approach to proliferate stories of autism outside received cultural scripts—autism as biomedical disorder, brain-based difference, otherworldliness, lost or stolen child and more. Our approach keeps the meaning of autism moving, always emerging, resisting, fading away and becoming again in relation to context, time, space, material oppressions, cultural scripts, intersecting differences, surprising bodies and interpretative engagement. We argue that the films we present and analyze not only significantly change and critique traditional special education approaches based on assumptions of the normative human as non-autistic, they also enact ‘autism’ as a becoming process and relation with implications for inclusive educators. By this we mean that the stories shift what autism might be and become, and open space for a proliferation of representations and practices of difference in and beyond educational contexts that support flourishing for all.
Authors: Gail J. Mitchell, Carla Rice, Victoria Pileggi
This paper offers an account of how women and gender non- conforming people living with mind/body differences connected and changed during a project of creating a dramatic performance intended to shift understandings of disabilities and differences for various communities, including health professionals. Insights from interviews with artist participants are presented in three themes: collective unearthing, carefully bringing forth with others, and embracing the newly tangible. Our insight at this point is that disability- affirmative artistic processes create an inter- and intra-relational space that invites generative learning through self- and critical reflection.
Author: Eliza Chandler
Georgina Kleege’s latest book, More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art (2018, Oxford University Press), offers a timely and informed account of the significance of blindness to arts and culture. Throughout this book, she moves between analyses of how blindness is represented in philosophy, phenomenological accounts of the cultural practices and technologies that make arts and culture accessible to blind people, and self-representations by blind artists. Using a disability studies and cultural studies framework, Kleege skillfully blends a sophisticated knowledge of European art history, a robust understanding of the disabled people’s movement and its politics, and her own experiences as a blind person, a daughter of artists, and a frequent patron of art galleries. The uniqueness of this book lies in how Kleege animates, chapter by chapter, cultural appearances of and encounters with blindness, unfurling a multifaceted account of blindness as offering sensorial and generative experiences of the world.
Authors: Eliza Chandler
Fredric Jameson writes, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” In conversation with Jameson, Rod Michalko offers, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than a different one,” referring to the way that a life with disability is too-often understood as the end of a life, a life not worth living. It is easier to imagine the end of our life, and the end of the world, than a life with difference and the creation of a different sort of world. In the midst of such ableism, disabled people have always demonstrated that a life with difference—and a different sort of world—is possible.
