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Re•Vision Newsletter - Fall 2022
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A LETTER FROM OUR DIRECTORS
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Greetings!
We are excited to connect with you all as we fully transition to winter.
Things have been feeling dense and intense for us at Re•Vision, so this newsletter addition is all about celebrating the beauty and creativity and critical insights of our incredible network of artists, activists, and scholars. We have a number of powerful, boundary-pushing project outputs that we are showcasing in this edition of our newsletter: an i2i expert video series; an animated video that offers an engagement with our Into the Light learning tool; a relaxed performance guide; and a zine series from the Re•Storying Autism collective to name a few. We are also excited, as always, to update you on all of our projects and to show you some video stories created by participants in recent storytelling workshops.
Please take a look and let us know what you think! We so appreciate your care and engagement with our collective work.
With love, Carla and Ingrid
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From InVisibility to Inclusion (i2i)
i2i is a SSHRC-funded research project bringing together scholars, researchers, business professionals, employers, NGOs, and arts communities. Its aim is to improve social, economic and employment opportunities for people with episodic disabilities in Ontario. We have completed survey research with employers, as well as 50 interviews and 23 digital stories with employees and income support recipients with episodic disabilities.
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Image Description: The title card from the i2i Expert Video Series video on Disclosure. On the right of the screen is a black and white image of a featured expert, Tammy Yates, Executive Director of Realize Canada. Tammy is a Black woman with curly hair, and she is wearing a microphone headset.
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We are proud to announce that the new i2i Expert Video Series is now available! The series is a set of short, informative videos featuring expert commentary on five key topics central to episodic disability, employment and income:
The videos are a resource for workers with episodic disabilities, employers and co-workers. Each video is available in two formats: Open captioned and open captioned and audio described. In December, i2i team members Elisabeth Harrison and Lacey Croft showcased the Expert Videos in a panel discussion on promoting employer capacity for disability inclusion at the 2022 Disability and Work in Canada virtual conference.
The i2i team recently partnered with the Ontario Occupational Health Nurses Association (OOHNA) to provide a continuing education training opportunity for their members on the topic of promoting access for employees with episodic disabilities. Check out our supporting article in the OOHNA Journal.
I2i researchers Adele Furrie, Lacey Croft and Donna Lero’s new report, People Experiencing Disability With Episodic Limitations: The Impact on their Experience in The Workplace,, is now available. The report presents data from the 2017 Canadian Survey on Disability to highlight the employment experiences of people with episodic disabilities.
Into the Light
The Into the Light online learning resource builds on the award-winning museum exhibition Into the Light: Eugenics and Education in Southern Ontario curated by Mona Stonefish, Peter Park, Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning, Evadne Kelly, Seika Boye, and Sky Stonefish. The resource addresses learning challenges in decolonization, anti-racism, and accessibility in educational institutions. It also addresses histories of the production and dissemination of oppressive knowledge within Ontario educational institutions and connects those histories to present day inequities while working to counter them.
The Into the Light team has also created a documentary film, which is now available to show for educational purposes. Please contact us to book a screening.
Into the Light: An Interpretation of Two Research Papers is a powerful short film that reflects upon the continuing impacts of eugenics in Ontario. It was written and performed by Jessie Huggett and Rachel Gray, and is a plain language interpretation of two research papers from the Into the Light project.
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Stretching Our Stories: Digital World-making in Troubled Times (SOS) is a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant that has established a new online arts- and story-based research program that responds directly to four distinct community-university groups of intellectually and physically disabled, Indigenous, and trans and gender non-conforming (TGNC) storytellers in Ontario and Alberta.
As we move toward an unpredictable era commonly known as "the new normal," Stretching our Stories (SOS): Digital World-Making in Troubled Times bolsters communities' vibrant online world-making practices as processes of artful knowledge creation by asking: How can we deepen space for critical, online multimedia story-making as embodied and felt inquiry in ways that enrich our understandings of the affective, social dynamics of vulnerability, isolation, affirmation and resistance for underrepresented groups in unprecedented times? SOS expands generative relationships between the Re-Vision Centre for Art and Social Justice at the University of Guelph, Tangled Art + Disability (Toronto), story-makers at Humber College's Community Integration through Education program (Toronto), the WAABAN Indigenous Teacher Education program, York University (Toronto), Women's and Gender Studies at Athabasca University (Edmonton), and Ryerson University's School of Disability Studies (Toronto).
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Image description: A digital drawing of the opening page for the digital storymaking website. Showing the 6 key elements of the storymaking process: orienting, gathering, assembling, sounding, envisioning, and moving.
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SOS Storytelling Workshops
The Storymaking Trans Futures trans and Indigenous led workshops took place online in September and October, 2022. As a continuation of the qualitative “Transgender Mental Health during COVID-19” interview-based project, 10 trans and gender non-conforming (TGNC) participants from all across Alberta created digital stories in collaboration with the Re•Vision facilitation team and with the Transgender Archives, imagining digital trans futurity in the face of emergent crisis.
The Language Revitalization through Multimedia Story-Making online digital storytelling workshop will take place in January 2023. Participants will contribute to the understanding of links between Indigenous language revitalization, identity, knowledge, and community well-being to skirt colonialism’s “divide and conquer” logics and reclaim culture and knowledge.
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Practicing the Social Book and Digital Publication
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Image description: The Practicing the Social logo is centred on a red backdrop with text in white all caps around colourful rings and the words Re•Vision Bodies In Translation.
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We are hard at work developing two peer-reviewed outputs based on the Practicing the Social online gathering, held in January 2022. Look out for a peer-reviewed book collection of essays based on the presentations and research outputs, and a peer-reviewed online multimedia publication featuring recorded performances, videos, interviews, art, and other creative outputs. Both projects will be published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
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Image Description: A photo illustration by Morgan Sea, showing a white cargo van (licence plate “R3V1S10N1”) flying through the air above a parking lot on the University of Guelph campus. Brightly coloured text boxes read, “We’re getting a VAN! And taking ReVision Story-Making on the ROAD!”
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Re•Vision/REDLAB is thrilled to be moving forward with our new state-of-the-art mobile media laboratory, REDLAB in Motion that will upgrade and expand the virtual reach of REDLAB’s digital, visual and sensory research-related stationary equipment housed at the University of Guelph as well as expand the geographic reach and accessibility of research activities through an accessible media laboratory outfitted vehicle that will travel to communities across Canada.
REDLAB in Motion was developed using 3 cutting-edge design principles: accessibility, flexibility and modularity. The principle of accessibility foregrounds the need for research infrastructure that connects people across geographic and virtual distances, including groups often viewed or treated as peripheral, outliers and marginal in research, such as those living in rural, remote, northern, and impoverished areas as well as those with sensory differences in communication, such as with low or no vision, d/Deafness, neurodiversity, and mental and physical difference; flexibility emphasizes the need for diverse and hybrid modes of research conduction and creation in both face-to-face and digitally-mediated interactions/spaces; and modularity underscores the need for a media system comprised of interlinked yet separable components, which can be independently assembled, modified, replaced, and exchanged depending on the needs of the research and research partners.
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Bodies in Translation: Transforming Culture from the Vital Edges (BIT 2)
We are working on our resubmission to Stage 1 of the SSHRC Partnership Grant competition, Bodies In Translation: Transforming Culture from the Vital Edges, or BIT 2. The Stage 1 grant is valued at $20,000 and, if successful, will fund the development of a full SSHRC Partnership Grant application.
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Bodies in Translation (BIT)
Bodies in Translation Knowledge Platform
The development of the new Bodies in Translation Knowledge Platform is ongoing, with content being added to showcase the wide range of academic and creative work undertaken through the Bodies in Translation grant. We are currently working with artists to create illustrations that will be featured across the site. Here is a sneak preview of a few of the website icon designs created for us by Andrea Vela Alarcón:
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Image Description: A screen grab of black and white hand-drawn icon designs for three elements of the BIT Knowledge Platform. The ”Learn” icon is a snail, to represent slow scholarship, and it will link to the Learning Modules. The “Member” icon is three mushrooms of various heights with wavy stalks, and it will connect users to their accounts and profiles on the site. The icon for the Artist Directory is a small book with scribbly lines on the front.
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The site will feature an expanding group of interactive learning modules featuring BIT scholarship and artistic works. Topics include the following:
Into the Light: Addresses learning challenges in decolonization, anti-racism, and accessibility in educational institutions by tracing their historical and ongoing relationship to the production and dissemination of eugenics ideologies.
Re•Vision Storymaking: A guide through the steps of the Re•Vision story-making process, from brainstorming to screening.
Aging, Arts, Accessibility: Explores how aging art and storymaking generate counter-narratives that offer complex, nuanced, and diverse understandings of aging.
Fat Activism: Showcases critical, activist, and artistic approaches to understanding fat.
Disability Arts and Crip Cultural Practices: Introduces disability arts through theory, methodology, and practice.
Neurodiversity: Introduces critical topics in neurodiversity, including content focused on autistic makers, family and kin, and practitioner and educator stories.
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Image Description: An illustration created by Naheen Ahmed for the Aging, Arts, Accessibility learning module. The image shows eight people of different ages, races, faiths and genders, one using a wheelchair and the others standing. The people are in a room with bright blue walls and flooring, and they are gathered around a table to engage with a brightly coloured tactile artwork.
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Tangled Art + Disability: avere cura, December 9 2022 to February 24, 2023
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Image Description: A photograph of Untitled by Carla Sierra Suarez. A white plaster replica of a medication blister pack is broken in half on the diagonal, with crumbs of dried plaster and broken off pill-shaped castings scattered across a white background.
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Tangled Art + Disability’s new show, avere cura, is curated by Max Ferguson and features works by Susan Aydan Abbott, Olivia Brouwer, B Garneau, Kit Trytten, seeley quest and Carla Sierra Suarez
avere cura started with thinking about curation as care. The word ‘curating’ comes from the Latin root “to take care.” In history, the story of art in the West has been mostly told by white people, straight people, and non-disabled people. It has pushed marginalized people out. The art world is still like this. This creates a norm within the arts, and to be outside the norm (BIPOC, mentall ill, neurodivergent, or disabled) can be hard. Disability art is a space where people can talk about and challenge these norms. We see these norms a lot in the ways that artists create work for art galleries. In avere cura, we use accessibility to ask questions about that and try to change it. Together we make room for new ways of seeing and being, as well as making.
Another part of the exhibition is thinking about how we see artists as workers. In the art world, we expect artists to trade their life for their work. That work is connected to capitalism, and that can be ableist. The show is also about time. When artists make art, they are working against the clock. Sometimes making art isn’t as simple for artists as people in art institutions or the culture of a place would like it to be. When we go to a museum, we often see art that is by artists who are dead. This can cause us to value the objects created by artists more than we value or think about the artists themselves. Art is created by artists, who are people with real lives. Art comes from artists and their life. Because of this, what is ‘art’ is hard to define.
Sometimes we can forget about the humanity of artists. We can see their art and not think about their lived experiences as people. What does that lived experience offer the audience of a piece of art? This exhibition thinks about that. It tries to think about and respect the lives lived by each artist. avere cura has work by six artists: Susan Aydan Abbott, Olivia Brouwer, B Garneau, Kit Trytten, seeley quest and Carla Sierra Suarez. We are creating not for capitalism but for ourselves. Here, we seek to flourish.
Cripping Masculinity
The Cripping Masculinity project explores D/Disabled, D/deaf and Mad-identified men and masculine non-binary people’s experiences with gender, fashion and disability. We’re currently working on the fashion hacking phase of the project, where participants lead out the de-construction and re-making of one of their existing garments to centre their needs and better express their desired identities. Participants work interdependently with fashion design researchers and students to re-design their garments, share knowledge and skills, and foster desire for disabled masculinities through fashion.
We had originally conceived that fashion hacking would take place through an in-person, one day workshop. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we moved these workshops to a virtual format in which participants and the research team work in small groups over several months by communicating with each other online and mailing garments back-and-forth. This online format has allowed for an unexpected flexibility and increased level of access for participants and the research team.
The hacked garments, along with other work from The Cripping Masculinity project, will be showcased at an exhibition at Tangled Art + Disability in Spring 2023.
Cripping Masculinity is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Re•Vision (through Bodies in Translation), Toronto Metropolitan University and The University of Alberta.
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Image Description: A graphic illustration of a man wearing dark green pants, a light green sweater over a blue button-down. He has medium-dark skin, dark brown hair and eyebrows, and a five-o’clock shadow beard. Both hands are rested on the walker in front of him. Pink and yellow flowers sprout out of his upper arms and the walker. The background is light purple with cream stars. Illustration by Rana Awadallah (@rana2.0).
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Image Description: This screen capture from the ReVisioning Fitness presentation at the Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise conference shows screen captures from of five team members’ digital stories. In the top left corner is an image of a pool in Budapest, with a mustard yellow building behind it. In the top right corner is an image of Meredith Bessey in child’s pose, with her tattoos of a cat and a teacup visible. In the bottom right corner is an image with the phrase “The future of fitness is…” against a striated grey and blue background. In the bottom left corner is an image showing a page from an album or scrapbook, with a photograph of young Kayla Besse on the treadmill at physiotherapy at the centre, surrounded by handwritten captions and the edges of other photos. At the centre of the screen capture is a photograph of young Tara-Leigh McHugh seated with two other children in a canoe on a body of water, with an adult wading in the water behind them.
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ReVisioning Fitness is an arts- and community-based participatory research project, community of practice and care, and collective of people working across difference to re-conceptualize “fitness.” Aly Bailey (PI), Evadne Kelly, Carla Rice, Tara-Leigh McHugh (Co-I’s), Meredith Bessey (RA), and participant co-researchers Kayla Besse, Salima Punjani, Bongi Dube, Paul Tshuma, seeley quest, and Skylar Sookpaiboon met regularly throughout 2021 to question notions of inclusion and accessibility within the realm of fitness, physical activity, and leisure spaces, and to reimagine fitness in ways that include fun, connection, joy, and pleasure.
In addition to the minidocumentary that was shared in the last edition of this newsletter, the ReVisioning Fitness team has been working on sharing their research in a series of papers and chapters which are currently forthcoming. We will be sure to provide a further update in a future newsletter when they are published!
Meredith recently presented on behalf of the team at the Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise conference, held in July 2022 at Durham University. Her talk was entitled Exploring artful politics: Bodies of difference remaking body worlds in ReVisioning Fitness, where she presented an earlier iteration of the ReVisioning Fitness through a relational community of practice paper. Aly also made two other presentations discussing ReVisioning Fitness and the project’s arts-based, participatory approach at recent conferences:
Bailey, K. A., Thorpe, A., Cupchik, E., Varadi, A-L., Notwel, J., Schnarr, M., Grafton, E., Ross, L., Varadi, A-L., Lennox, R., Chatterjee, S., Godderis, R., Burghardt, M., Mason, C., Ngo, A., & Jones, C. Roundtable Chair: Carter, C. Contemporary Vulnerabilities: Reflections on Social Justice Methodologies. WGSRF Congress, May 14, 2022.
Bailey, K. A., Radulovici, A., & Brown, S. Waterloo Wellington KMb Community Panel Discussion: ReVisioning Fitness through arts-based knowledge mobilization. March 4th, 2022.
Aly and Meredith also intend to submit work from ReVisioning Fitness to the 17th World Leisure Congress happening in New Zealand in December 2023, and look forward to sharing more at a later date!
Beyond these knowledge sharing opportunities, the team is also looking ahead to other opportunities to share their knowledge with leaders in the fitness space through mini-documentary screenings, the creation of a living library of multisensorial resources about fitness, and the creation of access guides for fitness and leisure spaces.
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Image Description: Against a teal background, a large spider with a bright purple, red, and dark blue body sits on top of a multicoloured pastel web.
The handwritten words “Guidelines plus open-ended approaches” appear at the edge of the web. Beneath the web, brightly coloured handwritten phrases are connected by dashed, web-like lines that appear to have been made by a smaller, purple and pink spider.
The connected phrases are as follows: “Context Specific,” “Community Knowledge,” Responsive,” “Welcome Difference,” “Embodied,” “Accessible Praxis,” “Vital Practices,” “Adapting to Conflicting Access Needs.”
Spider © 2021 by Sonny Bean is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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Available soon, Relaxed Performance: An Illustrated Guide, is an illustrated easy to read guide to Relaxed Performance. The guide was developed by Kimberlee Collins, Chelsea Temple Jones and Carla Rice with support from Emma Campbell, Carrie Hage, Jodie Salter, Nadine Changfoot, Tracy Tidwell, Sean Lee, Eliza Chandler, and Rana El Kadi. It was illustrated by artist Sonny Bean and graphically designed by Jennie Grimard.
Readers of the guide will learn about the theory behind Relaxed Performance and how to integrate it into praxis; how to engage with disability cultural practices; and how Relaxed Performance can enable people to move from best practices to vital practice.
You can also learn more about Relaxed Performance in a new article by Kim Collins, Chelsea Jones and Carla Rice, Keeping Relaxed Performance Vital: Affective Pedagogy in the Arts.
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Re•Storying Autism in Education
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Image Description: Colourful strings with twists, braids, and knots in hues of red, orange, green and blue are laid out strand by strand on a white surface.
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Re•Storying Autism in Education is a multimedia story-making project that intervenes in deficit systems in ways that desire the difference of autism.
We are a collaboration of autistic and allistic artists, activists, co-researchers, family members, educators, and practitioners generating difference-affirming practices and representations of autism and neurodiversity, particularly in education and health systems.
The project is led by Patty Douglas (Brandon University) and supported by project coordinator and documentary filmmaker Sheryl Peters.
It is funded through SSHRC, Mitacs and with generous support from Re•Vision and the Inclusive Early Childhood Service System Project.
Decolonizing research and stories of autism is a focus of the project. In the spring of 2022, we completed an Indigenous Approaches to Autism storytelling workshop with Indigenous autistic people and those who love and care about them in Southern Manitoba with partners Manitoba Metis Federation Southwest and Brandon Friendship Centre.
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This initiative emerged out of shared concerns about racism, colonialism and ableism in education including the mislabeling and exclusion of Indigenous autistic children (e.g., labels such as behaviour or fetal alcohol spectrum disorder rather than autism), overrepresentation in special education and lack of services, particularly services grounded in Indigenous worldviews. Interviews with 21 family members, Elders, teachers and autistic individuals show the collusion of ableism and racism in education, health and child welfare systems through mislabeling, barriers and stereotypes around autism and Indigeneity. Interviews also describe Indigenous informed micro-practices around difference that centre love, extended kinship networks and the understanding of all children as unique and as gifts. We shared videos from our Manitoba Indigenous Approaches workshop at the Shawane Dagosiwin conference in May 2022.
Re•Storying team members from the UK, Aotearoa and Canada have been busy in writing groups analyzing interviews and videos made in our Aotearoa workshop in May 2021. In addition, we are currently developing a neurodiversity focused learning module for the Bodies in Translation Knowledge Platform.
Re•Storying has also been working on our Mad (M)others initiative with University of Sheffield collaborators Katherine Runswick-Cole and Penny Fogg. Through a series of focus groups with (m)others over the past year, we have investigated how (m)others of dis/abled children are labelled as ‘mad’ in their encounters with the psy-professions (education, psychology and psychiatry. Making Memories is the second of three publications in this series.
The Re•Storying Autism Collective recently showed our zine collection, Re•Storying Autism ‘In’ Difference/Autistic, Surviving and Thriving Under COVID-19, at the Tangled Art + Disability Gallery. The show was curated by artist Kat Singer. If you missed it, you can also catch it online.
As we work toward wrapping up this phase of Re•Storying Autism and planning for the next, we will be hosting several events including a Critical Autism Summit in 2023.
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DIGITAL STORYTELLING WORKSHOPS
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Indigenous-Led Conservation Digital Storytelling Workshop.
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The Indigenous-Led Conservation Digital Storytelling Workshop series was hosted by the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership, the IISAAK OLAM Foundation, in partnership with Re•Vision.
In September and October 2022, practitioners, and knowledge holders from Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area (IPCA) projects across what is now called Canada, came together in an online workshop to create diverse stories in relation to/with their IPCA projects. The goal was to explore stories about the lands, waters, and relationships at the centre of these Indigenous-led conservation initiatives. With the permission of the storyteller, the stories will be featured on the IPCA Knowledge Basket, so other Indigenous governments and their partners can benefit from seeing the story.
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Building Gender Diverse Communities: Youth Digital Storytelling Workshop
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In October 2022, Indigenous Two-Spirit, LGBTQQIA+ youth came together to tell their stories and continue building the 2SLGBTQQIA+ storytelling community.
The Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres (OFIFC) hosted the workshop as part of the Building Gender Diverse Communities (BGDC) research project in partnership with Re•Vision. The goal of this project was to better understand the needs and priorities of Indigenous 2SLGBTQQIA+ people and create affirming supports, services and programming in Friendship Centre Communities in Ontario.
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Transformational Change Methodologies Lab
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Students in the Transformational Change Methodologies Lab taught by Carla Rice with Ingrid Mündel, have learned about the work of stories in the world, how they intervene in dominant discourses, offer multiplicitous counter-narratives, and scaffold intersectional and inter-sectorial alliances to imagine more just futures. Students created their own digital stories in an online workshop and shared them with one another in their final class.
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Call for Papers: Cripping Visual Cultures
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Cripping Visual Cultures is a special issue of RACAR: Journal of the Universities Art Association of Canada to be published October 2024. Honoring the legacy of the late Tobin Siebers’ field-altering Disability Aesthetics (2010), the special issue is dedicated to confronting the promise and the pitfalls of what it means to crip visual cultures. Read the call for papers.
The special issue is intended to serve as a platform to encourage and support emerging scholars, artists, and critics, while also featuring the work of some established voices. It is most importantly meant to further the field emerging at the intersection of disability studies, crip theory, art history, and critical visual cultures to consider new, difficult, and perhaps even controversial, topics and discourses. RACAR is an international, bilingual journal, and the editors of this special issue seek contributions that reflect this fact. The editors encourage French and English submissions, and welcome supplementary LSQ and ASL materials, emerging ideas, disability neologisms, and creative formats.
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Call for Participants: Interview and Body-Mapping Workshop - Experiences of Bariatric Surgery Recipients in Canada
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Image Description: A poster advertising Meredith Bessey’s dissertation research study. The poster features yellow and pink abstract shapes, a black silhouette of a stomach, and a cartoon of an artist’s palette. The text reads: “Creative research opportunity: Have you had bariatric surgery in Canada? Researchers at the ReVision Centre at the University of Guelph are conducting arts-based research exploring the experiences of bariatric surgery recipients in Canada. Your participation will involve a brief 1-on-1 interview and a 4-part group body-mapping workshop. You can reside anywhere in Canada, research will take place entirely online. You are eligible to participate if you have received any type of bariatric surgery five or more years ago. For more information or to express interest, contact Meredith Bessey at besseym@uoguelph.ca. Principle Investigator, Dr. Carla Rice, University of Guelph. This research has been reviewed by the Research Ethics Board for compliance with federal guidelines for research involving human participants. [REB #22-09-018].
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Meredith Bessey, PhD Candidate at the University of Guelph, is conducting her dissertation research about peoples' experiences of bariatric surgery in Canada, including a virtual art-making workshop. No previous art-making experience is necessary, as you will be guided through the entire process by the research co-facilitators. However, people with art experience are also welcome to join! We also welcome and encourage women, people from the 2SLGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities or differences, people with chronic illnesses, people of various ages, races, and more to participate in this project. See below for a bit more information about the project, and Meredith's contact information.
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Call for Participants: Focus Group - Cripping Spatial Accessibility from Cultural Spaces to the Public Realm in Toronto
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The research project will gather the perspectives of creators, curators and consumers of arts and culture to identify the barriers and supports that exist for people identifying as either Blind, low-vision or visually impaired who participate in cultural activities in Toronto. Inspired by touch-based museum exhibits used to improve the accessibility and inclusion of visually impaired people, the project will investigate how similar programs, designs, and policies can be (re)created in outdoor public space. Eligible participants will self-identify as Blind, low-vision or visually impaired, and be involved in the arts as either an artist, curator or patron. Participants must be over 17 and preferably based in Toronto. Participants will take part in a two-hour long focus group and will have the option to share their experiences creatively as a part of an audible story map project that will be made available online. Focus group participants will receive a $20 honorarium.
To participate, please email Primary Researcher, Justine Bochenek, Master of Planning Candidate, School of Urban and Regional Planning, Faculty of Community Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University
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Creative Users Film Festival Guide to Access
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Image Description: Pages from The Film Festival Guide to Access feature the saying “Nothing about us without us” and a monochromatic image of an audience looking at a blank screen in a movie theater.
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From Inside Out and Creative Users Projects, The Film Festival Guide to Access is a new interactive workbook for film festival leaders, staff and volunteers. It offers creative solutions and exercises to help teams build a culture of access. The guide introduces the social model of disability and difference centred design thinking; helps teams to build a feasible access action plan; and provides vital information about resources and tools.
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New Fat Studies Journal: Excessive Bodies
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Announcing a new journal in the field of Fat Studies: Excessive Bodies: A Journal of Artistic and Critical Fat Praxis and Worldmaking is an open access, multidisciplinary, and multimedia journal that provides authors/artists the opportunity to have their work be part of an optional non-traditional peer review process centring critical fat studies approaches, mentorship, and relationality. This critical approach pushes against the marginalization of diverse ways of knowing that often occurs in mainstream journals.
The journal welcomes creative and artistic works alongside more traditional scholarly articles to present a version of worldmaking that reimagines and creates alternative fat epistemologies and ontologies centering fat liberation. Acceptance is based on a peer-review process. We encourage emerging scholars, artists, and activists to submit their work, as we are committed to cultivating a mentorship-based and care-full publishing process and infrastructure. Connect with Excessive Bodies on Instagram and Twitter, and look for the inaugural issue in 2023.
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Image Description: The logo of Excessive Bodies: A Journal of Artistic & Critical Fat Praxis and Worldmaking features the title in fuchsia letters and an illustration of an oval shaped tree with green leaves and white flowers.
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BEING Studio: Visualizing Justice
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Created by BEING Studio, Visualizing Justice is a series of videos that explores five concepts of Disability Justice in an accessible way, recognizing the leadership of artists with developmental disabilities, and placing them in the centre of the conversation. The films use plain language and a multi-modal approach to presenting information that accommodates a diverse range of learning styles.
Watch the series here, or check out our YouTube playlists with video description and without video description).
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(Am I?) That Guy by Em Glasspool
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Below is an excerpt from (Am I?) That Guy, a new poem by Em Glasspool, Bodies in Translation collaborator, theatre artist, and Executive and Artistic Director of Mysterious Entity Theatre.
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Welcome to Charlie Davis, Research Associate, From InVisibility to Inclusion
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Image Description: A black and white headshot of Charlie Davis. He is standing outside and smiling directly at the camera. He is wearing professional clothes and a vintage rose brooch.
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Charlie Davis (he/they) is a PhD candidate in Community Psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University.
He is a community-based researcher, with a strong commitment to conducting action-orientated research that will promote the health and wellbeing of trans communities.
His dissertation research examines historical trans activism, with an emphasis in examining how trans communities have been impacted by Canadian policies.
Some of his other research interests include examining the impacts of colonial institutions (e.g., universities, healthcare, governmental policies, etc.) have on minoritized communities, the interplay between activism and social change, and critically examining qualitative research methodologies and analysis curricula.
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Welcome to Dr. Megan Johnson, Research Associate, Bodies in Translation, Accessing the Arts
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Image Description: A black and white photo of Megan Johnson. She has curly hair that is half pulled back and is wearing clear rimmed glasses and a black shirt. She is smiling at the camera with closed lips.
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Dr. Megan Johnson (she/her) is a performance scholar, singer, arts administrator, and dramaturg, and is currently a Research Associate with the Re•Vision Centre. Megan holds a PhD in Theatre & Performance Studies from York University.
Her dissertation, titled “Infrastructural Dramaturgy and the Politics of Disability Art and Performance,” explored the capacity of disability performance to reveal inequities within built, interpersonal, and administrative infrastructural systems and to reimagine those infrastructures in service of a more inclusive, accessible, sustainable, and just world.
Her work centers on disability art and performance, crip cultural practices, critical access studies, infrastructural politics, and environmental studies.
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Welcome to Dr. Elizabeth Straus, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, September 2022–September 2024
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Image description: A black and white photo of Elizabeth Straus, a white woman with long brown hair and rimless glasses, wearing a shirt and black sweater, smiling into the camera.
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Elizabeth (she/they) is a nurse scholar and experienced educator, who recently defended their PhD dissertation, “Living as a Young Person with Home Mechanical Ventilation: A Critical Narrative Inquiry” in the School of Nursing at the University of British Columbia, in which they used a critical, narrative, arts-based approach to interrogate constructions of living well with young people who use a ventilator long-term.
Elizabeth's research explores how critical, narrative, and arts-based scholarship can contribute to informing and shifting narratives of disability, technology, and autism in health care, workplaces, and higher education, as well as how disabled and autistic adults navigate these institutions. Their postdoctoral work, under the supervision of Dr. Carla Rice, will explore how Autistic individuals are un/doing gender, sexuality, and autism.
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Welcome to Andrea Vela Alarcón, Digital Storytelling Facilitator
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Image Description: A black and white photo of Andrea Vela Alarcón. She is a brown woman with an oval face. She presents with a subtle smile and is wearing round glasses, long earrings and her hair is pulled into a big messy bun.
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Andrea Vela Alarcón (she/her/ella) is a brown settler in T’karonto. She is from the Abya Yala rainforest territory, currently known as the Peruvian Amazon. Andrea is a community educator rooting her practice in a feminist care ethics to facilitate spaces of critical conversations on ecological survival.
She has been working with different communities for over ten years, using popular education and cultural production, particularly visual media and storytelling. Through her work, Andrea collaborates with communities in the crafting of stories that center refusal and resistance to the logics of extractive capitalism.
Recognizing the often emotional and physical tax of environmental justice work, her creative encounters and workshops prioritize moments of joy, play and care.
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Welcome to Rosa Duran, Digital Storytelling Facilitator
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Image Description: Photo of Rosa in an outdoor environment standing close to a body of water.
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Rosa Duran (she/her) is a PhD student in the Social Practice and Transformational Change interdisciplinary program at the University of Guelph, under the supervision of Dr. Kim Anderson. Rosa is a settler with Central American roots who lives with her family in Tkaronto.
Rosa is an interdisciplinary educator with 20+ years of experience working on community building projects providing access to education and supports to equity seeking groups.
Her current research interests are decolonization, Indigenous knowledge systems, sustainable community building, and cultivating relationships among human and non-human beings and the natural world.
She is interested in weaving research, art and culture, and land-based pedagogy together to inform social practice and inspire innovation and change.
Rosa thrives when collaborating with creative and innovative individuals who are transforming systems and spaces: intentionally co-creating sustainable, inclusive, and healthy communities where all can thrive. She holds a MEd in Adult Education and Community Development from University of Toronto and a BCom in Business Administration- Marketing from Toronto Metropolitan University.
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Congratulations to Dr. Jessica Watkin, PhD
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Congratulations to Dr. Jessica Watkin (she/her), who recently completed her PhD at the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. Jess’ dissertation, "Disability Dramaturgy: Performance, Care, Practise" considers disabled artists’ creation processes when creating performance, and how they were supported by and provided care for their teams and themselves. Jess received an Honourable Mention at the Canadian Association for Theatre Research 2022 conference for her presentation of her dissertation findings.
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Best Wishes to Jodie Salter
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This summer Jodie Salter completed her secondment with the Re•Vision Centre, and returned to her role as a Writing Specialist and Writing Peer Helper Supervisor at the University of Guelph Library. We are extremely grateful for the expertise Jodie brought to her position and the significant contributions she made to our Practicing the Social conference, the BIT Knowledge Platform, and the Learning Modules. We miss you, Jodie!
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Public - Issue 66 Access Aesthetics -- co-edited by Mary Bunch, Julia Chan, and Sean Lee -- is now available! Launching at Tangled on December 15. The issue was supported by BIT, and also features work by BIT members including Carla and Eliza, Patty Douglas, Nancy Halifax, Evadne Kelly, Ingrid Mundel, Jessica Watkin, Mary Bunch and co-editor Sean Lee.
Bailey, K.A., Bessey, M., Besse, K., Dube, B., Kelly, E., McHugh, T.-L., Punjani, S., quest, s., Rice, C., Sookpaiboon, S., & Tshuma, B.P. (In press). Working collectively across our minoritized differences: Vulnerabilities and possibilities of ReVisioning Fitness. In C. Jones & C. Carter (Eds.), Contemporary Vulnerabilities, Plans Unraveled: Reflections on Social Justice Methodologies. University of Alberta Press.
Bailey, K.A., Bessey, M., Rice, C., Kelly, E., McHugh, T.-L., Punjani, S., Dube, B., Tshuma, P., Besse, K., Sookpaiboon, S., & quest, s. (Under review). In the wake of Canada’s violent eugenic legacies: An urgency to ReVision Fitness. Leisure/Loisir.
Bessey, M., Bailey, K.A., Rice, C., McHugh, T.-L., Besse, K., & Punjani, S. (Submitted). ReVisioning Fitness through a relational community of practice: Conditions of possibility for access Intimacies and body-becoming pedagogies. Social Sciences.
Collins, K., Jones, C. T., & Rice, C. (2022). Keeping Relaxed Performance Vital: Affective Pedagogy in the Arts. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 16(2), 179–196. https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2022.14
Douglas, P. Runswick-Cole, K., Fogg, R. & Ryan, S. (2022). Making memories, making madness: Mad (m)others of disabled children write back through digital storytelling. Journal on Developmental Disabilities, 27(2), 1-19. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6502811
Re• Storying Autism Writing Collective:, Shields, R., Easton, S., Gruson-Wood, J., Gibson, M. F., Douglas, P. N., & Rice, C. M. (2022). Storytelling methods on the move. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 1-20.
Douglas, Patty, Katherine Runswick-Cole, Sara Ryan & Penny Fogg (2021). Mad mothering: Learning from the intersections of madness, mothering and disability. Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 15(1), 39-56. doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2021.3
Douglas, P., Runswick-Cole, K., Fogg, P. & Ryan, S. (2022). Making memories, making madness: Mad (m)others of disabled children write back through digital storytelling. Journal on Developmental Disabilities.
Hodge, N. & Douglas, P. Developing the right(s) approach for autism. In A. Beckett and A. Callus (Eds.). Routledge Handbook on Children's Rights & Disability. Routledge
Hodge, N., Douglas, P., Kruth, M., Connolly, S., Martin, N., Gowler, K. & Smith, C. Contemplating teacher talk through a critical autism studies lens. In D. Milton & S. Ryan (Eds.). Routledge Companion of Critical Autism Studies.
The Re•Storying Autism Collective (Shields, R., Easton, S., Gruson-Wood, J., Gibson, M. F., Douglas, P. & Rice, C.). (2022). Storytelling methods on the move. Special Issue, Critical Autism Studies: Methodological Incursions (Eds. A. Broderick and R. Roscigno). International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2022.2061625.
The Re•Storying Autism Collective. (Singer, K., Gillespe, E., Liska, S., Peters, S. & Douglas, P.) (2022, online publication). Autistic, surviving and thriving under COVID-19: Imagining Inclusive autistic futures. Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association.
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Thank you for reading our Fall 2022 Newsletter!
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