Session 1: Wednesday May 4 | 11:00-12:30

Wednesday May 4
Session #1
11:00-12:30

Emerging critical movement

Kelsie Acton

University of Alberta, Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation/ CRIPSiE

What is Access to a Career in the Performing Arts?

This presentation questions what constitutes access for disabled artists, with a particular consideration of the issues in the performing arts. Given the project-to-project nature of arts work in Canada, a full artistic career is often dependent on a number of skills secondary to one’s artistic skills. These can include marketing, grant writing, festival application writing, documentation of one’s work, project management and networking. With limited access to formal training and the informal networks of mentorship that allow emerging artists to acquire these skills, can disabled artists achieve full participation in the performing arts? How can the conditions for disabled artists to acquire these skills be created?

Through this conference I hope to expand my thinking and awareness of the artistic and critical work on disability and Deaf arts and activism being done in Quebec and across Canada. I desire to connect with other artists and academics to hear their solutions, questions and critiques of the problem and questions I struggle with in my own artistic practice.

Arseli Dokumaci

FQRSC Post-doctoral Fellow, McGill University, Department of Social Studies of Medicine

Disability as Method: Critical Inquiries into Mundane Micro-practices and Performative ways of Media Making (video, English, close-captioned, audio description available)

“You have to think about all these things that seem to be small details but are [in fact] not,” says Jérôme. In this research-creation project, I move, think and theorize alongside with Jérôme and Anna, two differently disabled individuals living the woefully inaccessible city of Montreal. Drawing on their situated insights into the micro-practices of everyday life, I document how ‘misperformances’ of disability become a place from which to rethink the material entanglements of the body with the world at the most miniscule level. Adopting what I term “disability as method” and as critical methodology, I argue that ‘misperformances’ of disability do not point to a ‘failure’ of what should have been performed but to the arbitrariness of what is thought to have just failed.

In the project, I adopt disability as my method of media creation as well and propose a new technique that blends audio-description with freeze-framing both as a performative intervention into the medium of film and as a creative experimentation with its affordances.

Sarah Heussaff

Travailleuse culturelle dans les arts visuels, France

Pratiques en art visuel: étude des stratégies artistiques dans la transmission des enjeux du modèle social anglais du handicap.

En tant qu’historienne de l’art je m’intéresse à comment le champ des arts visuels peut être un média auto-maitrisé pour transmettre les enjeux du modèle social anglais du handicap, repris, plus tard dans les Disability Studies. Tout en me basant sur des écrits majeurs des Disability Studies, j’étudie comment les revendications du modèle social du handicap prennent corps aussi plastiquement. En me concentrant sur des pratiques, majoritairement anglophones (anglaises, canadiennes, états-uniennes), pour la plupart revendiquées comme relevant des Disability Arts, je tente de démontrer que ces pratiques jouent un rôle fondamental dans l’autoreprésentation et dans la dénonciation, de façon auto-définie, des discriminations relatives aux handicaps. Qu’elles sont les stratégies artistiques et militantes employées par certain-e-s artistes. En constatant que toute une partie de cette littérature relative au modèle social anglais du handicap ne nous est jamais vraiment parvenue en France, il me semble que les arts peuvent être un média privilégié pour étendre ces questionnements, encore trop méconnus ici.

Diplômée d’un Master en commissariat d’exposition (Univ. Rennes, dir. Elvan Zabunyan), je me suis formée dans les arts visuels par les études féministes, postcoloniales et les études de genre. Me retrouvant peu dans ce champ de recherches de l’accessibilité à la française, mon séjour à Montréal en 2014, pour un stage post-études (à la Centrale, galerie Powerhouse) a été l’occasion de me familiariser aux études critiques du handicap. En 2015 j’ai lancé : http://versune(re)présentationdisabled.blogspot.com 

Session 2: Wednesday May 4 | 14:00-16:00

Wednesday May 4
Session #2
14:00-16:00

Rights and justice

Melanie Benard

Human rights lawyer, co-founder of Québec accessible

Promoting Accessibility Through the Law: A Call for Reform in Quebec

This presentation will trace the evolution of Quebec's disability legislation over the past thirty-five years. Once a front-runner in promoting inclusion and equality for people with disabilities, Quebec has now fallen far behind other jurisdictions such as Ontario, the United States and France. Quebecers with disabilities continue to face countless barriers in accessing basic services such as public transportation. This presentation will highlight the need for a much stronger provincial accessibility law to give meaning to the equality rights guaranteed in our Charters of Rights and Freedoms.

I am a lawyer devoted to advancing the field of disability law in Quebec. I look forward to learning from and engaging with diverse perspectives of disability scholars and community members at this symposium.

Susanne Commend

Université de Montréal

Les enfants de la polio à Montréal, 1930-1960 : familles, philanthropes face à une crise sanitaire et humanitaire

Cette présentation propose une analyse de la réponse étatique et associative aux épidémies de poliomyélite au Québec entre 1931 et 1960. Centrée sur la ville de Montréal, véritable microcosme où s’entrecroisent les cultures anglophone et francophone, cette étude propose également des éléments de comparaison entre les services offerts aux enfants atteints de polio par un organisme «bilingue» et une association francophone. Quelles sont les relations des philanthropes avec les familles? Nous examinerons enfin comment les médias anglophones et francophones montréalais appréhendent les épidémies de polio et dans quelle mesure le discours social sur le handicap est teinté par la culture. Au total, la présentation vise à tenter de dégager quelle conception des enfants handicapés se reflète dans la société québécoise des années 1930 à 1960.

J’effectue un doctorat en histoire sur les enfants handicapés au Québec, de 1930 à 1980. Je souhaite élargir mes perspectives en rencontrant d’autres chercheurs et activistes montréalais et québécois et échanger sur leurs réflexions et leurs pratiques. Un symposium comme celui-ci offre une occasion vraiment unique d’échanges puisqu’au Québec il n’existe pas encore de programme universitaire en études critiques du handicap.

Melissa Graham and Kevin Jackson

Toronto Disability Pride March

From the Ground up: a conversation on building movements and meaningful legislation

The federal government has promised us a National Disabilities Act, but what does this really mean? Where I come from in Ontario, we have the AODA, but it was developed with little input from the grassroots. There was no discussion of the specific barriers faced by indigenous communities, or what women face, and there certainly was no mention of poverty or ableism. Grassroots activism is where these conversations are taking place. In Toronto, the Toronto Disability Pride March takes up these conversations, RAPLIQ in Montreal is another important example. There are organizations in place to represent disabled people at a national level, but they are not taking up the grassroots message. This is the beginning of a conversation exploring the ways we can unite in an anti-oppressive way to ensure all voices are heard in this important legislation, and why this is so important.

I’m the founder and one of the co-organizers of the Toronto Disability Pride March, an annual event that began in October 2011, recognizing that there were many missing voices in the mainstream disability movement. Our march was built to raise attention to the issues face by disabled people in a visible and meaningful way. Since the march began I’ve followed and supported disability activists and their actions, such as RAPLIQ, and have been looking for ways to unite around shared struggle without overpowering each other. 

Kristin Snoddon

School of Linguistics and Language Studies, Carleton University

Can a Human Rights Framework Support the Social Relational Model of Deaf Childhood?

This presentation problematizes the application of a human rights framework to the social relational model of Deaf childhood, which positions Deaf children within Deaf cultural discourses. The inclusion movement is based in a rights discourse that promotes the right of all children to high quality education and full participation in society as a whole, as well as in one’s own cultural communities. However, there is a gap between rhetoric and practice since early childhood special education has been a site of disablement for Deaf children and their families. The presentation will discuss points of departure for the Deaf community and examine Deaf cultural childhoods in relation to disability rights, sign language rights, and the rights of children outlined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. This presentation is based on a paper co-written with Kathryn Underwood.

I am a Deaf Studies scholar who also teaches and is interested in Disability Studies. I wish to expand my networks and engage in dialogue with my colleagues in Quebec. I am presently working with the Franco-Ontarian Deaf community in Ottawa to secure funding for developing a parent LSQ curriculum (thereby extending the work I have done related to ASL and possibly holding implications for the Quebec LSQ community).