This paper examines the challenges and possibilities of mobilizing intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological construct throughout our collaborative, arts-based research program. Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life is a SSHRC Partnership Grant that cultivates disabled, d/Deaf, fat, Mad, and aging arts using a decolonizing lens through engaging with 70+ community and institutional partners and collaborators. The multiple creative, boundary-pushing, and field-expanding artistic activities/scholarly outputs that have emerged through our generative project partnerships have called us to interrogate the intersections among diverse scholarly fields and justice-seeking communities, including the aging/disability nexus; the decolonizing of disability studies; and the thickening of fat studies scholarship. Reviewing relevant debates within the intersectionality literature, we reflect on how we enact intersectionality as an active, integral part of our research process. We assert that thinking through art enables us to rethink intersectionality in productive ways, ways that bring into visibility the relationalities of persons’ bodies, selves and worlds which are in confrontation and confluence. Creative accounts of complex embodiment and of land-based concepts of self and sociality, for example in the work of such artists such as Lara Kramer (Oji-Cree), Valentin Brown, Steven Surlin, and Gloria Swain press the field of intersectionality studies to consider new ways of conceptualizing intersectionality to account for the complexity of embodied and embedded being in their diverse and divergent materializations in ways that generatively “exceed[s] intersectionality” (Nash, 2019).
This presentation starts from 37 mins 29 secs.
Presenters
Carla Rice
Dr. Carla Rice is Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Guelph, specializing in disability and embodiment studies and in unconventional and creative research methodologies. In 2012, she founded the Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice as an arts-informed research centre with a mandate to foster inclusive communities and social well-being. She is Principal Investigator of Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology and Access to Life, a multi-year, multi-site disability and non-normative arts grant that she co-directs with Dr. Eliza Chandler. She has received awards for advocacy, research, and mentorship has published on embodied difference, non-normative cultures, and practices of accessibility and inclusion. Published books include Gender and Women’s Studies: Critical Terrain (with Marg Hobbs, 2nd Edition, 2018); Becoming Women: The Embodied Self in Image Culture (2014); The Aging/Disability Nexus (with Katie Aubrecht and Christine Kelly, 2020); and Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality and Social Justice (with May Friedman and Jen Rinaldi, 2020).
Susan Dion
Dr. Susan D. Dion (Potawatomi-Lenapé) is the inaugural Associate Vice-President of Indigenous Initiatives and Professor of Education at York University. Dion specializes on issues related to Indigenous matters in education and the role of Indigenous relationships in teacher education. Dion has expertise in both the education of teachers on issues such as reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada in relation to the legacy of residential schools in Canada, and the ways these issues should be taught in primary and secondary school classrooms. She is frequently consulted as an expert on Indigenous issues in education in the news media, speaker, and in other community contexts. Dion has collaborated with the Toronto District School Board Indigenous Education Centre on matters such as a First Nations school and a variety of curriculum initiatives. Dion worked with the Ontario Ministry of Education on the “Urban Aboriginal Education Pilot Project.” Dion has particular expertise in collaborative inquiry, a methodology focused on a reflective practice. She has used this methodology in research and practical applications. The “Listening Stone” project focused on collaborative inquiry and First Nation, Métis and Inuit educational initiatives within the Ontario Ministry of Education school boards. Dion’s work with the TDSB and other initiatives on the decolonization of school curriculum has had wide impact on research and practical application of decolonization and indigenization methods within education. Her work with non-Indigenous teachers exploring blockages to incorporating Indigenous-related teaching and issues into the curriculum has also had impact.
Nadine Changfoot
Dr. Nadine Changfoot is Associate Professor in Political Studies, Executive Member of the Trent Centre for Aging and Society and Teaching Fellow at Trent University, Senior Research Associate with Re•Vision: The Centre of Art and Social Justice, Research lead of Aging Vitalities, Management Team Member of the research partnership Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology and Access to Life, and Executive Member of EC3, the Peterborough Arts & Culture Council). She engages in feminist, participatory and arts-based research, partnering with arts, environmental, disability, aging, healthcare, and Nishinaabeg communities for influence, capacity-building, and new possibilities. She has received awards for research, teaching and leadership and published widely in journals of philosophy, political science, disability, aging, health, engaged scholarship, methodology, community development, and social justice. An activist artist-scholar, she creates for self-expression and to make space for brave conversations, reimagining disability and aging with a decolonizing lens. She has guest edited with the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning and currently doing so with the Journal of Aging Studies and Social Sciences.
Eliza Chandler
Dr. Eliza Chandler is Assistant Professor in the School of Disability Studies at X University, wherein she teaches courses on disability arts and culture, cultural representations of disability, leadership and community building, and intersectional activist movements. Earning her PhD from the Social Justice and Education department at the University of Toronto in 2014, Chandler was dually appointed as the artistic director at Tangled Art + Disability, an organization in Toronto dedicated to the cultivation of disability arts, and the postdoctoral research fellow in X University’s School of Disability Studies from 2014-2016. During this time, she was the also the founding artistic director of Tangled Art Gallery, Canada’s first art gallery dedicated to showcasing disability art and advancing accessible curatorial practice. Chandler is also the co-director of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded partnership project, Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology and Access to Life, a seven-year research project that interrogates the close relationship between activist art and the achievement of social justice. She is also the director of a SSHRC Insight Development Grant that explores how accessibility practices that are led by disabled people and our politics change how we create and interact with arts and culture. Chandler is a practicing curator and regularly gives lectures, interviews, and consultations related to disability arts, accessible curatorial practices, and disability politics in Canada.
