Archives
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Medical Assistance In Dying: Resistance in Canada
Vol. 13 No. 2 (2024)Tomorrow’s historians will find rich veins of meaning in the crush of narrative and counter-narrative that swirl around Canada’s controversially named “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAID) regime. Expanded in March 2021 to authorize medical practitioners to administer euthanasia or suicide assistance to disabled persons who are still very much alive and in no way approaching the end of their natural lives, the regime has been championed in public policy debates as progressive and humane. Whose voices will prevail when the story of MAID is written? This special issue of the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies argues, not surprisingly, for disabled voices to be heard with resounding force. To this end, we have assembled in this volume testimonial statements entered into the parliamentary record by disabled and disability-aligned citizens immediately prior to a radical and – as argued in these texts – discriminatory, expansion of MAID law and the regime it authorizes.
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VIBE: Challenging Ableism and Audism Through the Arts
Vol. 10 No. 2 (2021)This special issue of the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies is a result of the activity surrounding VIBE: Challenging ableism and audism through the arts, a 3-day international symposium exploring the existing and potential contributions of the Deaf/disability arts to aesthetic innovations, research-creation and cultural change in attitudes towards the capacities of the Deaf/disabled. The symposium, which took place at Concordia University from November 30 - December 2, 2018, brought together Deaf/disabled academics, emerging scholars, post-doctoral researchers, activists, artists, and students – and their allies – for vibrant exchanges on the relationship between disability arts research and disability arts practice.
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Disability Studies in Education—Critical Conversations
Vol. 9 No. 5 (2020)This special issue of the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies brings together 19 articles by scholars and activists across broad academic disciplines and activist communities— from disability studies to inclusive education, early childhood education, decolonial studies, feminist anti-violence organizing, community health and more—as well as geopolitical locations.
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Sites and Shapes of Transinstitutionalization
Vol. 9 No. 3 (2020)The study of transinstitutionalization necessarily varies by context. In this issue we guard against misconceptions that institutionalization is an action that took place in the past, whose loose ends we are now trying to tie together and where contemporary institutionalizing conditions are merely legacies that will, in time, fade away. To think of institutionalization as something of the past is to gently scratch its surface. And, given the wide breadth of transinstitutionalization and the many lives and stories it encompasses, we are aware of the limitations of covering this vast topic in one special issue. Yet, following a call to include disability in developing new approaches to understanding modernity (Van Trigt, 2019), our aim with this collection is to gather the latest research and reflections on transinstitutionalization as a topic that can take flight in our theoretical and cultural imaginations, a topic that can help us transcend the dangers of “theoretical complacency” that come with imagining the ongoing as a past, one-time thing (Bauman, 2000, p. 3).
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The Intersections of Critical Disability Studies and Critical Animal Studies
Vol. 9 No. 2 (2020) -
Cécités et créations
Vol. 8 No. 6 (2019)Ce numéro spécial interroge et affirme les liens productifs et innovateurs qui existent entre cécité et création. Nous réunissons ici des réflexions historiques, créatives et littéraires qui montrent, de manière pluridisciplinaire, que de nouvelles conceptions de la cécité peuvent briser les images stéréotypées de la personne aveugle qui hantent la société contemporaine. Nous rejetons le modèle médical de la cécité qui représente la personne aveugle comme victime ou objet de pitié souffrant de son sort. Tout en reconnaissant les inconvénients qu’affrontent les personnes aveugles dans un monde fait pour et par les personnes non aveugles, nous affirmons que la cécité n’est ni problème ni tragédie. Au contraire, elle ouvre de nouvelles perspectives intellectuelles, imaginatives, esthétiques et innovatrices qui remettent en question la position privilégiée de la vue dans la hiérarchie des sens.
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Survivals, Ruptures, Resiliences: Perspectives from Disability Scholarship, Art and Activism
Vol. 8 No. 4 (2019)This special issue of the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies (CJDS) includes 18 original works that critically examine survival and resilience as socio-political phenomena. The volume of contributions in this issue suggest the complexities of survival and resilience are important current considerations for critical disability studies scholarship and praxis. Drawing on interdisciplinary disability and mad studies perspectives, and a wide range of methodologies, including autoethnography, poetry, photography, art, commentary, as well more traditional academic methods for sociological and social-geographical, genealogical, and geopolitical analysis, these works expose, resist and rupture unexamined relations to difference and adversity.
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Disability and/in/through Fanfiction
Vol. 8 No. 2 (2019)Disability and/in/through Fanfiction includes a mix of academic articles, based on research and scholarship, reflections on how disability manifests in fannish spaces, a documentary film, and fanfiction narratives. All are imbued with disabled fan sensibilities and perspectives.
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Cripping the Arts in Canada
Vol. 8 No. 1 (2019)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.
