About the Lab
Housed in the School of Disability Studies, at the Faculty of Community Services, the Disability Publics Lab hosts multi-media and digital initiatives committed to bringing in disabled, Deaf, mad, fat, aging, and otherwise differently embodied and enminded participants into mutual, interdependent, critical, and collaborative research spaces.
![A photo taken at the Dispatches from Disabled Country book launch. There are a crowd of people sitting, some masked, other not. An ASL Interpreter is at the front. There is a computer screen monitor showing a video of Catherine Frazee, a disabled woman. There is an open microphone in the foreground.](/content/dam/disability-publics/CatherineFrazeeBookLaunch-2872.jpg)
Photo from the Dispatches from Disabled Country book launch event with Catherine Frazee. Credit: Lisa East
Lab Focus
Part of the Lab’s efforts are directed towards accessible community-based research and adjoined knowledge mobilization. In the Disability Publics Lab, we understand accessibility as 1) expansive and 2) relational.
- Accessibility is expansive and more than a standard list of procedures. We seek to welcome and anticipate differently embodied and enminded peoples into the lab by actively reducing barriers to research and participation.
- We also think of access as relational, meaning that we create accessibility collectively through our everyday interactions with co-researchers, participants, and partners.
The Disability Publics Lab offers resources, methodologies, and knowledge dissemination that work across digital and physical spaces.
A key goal of the Lab is to facilitate public scholarship that extends beyond the walls of the university to engage publics in the exploration, debate, and possible re-imaginings of contemporary social issues. Therefore, we also take up and build on the extensive online scholarly and activist practices of differently embodied and enminded peoples through multiple digital platforms.