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Projects
Watch this space for emerging research projects out of the Disability Publics Lab.
Addressing the Gaps in Graduate Student Mental Health is a SSHRC-funded Connection grant. The project will mobilize findings from previous research bringing a critical disability studies lens to graduate student mental health by developing and disseminating a handbook for students and faculty about experiences of psychiatric distress in graduate education. This handbook will summarize the results from the previous study, offer tips and strategies specific to graduate student and faculty audiences, and offer resources that may support collective advocacy.
Project Lead:
Dr. Merrick Pilling
2024 - Present
Social Justice Praxis and Clinical Chart Documentation in Mental Health Care is a SSHRC-Funded Connection Grant. This project involves the creation and implementation of a 3-hour interactive workshop on social justice praxis and chart documentation in mental health care. The goal of the workshop is to mobilize cutting-edge chart documentation theory and practice to support and encourage social justice praxis amongst current and aspiring mental health practitioners and social service workers. The workshop supports current and aspiring workers to use critical documentation practice as a strategy towards revealing and resisting pathologization of the everyday and the dehumanization of service users.
Project Lead:
Dr. Merrick Pilling (opens in new window)
2023 - Present
Transforming the Disabling/Maddening State: Capacity and Decision Making was a Global Classroom in May 2023 put on through the Disability Publics Lab with funding from TMU Global. This event brought together activists, legal scholars, and students from Colombia, Scotland, and Canada to discuss the 'Right to Decide.' The conversation explored questions about enacting Article 12 of the UNCRPD (external link, opens in new window) through local advocacy, regional legal and policy change, and international information sharing. Attendees learned about transforming understandings of capacity and the social and material impact these concepts have on the lives of disabled and mad individuals. Student and alumni RAs produced a Pressbook, an open-access educational resource, to host recorded speaker presentations and transcripts, provide additional context, and facilitate ongoing learning through interactive activities.
Project Lead:
Dr. Esther Ignagni (opens in new window)
2022 - 2023.
Stretching our Stories: Digital World-Making in Trouble Times is part of a SSRHC-funded Partnership Development Grant that mobilizes a research-creation program across four activist storyteller communities, including TMU. Design Fiction workshops explore how communities' storytelling re-emerges online and how digital worlds can resist reproducing oppressive elements of in-person interaction
Project Leads:
Dr. Esther Ignagni (opens in new window) and Dr. Eliza Chandler (opens in new window)
2022 - Present
Disability Art Histories and Legacies: Animating BEING Studio's archive is a community-engaged research project that works with BEING Studio, a disability arts organization in Ottawa. We are working with a group of artists from BEING Studio to explore its archives and consider BEING's contributions to disability arts. To share our findings, we will create two podcasts, one for BEING's podcast series SPEAK and the other for Disability Saves the World. Funded by a SSHRC PEG.
Project Lead:
Dr. Eliza Chandler (opens in new window)
2022 - Present
Stories of Access was a series of co-creation workshops where participating disabled and neurodivergent artists engaged in storytelling, knowledge sharing, and prototyping related to the theme of access in the arts. Participating artists explored the question, “how can we make art more accessible?” We are now creating a documentary to mobilize our findings to diverse publics. Funded by a SSHRC IDG and PG.
Project Lead:
Dr. Eliza Chandler (opens in new window)
2022 - 2023
(google doc)
(external link)
Cultivating Community Care was a student research project on how 2SLGBTQIA+ and mad/Deaf/disabled communities in Toronto understand and define community care.
Principal Investigator:
L Morris, MA student in Communication and Culture
Supervisor:
Dr. Eliza Chandler
2022 - 2023