Inviting Death: The life and death consequences of access to housing

The Office of Social Innovation will present a Transformation Cafe exploring the intersection of disability, death, and access to housing on May 9th, as part of TMU’s School of Interior Design’s housed…unhoused…rehoused symposium. Transformation cafes are discussions that are open to the TMU community and the public that invite people from different disciplines and communities to engage in dialogue around a common issue. We will begin with a screening of Liz Carr’s documentary, Better off Dead?, which takes a disability activist analysis to explore different perspectives of medical assistance in dying. The screening will be followed by a Death cafe. Death Cafes are salon-style conversations about death, conversations often quieted in secular, western/ized cultures. These loosely structured conversations are typically guided by questions aimed to animate personal, collective, cultural, political, and/or spiritual exchanges discussions about death. In this death cafe, we will discuss disabled people’s life and death chances within a culture in which medical assistance in dying coupled with a lack of adequate social services and supports may make it easier to access death than to access life.