Representations

Leads: Elaine Cagulada and Tanya Titchkosky (University of Toronto) and Dan Goodley (University of Sheffield)

Doing disability differently (University of Toronto)

The Doing Disability Differently (DDD) research, reading and activist group based at OISE, University of Toronto are working with the question of representing disability in health and medical contexts. As Tanya Titchkosky (2025) writes:

Since 2006, I had been convening the Doing Disability Differently (DDD) research, reading, and activist group. At various times, this group included disability studies faculty, graduate students, post-docs, staff, sometimes undergrad students and sometimes faculty on leave from other universities. Together we’ve been doing research and access activism at OISE, the University of Toronto campus, and beyond for nearly two decades. We have hosted international speakers, reading groups, we’ve done access audits of OISE space, advocated for more accessible washrooms and subway entrances as well as formulated safety and emergency plans. At least two edited DS collections are connected to the DDD (Rethinking Normalcy and  DisAppearing: Encounters in DS ). We have also hosted colloquiums, seminars, a DS Summer Institute as well as a Critical Influencers conference and   intra-university sessions such as “What’s Up with DS in Toronto,” and “Outa Sight.” At bottom, the DDD events generate discussions that nurture the assumption that disability is not an individual problem but, rather, a collective interest that matters through all our relations.  

DDD promotes a unique model of relational scholarship and community building that brings together scholars, graduate students and activists. In relation to the Disability Matters programme, DDD asks:

• How does disability matter to education, including health and medical education?
• How might disability studies and mad studies reorient people, practices, and policy within the cultural matrix of education, health, and medicine? 

The DDD community brings a scholarly approach to the study of representations of disability - and ways of perceiving - that raise not only queries about our relationship with disability but also critiques the very idea of disability studies and the study of disability. Recent activities undertaken so far include:

Disability Matters ∞ Ways of Perceiving International Conversations (May 2025)
This Spring Institute promoted International Conversations about disability perceptions in and outside of medicine hosted by OISE, University of Toronto, Canada. See this link for a programme of the event You can also read contributions by some of the participants as they reflect on our time together. As Tanya Titchkosky writes ‘In attempting to recognize what might lie between disability matters and ways of perceiving, we landed on the infinity sign - ∞ - the sign for the on-going relations between our disability studies research work, and the need to consider the place of disability experience in our lives’.

Questions of disability studies: Writing retreat (June 2025)
What is disability studies for? What does it mean to do disability studies? What is disability studies and what is disability studies doing? What does it mean that, today, disability and disability studies can be, at least partially, incorporated into the university, even though the university conceptualizes disability in non-socio-political ways enabling primarily the study of disability as a bio-problem and its management as such? Once adopted by the university, how does disability and disability studies influence or change the ways traditional research is done or how students, faculty and staff are managed? Sylvia Wynter, decades ago, wrote to her colleagues about the place and meaning of b/Black Studies in the University in the face of the violent beating of Rodney King and the further injustices meted out following this beating. She asked her colleagues to be more concerned about what they had done to train the “inner eye” so that the “best and brightest” were enabled to perceive certain people and their lives as no life at all. When watching the expanse of relations that can encircle some lives as NHI – No Humans Involved – Wynter realized it was the whole of academia, including those interested in justice, and “our studies,” that she had to address – and not just the more obvious culprits – police, judiciary, and the media. The question of what “we” have done, we who educate the inner eyes informing how people perceive, know, manage, organize, rehabilitate, confine, and punish or support other people – this question should remain important given the appearance of NHI-perception in daily life, including our lives as disability studies scholars. NHI-perception, that is the capacity to perceive human life through acts of objectification, could be understood as one of academia’s primary activities. This writing retreat provided space and time - oriented to Wynter’s work - to address a key question of the Disability Matters programme: what is disability studies for?  Retreat discussions were also informed by two work in progress papers:

Titchkosky, T. (forthcoming). Submitted: Fascism taking Flight on a Disability Runway: Analyzing Trump’s Disability Degradation in Turbulent Times. Disability in Turbulent Times (Edward Elgar Publishing). Edited by Patty Douglas, Harriet Cameron and Katherine Rusnwick-Cole.

Cagulada, E. (2025). Breathing Speaks of God: Exploring a Moment's Unfolding Through Interpretive Disability Studies” (Canadian Theological Society ... https://cts-stc.ca/2025/05/21/cts-2025-final-schedule/ ). 

Disability Matters: A new Graduate course (2025 - 2028), OISE, University of Toronto
How does disability matter to education, including health and medical education? How might  disability studies and mad studies reorient people, practices, and policy within the cultural matrix of education, health, and medicine? This graduate course demonstrates how interpretive approaches in disability studies and mad studies might turn us toward a reconsideration of our entanglement with health and medical matters. Seminar discussions will focus on grappling with how disability matters not only to questions of humanness, but to questions of health and life itself. The course will be open to graduate students from across the arts, humanities, social and medical sciences (in 2028). The following phases of work are informing this work:

Doing Disability Disability Research group explorations of how disability matters in the medical context including: Scoping medical curriculum at the University of Toronto; Mapping unique courses in public health/medicine that make a connection to mad studies, or disability studies; Gathering representations of doctors who are disabled.

Disability and Race in the campus classroom: interpretive possibilities (Cagulada and Titchkosky, forthcoming, Open Access Book, Palgrave) argues that re-encounter[ing] representations as a way to commit to a politics of openness. Such a politics, Cagulada and Titchkosky suggest, requires a pause in the face of certain dichotomies (such as the assumed dichotomy between medicine’s interests and disabled people’s interests) as a way to pursue a “re-description” and show how we might better nurture engagement with our inter-relatedness.

Doctor Interviews. Making use of a cultural studies informed version of disability studies, this study explores the interpretive milieu reflected in medicalized understandings of disability in order to begin analyzing how disability is represented in health practice, research, and teaching. Through interviews with medical doctors and clinical practitioners - who are also medical educators - the research pursues the following objectives: 
(1) examine how disability is currently appearing in the health context; 
(2) show how routine medical practice, research and teaching have something to reveal about how the meaning of disability is produced within medical settings. 
In particular, how do established researcher/physicians experience and related to disability in their medical practice, research and teaching? Given the detailed knowledge that doctors have of particular disabilities as their speciality and their practice of interacting with actual people who live the disability experience there is a unique opportunity to explore the complex and nuanced way that disability has and is given meaning within a medical context.The main question of that guide these short open-ended questions with doctors include:

• how does disability come up for you in your practice?
• how do you address disability, or tell people about becoming disabled, or otherwise use the term in your daily practice?
   

Disability Studies Advisory Group - an ad hoc advisory group that brought together disabled/mad activists, researchers, scholars and teachers in July 2025 to assist in the exploration of disability matters as they relate to current research and the development of a new course. Participants have experiences of nurturing complex relationships to medical practices, psychiatric practices, disabled/mad experiences, disabled/mad community, and/or critical academic study in their lives and/or work.

Reclaiming disability representation in healthcare research and dissemination (University of Sheffield)

We will also explore how disability is depicted in healthcare research and dissemination. From May 2026, Dan Goodley and colleagues at the University of Sheffield will lead a phase of work that implements a Critical Ethnography and Critical Discourse Analysis of past/present online/offline public engagement events (including seminars, exhibitions, symposia, workshops, debates, panels) held by Wellcome and other inter/national funders over the last decade. We will assess discourses and narratives of disability represented in their messaging and ask:

• How is disability depicted in events held by inter/national funders?
• In what ways is disability used as a prosthetic to create problematic conceptions of disability in the service of health research messaging?
• How might we draw on the work of critical disability studies to reclaim alternative representations of disability in healthcare research and dissemination that emphasise possibility over deficiency?

This analytical work will also be supplemented by a number of Key Stakeholder interviews with disabled artists, designers and influencers will offer expert-by-experience critiques of representations of disability and health. We will work with these stakeholders to ask:

• In what ways are different media providing opportunities for a reconveyance of disability representations in health contexts?
• What possibilities and dangers are found in these media representations of disability?

An Online Guidance Document for health research funders will draw on findings of this phase and outline recommendations for the use of disability metaphors and imagery in healthcare dissemination/public engagement. 

We will also work with a disabled filmmaker to produce two Representing Disability Documentaries (the first on dominant discourses and the second on alternatives). Filmmaking is an effective tool for reimagining contemporary representations. We will report on findings/recommendations through at least four Journal articles