Stumbling Beyond the Expected

By Katherine Chen, MA Student, Social Justice Education, OISE of the University of Toronto

Read more about Disability Matters ∞ Ways of Perceiving: International Conversations.

I usually think of conferences as spaces where people with similar interests come together. However, what felt most powerful to me about our disability studies conference was not just that we had gathered, but how we gathered and why. As Dr. Rod Michalko mentioned during the keynote speech, disability studies is not a required subject or a conventional academic path. It’s not like geography or history where you need to check them off a list to graduate from high school. That kind of requirement gives people the opportunity to become interested in those subjects simply by learning about them in school. Disability studies, on the other hand, is something people encounter in more personal and often unexpected ways.

Each one of us had stumbled into it in our own unique ways, through lived experience, through frustrations with systems and society, or through curiosity sparked by the questions no one else seemed willing to ask.

This led me to reflect about my own journey into disability studies, how it wasn’t something I planned or set out to do, but something I found myself drawn to through experience, curiosity, and care. When I’m asked how and why I began doing disability studies, I usually give this long explanation about how I noticed I was thinking differently than many around me about the power of perception and interpretation in shaping what we call “normal,” and about who gets to define this. I let these thoughts and ideas guide me, leading me to ask questions that didn’t seem to belong anywhere in particular at the time. I didn’t learn about disability studies and then shape my thinking around it, rather, my thinking was already aligned with the field when I encountered it. I’ve come to realize this is something quite rare in academia.

So, when Dr. Rod Michalko began speaking about how disability studies is something you stumble into, it clicked. His words perfectly captured the path I had been quietly following all along, and I realized this experience was shared by many others at the conference. Though each of us had different relationships to disability studies, some new to the discipline, others established in their careers, some drawn by personal stories, others by pure curiosity, we all seemed united by that same sense of having stumbled into a field that spoke to us. It was that shared sense of each of our unexpected, yet deeply meaningful, arrivals that made the space feel so special.

The way the presentations and conversations of the day blurred the lines between personal and academic felt like a reflection of all of our journeys, reminding us that disability studies doesn’t force us to separate these perspectives. In fact, it welcomes the meaningful connections and new understandings that happen when intellect and care come together.

Although this was not my first conference experience, it was my first disability studies conference, and that made it feel like an entirely different kind of gathering. We all gathered with the understanding that disability studies is as much about community as it is about scholarship. We came not just with academic interests, but with personal commitments that inspired us to challenge assumptions, share our stories, and work towards a deeper understanding together.