Together-Together with Rod Michalko

On the 14th August 2026, 3pm Toronto time / 8pm GMT our dear friend and brother Dr Rod Michalko died. Rod’s life partner Professor Tanya Titchkosky released a beautiful obituary on the 17th August. Amongst this gorgeous text we find these words:

'Together with his partner of 38 years, Professor Tanya Titchkosky, writing, editing, teaching, arguing, pursuing pub-pedagogy and traveling with many disability studies students, Rod created spaces in which students could flourish and so too could Disability Studies … His work repeatedly asked us to notice the assumptions hidden inside ordinary relations. Writing about navigating streets, bars, classrooms, sidewalks, conversations, friendships, his work was theoretically demanding yet inviting and witty. Storytelling accomplished with humour is a defining characteristic of Rod’s scholarship and teaching'. https://rodmichalko.ca/obituary/ 

Later on the 14th August, Tanya phoned us - a collection of close friends and family - and we wept and laughed together. We were and remain consumed by loss and the realisation that Rod is now on another journey. Just after the call finished, we scrolled down our social media feeds to learn of the premature death of Professor Jason Arday. We were reminded of the many fictions and depictions of Professor Arday on X/Twitter the previous week that had resulted in a collective and vicious pile-on. Numerous X/Twitter academics appeared and reappeared amongst the online throng in this hounding of a proud Black and Disabled professor. Their negative and nihilistic intentions contrast so markedly with the values that Rod embodied in his life and writing. Each of those X/Twitter ‘characters’ (now there’s a euphemism) are, perhaps, best understood as pathological products of a particular kind of academic practice that knocks down those that have been ‘built up’; fails to recognise the racialisation of the university; rejects nuance for polemic; digs out individual academic ‘stars’ over revealing more positive representations of civic university cultures and dismisses Equality, Diversity and Inclusion initiatives for their ‘watering down’ of the ‘prestige’ of elite institutions. What these commentators share is a deeply cynical attitude and propensity for spiteful discourse. We can only imagine what Professor Arday’s friends and family are doing as they search for solace. 

We believe it is a mistake to understand cynical social media academics as individual outliers or a few bad apples. The cynical academic is in all of us. Each of us holds the potential - perhaps the inclination - to dismiss, deconstruct, dehumanise, and deter others through our words and deeds. We need to radically interrogate our own practices; to grapple again with careful relations and our shared responsibilities to one another as check in on our well-being and welfare with one another. We need help here. And so, we have found help and support in these awful polarising times through reflecting on Dr Rod Michalko’s life. Disability always has the potential to recalibrate, reevaluate and revise what it means to be human. And Rod always wrote and spoke about disability’s potential. Rod never asked for the end of debate nor criticism: but instead the insertion of care, craft and consideration. 

Let us be clear: Rod was no push over, wilting flower nor happy-clappy liberal. He was vociferous, passionate, and argumentative. He demanded that we write in ways that truly captured our voices. He hated what he read as the use of slogans in the place of deep thinking. He encouraged us to resist the punitive and punishing bureaucracies of the university. He asked us to consider pushing back at the creep of our institutions into our everydays of creativity, love and life. He could be dismissive, demanding, disruptive and disorientating. And Dr Rod Michalko was all of these things and more: he was generous. He loved to be with other people. He lent into physical and emotional connection. He foregrounded blindness as a guiding subject of inquiry. He asked us to stop talking about access and inclusion and reconsider the quality of our human relations. He embraced human and animal connections. He loved and mourned the loss of human and animal guides. He instructed us to question rather than seek out easy answers. He made us feel comfortable in ourselves as we tried to embrace uncertainty. He taught us not to know. He cherished disability as a complex human phenomenon. He found life tricky to understand, complex to enact and always felt viscerally. He was mistaken in the belief that John was the best Beatle (sorry Rod, we had to get that in). He would have laughed at the apparent certainty of keyboard warriors and quickly rejected their easy sense of right and wrong. It's not just that he would have despised the bullies on X/Twitter (he would have) and the impact that they had on a real, living person: he would have found their arguments banal.

Rod did all of this in concert with his life-partner Professor Tanya Titchkosky. In a recent book Rod introduced the idea of the ‘together-together’ through the imagination of his late guide dog Smokie. When Rod and Smokie were together on the planet they were, well, together-together. And Smokie longed for a time when he and Rod might reconnect: to be together-together again. We’d like to think that time is now. Tanya, like Rod, is an internationally renowned writer, thinker and provocateur. She is also a true intellectual leader and community facilitator of the making and remaking of space: the rearranging of a perspective and a room; the rejigging of chairs, tables, starting assumptions, arguments and ideas in order to make as many people feel included. Tanya and Rod have always been together-together: and through their scholarship this togetherness will remain.

Together-together, Rod and Tanya were and are the antidote to those cynical social media academics and academic pathologies in which bullying is misconstrued as ‘debate’; where crass Twitter/X postings are misrepresented as ‘theorisation’ and when character assination is misnamed as ‘intellectual sparring’. Being together-together in thought, reflection and life always means more. It means finding moments of reconnection and reaffirmation. Being together-together requires a mutuality where we recognise another’s humanity alongside our own. Being together-together pushes us to support one another to find better ways of thinking, debating and challenging one another. Being together-together is taking comfort in questions. Cynicism can have a devastating impact on our fellow human beings. In contrast, being together-together is all we have in life, love and death. And Rod, well, he’ll remain together-together with us all.