Abstracts
Abstract
This article reflects on the development process of a new undergraduate program, Racialized Health and Disability Justice (RHDJ), at the Critical Disability Studies program, York University from the perspective of the core program development team. The RHDJ program aims to centre the contributions and scholarship of Black, Indigenous, racialized, disabled, and Mad peoples, in response to mounting evidence demonstrating the ongoing marginalization and neglect of these groups in terms of their health and well-being across the Canadian state, and their exclusion from participation, recognition, knowledge production, and leadership within the colonial structures of academia. We reflect on how graduate students and faculty were involved in working toward the program’s central aim of teaching and enacting racial and disability justice. We ask, what difference does it make in our program development process to begin from a disability justice ethos, in our negotiations within a structure that the program resists at the same time as it relies on it for its existence? Since the program aims toward the transformation of care for communities who have been marginalized, we also consider if theories of care ethics can inform our process in implementing disability justice principles as we navigate institutional barriers, organization of labour, and collaboration. By sharing our process and reflections, we hope other collectives with similar disability justice goals may consider and build upon our experiences, in the service of building different tools for a different, more livable future.
Keywords:
- Disability justice,
- ethics of care,
- knowledge decolonization,
- transformative education,
- program development
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Appendices
Biographical notes
Patricia Hoi Ling Ki is an immigrant-settler of Chinese/Hakka descent living in T'karonto. She holds a PhD from Critical Disability Studies at York University. She is an artist, a registered social worker and art therapist, has practised as a mental health worker and educator over the past decade, and is currently the executive director at the Toronto Art Therapy Institute. She published papers, poetry, and artwork on the discourse of trauma and ethics of care.
Rachel da Silveira Gorman is an Associate Professor in the Graduate Program in Critical Disability Studies at York University. Current projects include disability data, AI bias, and AIprototypes, and biochemical mechanisms of the social determinants of health. Da Silveira Gorman’s writings on ideologies of disability and race have appeared in American Quarterly, thirdspace, and the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. Da Silveira Gorman also works in choreography and curating.
Jessica Vorstermans is an Assistant Professor in the Critical Disability Studies program in the School of Health Policy and Management, Faculty of Health at York University. Her research makes critical interventions into the field of international experiential and service learning and global citizenship, engaging plural ideas of human rights, disability, and equity in our current neoliberal world.
Agnès Berthelot-Raffard is a political philosopher and ethicist. She is an Associate Professor of Critical Disability Studies at the School of Health Policy and Management (York University). She published several papers in the fields of feminist ethics of care and vulnerability, Black feminist thoughts, and philosophy of public health.
Sean Hillier is a queer Mi’kmaw scholar (Qalipu First Nation). He is an Associate Professor and York Research Chair in Indigenous Health Policy & One Health at the School of Health Policy & Management, Faculty of Health at York University. He is Director for the Centre for Indigenous Knowledges and Languages at York and Co-Chaired the Working Group on Anti-Black and AntiIndigenous racism in the Faculty of Health.
Yasaman Delaviz is an Educational/Curricular Development Specialist in the Faculty of Health at York University. Yasaman earned her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Toronto.