Oughtism Multimodal Seminar, Day 1

A multimodal seminar series on neurodivergent ways of living in the world

Hosted by Christine Shaw and Steven Eastwood
Presented by the Blackwood Gallery
Supported by the UTM/JHI Annual Seminar

Oughtism is a seminar series which expands the Blackwood Gallery’s 2025­–26 exploration of neurodivergent doing, feeling and being, and sets out to conjure linguistic and embodied possibilities for being that resist neurotypical logic.

Free and open to the public. Lunch and light refreshements provided.
Visit our website for full program descriptions and contributor biographies.

Click here for a detailed campus map and here for directions to UTM.

Meet and Greet with Tour of STIM CINEMA
Snack and hot beverages provided
Blackwood Gallery, Kaneff Centre room 140
10am

How Like a Camera
Talk by Janet Harbord
Kaneff Centre, room L1220
11-12pm

Lunch Break
Food and beverages provided
Kaneff Centre, room L1220
12–1pm

Composing Perseveration / Perseverative Composing
Talk by M. Remi Yergeau
Kaneff Centre, room L1220
1:15–2:15pm

Spreads from the Multiverse
Out loud reading tour of the Blackwood’s lightboxes with Chris Martin
4 outdoor campus lightboxes beginning at Blackwood Gallery, Kaneff Centre, room 140
2:15–3pm

Afternoon Break
Snack and hot beverages provided
Circuit Break Area, CCIT Building, ground floor
3pm

Co-creation as Stimming
Workshop by Neurocultures Collective members Georgia Bradburn & Sam Chown Ahern, and Steven Eastwood
e|gallery and Circuit Break Area, CCIT Building, ground floor
3:30–5pm

Kaneff Centre / Innovation Complex

The Blackwood Gallery and Room L1220 are located in the Kaneff Centre on the ground floor and lower level, respectively. The building is on the south side of campus near Inner Circle Road, adjacent to the campus’ main public transit stop and Student Centre. It features open spaces, round sloped corners, and windows to facilitate visual communication and navigation. Accessible multiuser gendered washrooms are located on the ground and lower levels. The building is AODA-compliant, with wide doorways and powered doors. The Kaneff Centre’s white and teal postmodern architecture is distinguished by a minimal grid façade and connects to the modern architectural style of the Innovation Complex with its sleek lines and big windows. The Blackwood Gallery is a large, square-shaped space with high-ceilings, and is dimly lit for the exhibition. Room L1220 is a large room with fixed, raked seating, like an amphitheatre; the stepped seating integrates tables for note-taking.

Communication, Culture, & Technology (CCT) Building

The e|gallery and the Circuit Break are located on the ground floor of the CCT Building at the University of Toronto Mississauga. The building is in the centre of the campus along Middle Road path and is connected to the campus library and an underground parking garage. The building features open spaces and windows to facilitate visual communication and navigation. Accessible multi-user gendered washrooms are located at ground level. All-gender washrooms are located on the third floor. The building is AODA-compliant, with wide doorways and powered doors. The CCT Building is a humming centre where students collectively study, find space to relax, and organize pop-up market stalls. The e|gallery is encased by lime green cladding with frosted glass from floor to ceiling. The gallery space is long and narrow with high-ceilings and bright lighting. For STIM CINEMA, a series of modular tables stretch across the full length of the gallery and are outfitted with warm task lamps, weighted blankets, earmuffs, and stim toys. The Circuit Break is the area that surrounds the entrance to the gallery and is an open space with tables and cushioned seating.

A free shuttle bus will run from Toronto to Mississauga on Friday, February 6 and Saturday, February 7, following the schedule below.

9am: Departure from Hotel Ocho (195 Spadina Ave., Toronto, ON M5T 2C3)
10am: Arrival at the University of Toronto Mississauga (3359 Mississauga Road
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6)
5pm: Departure from University of Toronto Mississauga
6pm: Arrival at Hotel Ocho

Sign up for the shuttle bus on your registration order form.

Accessibility notes: While all stops are AODA-compliant and free of physical barriers, we regret that the shuttle bus is not accessible.

Info: Snack and hot beverages provided. Please indicate dietary needs on the registration order form.

Info: Autism and cinema have a shared history. Cinema at the beginning offered equality to human and non-human forms and their ways of being, but there came a gradual anthropocentric insistence that cinema mimics a human point of view. As autism came to be studied and storied in the mid-twentieth century, it too was subject to a pressure to prioritise human sociability above engagement with the more-than-human world. Both have been associated negatively with qualities of automation, leading to interventions to instate human-centred sociability (autism) and human-centred stories (cinema), enforced forms of normalcy. This talk explores how autism and cinema have been thought together in a number of environments and historical moments including in the work of contemporary autistic artists and in the short film, Autism Plays Itself (2023).

Info: Food and beverages provided. Please indicate dietary needs on the registration order form.

Info: “Desire, distress, requirement, repetition, release, repetition.” In their recent text “Composing Perseveration / Perseverative Composing” in Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (2023), M. Remi Yergeau discusses “perseveration,” a term psychologists have defined as a repetitive action which persists “beyond a desired point.” Wary of this framing rooted in the medical model of disability, they probe further: “whose point is desired?” How can perseveration serve “as a mode of rhetorical invention or access creation?” In this talk, Yergeau will discuss reclaiming perseveration from its origins in psychiatry and behavioural psychology—toward a more capacious vision beginning with “actions disabled people engage in to maintain relations within, toward, around, or in defiance of a given space.”

Info: Out loud reading tour of the Blackwood’s lightboxes with Chris Martin: Spreads from the Multiverse is the plainest way to say what the four images on the Blackwood’s lightboxes are: spread pages from texts in the Multiverse series of neurodivergent writing from Milkweed Editions. But Spreads from the Multiverse also gestures towards Adam Wolfond’s invitation to “extend the choreography.” Something spreads from the text to the reader, who these images make clear is also always a viewer. And when it spreads, there is a transference of sorts, a contagion, a becoming. How will the spreads spread from human to text to human to text to human and on and on? How will the reading be spreading from here to there, from you to you to you to yes?

Info: Snack and hot beverages provided. Please indicate dietary needs on the registration order form.

Info: Workshop by Neurocultures Collective members Georgia Bradburn & Sam Chown Ahern, and Steven Eastwood. In this workshop, some of the artists behind STIM CINEMA guide you through their methods of co-creation and creative development, exploring neurodivergent “stimmy” perspectives that place emphasis on sensory experience and delight in circularity, repetition, pattern and detail. Using the project’s mural structure as inspiration, the session will look at ways of articulating neurodivergent experience, through moving image, drawing, writing, collaging, and other forms. A breakout drawing activity will enable all involved to practice and apply these concepts. By embracing tactile, visual and nonlinear practices, participants will gain insights into the value of challenging normative structures of artmaking that exclude neurodiverse perspectives, instead focusing on liberated methods that provide opportunities for neurodivergent agency.

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