The Power, Place and Potentiality of Disability in the University

We are pleased to invite you to a free hybrid public talk hosted by the Disability Publics Lab in the School of Disability Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Please join us on Wednesday, August 26, from 12:30–1:30 p.m. in the Disability Publics Lab (SHE Building, Room 576, 99 Gerrard St. E., Toronto) or online via Zoom. The Zoom link will be shared with registered attendees before the event.

We are delighted to welcome Dr. Kirsty Liddiard from the University of Sheffield.

This talk poses some critical questions about the power, place and potentiality of disability in the neoliberal-able university: (i) How might we imagine anti-ableist research practices and cultures together? (ii) What should inclusive research feel like? And importantly (iii) How must we sustain ourselves and our communities, and why does this matter?

The talk centres two research projects based at the Institute of the Study of the Human (iHuman) at the University of Sheffield (UK). In 2024, colleagues in iHuman began a Wellcome Trust Institutional Fund for Research Culture award; (WAARC). WAARC brings together disabled and non-disabled academics at the University of Sheffield – working together with disabled people’s organisations – to find and promote anti-ableist practices in the university. Furthermore, a project entitled - a 5 year interdisciplinary programme of research funded by a Wellcome Trust Discovery Award - is developing forms of knowledge production that emerge from lived experiences of chronic respiratory illness and ventilator use. In the project, Artists-in-Residence, experts-by-experience, disability and arts organisations and clinicians are working in collaboration to curate and coproduce new understandings of the experiences of ventilated people, across a host of identity positions, to interrogate the new cultural politics of respiration in a continuing global pandemic, and as we imagine post-pandemic futures.

These research projects, then, are raising critical questions about the spaces, cultures and contexts in which we generate and co-produce knowledge on disability, health and chronic illness. We share these questions, and also the tools, resources and new ways of working developing across both projects. We locate and problematise the everyday forms of academic ableism and look to resistance, hope, solidarity, and community to mitigate its deleterious effects.

Dr Kirsty Liddiard is a feminist disability studies scholar and disabled researcher whose co-produced research centres on lived experience, emotion and embodiment as core axes through which to understand the everyday lives of disabled people and their families. She is currently a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Education and iHuman at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of The Intimate Lives of Disabled People (2018, Routledge) and the co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Disabled Children’s Childhood Studies (2018, Palgrave). She is also co-editor of Being Human in Covid-19 (2022, Bristol University Press) and a co-author of Living Life to the Fullest: Youth, Disability and Voice (2022, Emerald). Her current project, Cripping Breath: Towards a new cultural politics of respiration, funded by a Wellcome Discovery Award, explores the lives of people who have had their lives saved or sustained by ventilatory medical technologies. To learn more about this project, please see: www.sheffield.ac.uk/cripping-breath

• This is a hybrid event. Attendees may participate either in person or virtually via Zoom.
• ASL interpretation will be provided for virtual attendees and displayed on the TV in the Disability Publics Lab.
• Attendees are asked to wear a mask unless they have a medical exception. Masks may be removed while eating or drinking.
• HEPA air filtration will be in use throughout the event.
• The Disability Publics Lab and a nearby washroom are wheelchair accessible.
• Light refreshments will be provided.
• A separate dining area is available upon request.
• If you have additional access needs, please contact us in advance. We will do our best to support your participation.