Disability Salon Student Spotlight Series: March Spotlight
OI 12– 252 (Air Space)
91ֱ
252 Bloor Street West
Toronto ON M5S 1V6
Canada
March Spotlight:
Presentations from current SJE MA student on their MA thesis in progress and PhD candidate on their dissertation writing in progress.
Presenters: Katherin Chen
Re-encountering How Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is Perceived in the Educational Context.
Presenters: Sara-Marni Hubbard
A PhD in the Middle of Things: Work, a Pandemic, and Finding New Meaning in Legislative History
Respondent: Dr. Efrat Gold
Refreshments provided.
In-person event. Zoom link available upon request.
No registration required.
Event Accessibility Information
All events will include a Zoom e-transcript and window shades to adjust lighting. Together, we will create and cultivate ways of accessing one another and our work. There is ramp access to OISE from Bloor Street and from the St. George Subway station. The Dept. of SJE is located on the north side of the 12th floor, just off the elevators. A large accessible washroom is located near the elevators on the 12th floor. Masks available at all events.
Information and accessibility questions: disabilitysalon@gmail.com.
About the Disability Salon:
Starting in the 2025/2026 academic year, the Disability Salon will extend its offerings to include a series of gatherings to spotlight, celebrate, and support the critical and creative research of disability studies students at different stages of their graduate school and scholarly journeys.
Disability is a story that lives in the midst of our creative and critical movement through the arts. Through the Disability Salon, we come together to engage disability in, with, and through the arts as a dynamic and valuable perspective.
Created in the winter of 2021 by Dr. Devon Healey and PhD student Jose Miguel ‘Miggy’ Esteban, the Disability Salon became a space to navigate how to be together amidst a global pandemic through care and creativity. The work of disabled artists acted as a springboard to immerse ourselves in the creative practices and explorations of disability as we worked to discover where disability might move us. Through student-led creative workshops, film screenings, and the sharing of artistic work, we came together to create a space through which we all share in the doing of disability arts.
About the Speakers
Katherine Chen
Presenter. Current SJE MA student.
Sara-Marni Hubbard
Presenter. Current SJE PhD candidate.
Sara-Marni is in the final year of her PhD, where she is writing a Disability Studies history of the Toronto Asylum’s role in immigration and deportation. She is a disability studies informed historian whose research explores the history of public health, migration, psychiatry, and eugenics in North America.
Dr. Efrat Gold
Respondent.
Dr Efrat Gold is an AMS History of Medicine postdoctoral fellow at York University, engaging in mad and disability studies. Using interpretive and critical theory and methods, Gold critiques the psy-complex, moving toward contextualized and relational understandings of suffering, crisis, and distress, and foregrounding those most vulnerable and marginalized by psychiatric power, discourse, and treatments. Her scholarship focuses on constructions of psychiatric legitimacy that naturalize and reproduce medicalized understandings of human suffering, thereby casting off all other possibilities. Through explorations of norms and meaning-making, Gold unsettles psychiatric ideology by unearthing the present absences of those deemed mad and exploring life-affirming possibilities for mad inclusion. Gold’s publications appear in scholarly and community venues, indicating her commitment to producing research and pedagogy that is accessible to and includes mad and disabled people through consultation, activism, and solidarity. Using archival material and artefacts related to mad and disabled people’s history, Gold’s unique scholarly approach unearths the often-overlooked active role of mad and disabled people in pushing back against oppressive boundaries of normalcy and creating affirmative alternatives and potentials. Motivated by social justice-informed approaches to madness and disability, Gold works across difference, moving towards an emancipative politics that recognizes the entwined landscape of oppression within efforts to build different futures.
