This public forum includes four workshops and a response that foreground multivalent experiences of access, including its sounds, scents, motions, and textures. Embracing what Disability Studies scholar Tanya Titchkosky calls the “politics of wonder”—a “pausing in the face of what already is”—this forum confronts barriers to access that shape current exclusionary systems, environments, and interactions.11Tanya Titchkosky, The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), p. X. Through experiential, participatory, and conversational modes, each session holds space for processes of learning and unlearning to destabilize able-bodied, high-sensory, and fast-paced ways of being that are too often deemed acceptable.

Rehearsal Hall C, Deerfield Hall room 1065
9:45am

Facilitator: Devon Healey
Rehearsal Hall C, Deerfield Hall room 1065
10–11am

Blind Disability Studies scholar, theatre creator, and actor Devon Healey expands on her theatrical practice called, Immersive Descriptive Audio (IDA). IDA is an artistic practice that, through blindness, understands accessibility as an integral part of the creative process and theatrical experience. IDA disturbs the isolation of the senses. Sight, the silent act of watching the dancing/moving body; and sound, the voice description of that body, comingle in IDA. This work develops a rapport between blindness and sight through a soundscape giving voice to that which does not always appear. IDA disturbs the senses and brings the intrigue of blindness to the fore. This workshop explores the creative process of writing IDA and will showcase some of Healey’s most recent work in blind perception including a reading from her new play, Rainbow on Mars.

Facilitators: Nina Leo and Moez Surani
Rehearsal Hall D, Deerfield Hall room 1061
11:15am–12:15pm

Interdisciplinary artists Nina Leo and Moez Surani share Heresies, an olfactory project in response to heavily mediated cities. This workshop considers how scent operates, how it can be used as a subversive corporate and political tool, and how it may also be employed to counter rhetoric, access shared experiences, and enlist empathy.

12:15pm
With Work-Study Students-led exhibition tour beginning at 12:45pm

Facilitator: Shay Erlich
Blackwood Gallery, Kaneff Centre room 140
1:15–2:15pm

In a digital world where anything seems possible, disability justice world builder, educator, and artist Shay Erlich asks: why is it so difficult to find digital spaces that radically include disabled people? This workshop traces the feedback loops between the design of the physical world as we currently know it, and the imagined physical worlds of video games. Erlich will draw on two of their projects to demonstrate this relationship: Pushmakers, a national manual wheelchair dance curriculum development project, and Cycles of Care, a video game concept focused on the futures available to young disabled people. Fostering connections between our understandings of the ways that disabled people move in the physical world and the worlds that we create in the digital universe, participants are empowered to imagine how the digital worlds they create can disrupt physical world futures. Participants should be prepared to explore some light movement activities together.

Facilitators: Maryam Hafizirad and Ely Lyonblum
Blackwood Gallery, Kaneff Centre room 140
2:30–3:30pm

This conversation with Deaf Canadian Persian artist Maryam Hafizirad and hearing Canadian-American music researcher Ely Lyonblum asks: What are the relationships and tensions between auditory and deaf cultures? First brought together by Signed Music, they reflect on collaborating across historically divided cultural and artistic practice and share examples of Deaf musical performances that have been a galvanizing force for their collaboration. Drawing on a combination of professional and lived experience—Hafizirad as a culturally Deaf “insider” and Lyonblum as a non-signing “outsider”— they discuss their work and their projects together (The Black Drum; The Artists Broadsheet) in complementary roles as artist, curator, and researcher.

Respondent: Eliza Chandler
Blackwood Gallery, Kaneff Centre room 140
3:30–4pm

Deerfield Rehearsal Halls are located on the ground floor of Deerfield Hall and the Blackwood Gallery is located on the ground floor of the Kaneff Centre/Innovation Complex at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Both buildings include open spaces and windows to facilitate visual communication and navigation. Accessible multi-user gendered washrooms are located at ground level. Both venues are accessible to people who use mobility devices, with doorways measuring over 32” wide. All entrances to the ground floor are equipped with power-assisted doors. For more information about the forum's venues, directions, and accessibility, download the forum Welcome Package.