Testimonial of Krista Carr

Logan Smilges’ short academic text Crip Negativity (2023) is about the nexus of difference, desire, and survival in the right now.

Touch The Future: A Manifesto in Essays is a collection of essays by John Lee Clark, a Minnesota-based “DeafBlind poet, essayist, historian, translator, and an actor in the most thrilling development in DeafBlind history, the Protactile movement” (Clark, 2023). Clark was born Deaf and gradually became blind due to a progressive-blindness condition known as Usher syndrome. He is the author of several books including How to Communicate and Where I Stand: On the Signing Community and My DeafBlind Experience and the editor of anthologies Deaf American Poetry and Deaf Lit Extravaganza. Recognized in the field for his work and contributions, Clark has been a recipient of multiple prestigious awards and fellowships.

The increased use of online learning in postsecondary education has documented negative impacts for students that may be particularly pronounced for students with learning disabilities (LD). We collected data from 224 postsecondary students with (n = 44) and without LD during the Fall 2020 semester when nearly all post-secondary courses in Canada were being offered exclusively online. Using an Expectancy-Value Theory lens, we examined how students’ expectancy for success, value ascribed to an academic task, and potential costs were related to their satisfaction, academic achievement, and burnout. Moreover, we wanted to determine how students rated courses they completed before the switch to online learning because of the COVID-19 pandemic to their current courses in terms of expectancy, value, and cost. When considering courses completed after the shift to online learning to ones before, students with LD identified that they had lower expectancies to do well, and perceived their courses to have higher costs than their peers without LD. Moreover, for students with LD, academic achievement was associated with higher expectancy and cost, while burnout was also associated with higher cost, but lower expectancy. Ways to support students with LD during online learning are highlighted.

L’émergence des disability studies a vu le jour principalement au Canada anglais, aux États-Unis et en Angleterre pendant les années 1980. Si la Society for Disability Studies a été fondée à Maryville au Tennesse en 1982, il a fallu attendre jusqu’en 2004 avant que l’Association canadienne d’études sur le handicap (ACÉH-CDSA) ne voie le jour. Bien que cette association soit bilingue, le long laps de temps précédent sa création est représentatif d’un enjeu plus large : quarante ans après l’arrivée de ce champ d’études dans le monde anglo-saxon, force est de constater qu’il existe toujours un retard dans la littérature québécoise et franco-canadienne à cet égard. Cet article vise à encourager une prise de conscience sociale sur ces enjeux d’accès, de traduction, mais aussi d’éducation. C’est à travers mon regard de chercheure, d’activiste et de femme neurodivergente francophone québécoise que je souhaite proposer des pistes de réflexion pour problématiser l’absence de programmes de baccalauréat dans ce domaine d’études en français.

This is a book that challenges the narrative that those who are “different” should be either pitied or admired. In doing so, Alexander-Passe has successfully collapsed the “twice exceptional” binary, and given the reader a far more satisfying three-dimensional view of the reality – and the humanity – of what it means to not quite fit in.

The authors report findings from an 11-month research study where disabled adults created digital stories about life-stage transitions related to employment, post-secondary, and community living. While results about transitions have been published elsewhere, this article focuses on the online digital storytelling process as experienced by disabled adults. It begins with a brief description of crip theory and its relationship to disability. Next is an overview of the research design: a two-phased process where 13 post-secondary disabled youth were trained as digital storytelling peer-facilitators, and subsequently co-facilitated a series of digital story workshops over 8 months involving 34 disabled participants. Peer-facilitators and participants completed pre- and post-workshop surveys. Responses were analyzed guided by crip theory and content analysis. The second half of the article reports on survey findings which indicated several themes: disability pride, centering disability perspectives, the importance of crip time, and the need to consider community connection. It ends with a discussion and considerations in designing and replicating accessible online digital storytelling workshops to remove ableist barriers, amplify community, and ultimately celebrate difference.

In this article, we critically examine issues related to disability inclusive education in the global South. Specifically, we discuss our work on inclusive education in western Kenya. We acknowledge how such practices are often framed within global North perspectives, and use methodologies and approaches from these same spaces and places. Such methodologies tend to be steered by powerful stakeholders and donors that may not always be sensitive to local contexts, concerns, and demands. In this article, we outline how we incorporate Critical Disability Studies (CDS) to address these concerns while working towards a bottom-up approach with multiple local stakeholders of inclusive education. Specifically, we discuss how we centred the stories of disabled and non-disabled students and their parents, teachers at special and primary schools and their respective head teachers, and disabled and non-disabled community members to create the foundations of a sustainable inclusive education system. We use quotes from various stakeholders to shape our discussions, and highlight spaces where applying foundations of CDS was useful in creating bottom-up approaches to disability inclusive education reform.

In Canada, Indigenous families and children experience structurally-rooted marginalization due to longstanding and ongoing histories of colonization and discrimination. Indigenous children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are currently underrepresented in literature and databases on ASD in Canada, raising concerns about their equitable access to related services and optimal health outcomes. This critical scoping review maps out existing and emerging themes in literature pertaining to ASD and the provision of ASD services with Indigenous children and families in Canada. No previous reviews of literature have focused exclusively on ASD among Indigenous children in Canada. A literature search conducted across eight databases between 2011 and 2021 resulted in 362 potentially relevant publications, of which 19 met our inclusion criteria. Findings point to a clear lack of data on ASD and unmet health, social, and educational service needs among Indigenous children with ASD in Canada. ASD is also frequently discussed through a Western, deficit and medical discourse. The main contributors to the lack of data and unmet service needs relate to the historical positioning of colonial oppression, stigma, an overrepresentation of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), lack of funding, and concerns about standardized diagnostic and assessment tools, and social determinants of health. Recommendations for policy, practice and research concerning Indigenous children with ASD are proposed.


 
 
 Laura Bisaillon’s Screening Out is a brilliant and much needed study of one barely known aspect of the Canadian immigration system: the medical screening of immigration applicants and the mandatory testing for HIV.