September 19
5 - 7pm
Kingston Frontenac Public Library - Central Branch
How can we—educators, researchers and community members—tap the power of research and story to imagine and create a world that affirms, and even desires, disability and difference?
This talk brings to life a new storytelling and disability studies approach to inclusion and belonging in education, countering long-standing educational inequities heightened through COVID-19. The talk moves its audience beyond a Western biomedical understanding of disability as deficit that needs be remedied. Instead, Dr. Douglas asserts disability and difference as fundamental, desirable, and needed for tangibly reimagining living, learning, and thriving together on planet earth.
The shift made in this talk from deficit to gift, and inclusion to belonging in education is illuminated through community engagements across Canada, the UK and Aotearoa (New Zealand). The talk includes screening two short multi-media (digital) stories, invites audience reflection and participation, and concludes with a vision for education as a site of radical hope for belonging and thriving in unprecedented times.
Patty Douglas uses the power of the arts and story to rethink disability and difference in affirming ways, and to reimagine education and health by cultivating collaboration and care. She is a former special education teacher, and Associate Professor of Disability Studies, in the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University. Patty’s research is deeply community-driven, informed by arts-based, participatory, decolonial, intersectional, mad (m)othering and other justice facing approaches. She enjoys mentoring students and is a leader in her fields, founding and directing the multimedia storytelling project Re•Storying Autism in Education in Canada, the UK and Aotearoa over the past 8 years. Patty has published widely and is a highly sought public speaker and collaborator in her fields. She is the Inaugural Chair in Student Success and Wellness and Director of the Centre for Community Engagement and Social Change at Queen’s. Her monograph, Unmothering Autism: Ethical Disruptions and Affirming Care is forthcoming with UBC Press. For more information, see www.restoryingautism.com.
Research Interests
- Disability justice
- Multimedia storytelling
- Arts-based and creative research
- Critical approaches in research
- Decolonizing disability and autism
- Neurodiversity affirming practice
- Critical approaches to (m)othering and care
