To celebrate National AccessAbility Week, which is from May 30 to June 5, 2021, the Carleton University Disability Research Group (CUDRG) is launching a new virtual exhibit, Disability Futurity: Interdisciplinary Anticipations of a Non-normative Tomorrow.
The series asks how we can change the dominant perceptions of disability in society. Despite the fluctuating, permeable, and time-contingent nature of disability, it is often characterized in medical, social, and even scholarly circles as a binary condition or “illness”. Disability is too often viewed as the result of a tragic event, rather than an identity with which the majority of us will come to identify at some point in our lives. As a consequence, disability is marginalized in the present, which is why this series looked ahead with optimism towards disability futurity.
Disability Futurity refers to the disability of the future and envisions a future marked by a very different concept of “disability”. In this speaker series, the Carleton University Disability Research Group (CUDRG) and the Liverpool Hope University Centre for Culture & Disability Studies (CCDS) seek to re-imagine what disability will mean in the future. Speakers and participants from a range of perspectives explore the growing significance of disability identity outside of the current dominant category of “normativity”.
Through this exhibit, you will find recordings of the speakers' lectures and the discussions that followed (with closed captions and described video available), English transcripts of the events, some French-translated transcripts, and a range of online resources, further reading, and teaching materials.