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Funding for post-secondary students with disabilities in Canada is an under-studied yet pressing policy issue that affects up to 15% of students currently enrolled in post-secondary institutions across the country reflecting, at the same time, trends in educational accommodations occurring on a global scale. This article presents new data and combines these findings with a qualitative policy review to expose how funding levels in Canada have remained static over a 20-year period as a result of changes to key funding programs. We show how access to these insufficient funding programs is based on application processes that are shaped by the careful management of knowledge and information, underpinned by a desire to keep spending low. We then analyze the implications of these funding practices for disabled students and situate their effects within the neoliberal cultural project that eschews transparency while increasing individualization and self-responsibilization – encouraging disabled students to embody market rationalities as a way of maintaining their presence in academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article thinks with disability theory and artistic praxis to explore how disabled artists repurpose and invent technologies in artistic processes designed to enact care and access, extend embodiment, satiate the senses, and create crip culture. Drawing on four examples, we claim that disabled artists are creative technologists whose non-normative culture-making practices approach accessibility as a transmethodological process that requires and generates new forms of interconnected technology and artfulness. Disabled artists, as "creative users," change the uses and outcomes of technology, dis-using technologies in ways that lead to a more dynamic understanding of access and with it, of crip cultures as processual, artful, and political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online voting platforms have been introduced in some locations asthesolution to the many barriers to political participation that disabled people continue to face. Reading the experiences of disabled student voters on university campuses alongside broader trends in electoral reform taking place in jurisdictions across Canada allows us to attend to the dangerous ways in which conversations around access have been limited through virtual solutions that encourage the physical absence of disabled voters. This article situates these absences alongside other categories of exclusion – including groups who are formally disenfranchised – and recalls many unstated values that are active in shaping citizenship cultures. Probing online voting through a critical disability angle, we present a critique of techno-fixes that builds upon broader notions of accessibility and inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout history different practices have attempted to silence the experiences of disabled people. In this paper we explore some of these practices including the medical, familial, and self-subjugating practices English-speaking Canadian polio survivors experienced throughout their lives. We analyze participant’s experiences of silence and silencing through a Foucauldian lens, drawing on the three modes of objectification to explain the institutional and cultural discourses around polio subjects that acted upon and through the polio body to silence it. Participants’ oral history accounts demonstrate how sociocultural and medical practices effectively silenced survivors from speaking about their polio experiences. However, the trope of silence is also uprooted within oral history traditions. We will demonstrate how participants broke their silence and shifted their perspectives on polio and disability, and how this process contributed to their resistance of hegemonic conceptualizations of disability as defective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present oral narratives focusing on schooling experiences of Canadians who lived with polio as children between 1940 and 1959. We argue that disabled students with polio received an education about the differences ascribed to them by individuals in authority (teachers, principals), by other young people, and through the dominant negative discourses of polio and normalizing, ableist practices of schooling. Using narrative accounts from participants’ interviews, we analyze their school experiences of difference: inaccessible physical and temporal spaces, bullying at school, exclusion from classes, and negotiating youth culture related to shoes, clothes and friendships. However, participants were not passive and they discussed how, along with families, they negotiated and occasionally defied normalizing processes. This research gives voice to a generation of disabled English-speaking Canadians, whose stories about school have not been heard before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present oral narratives focusing on schooling experiences of Canadians who lived with polio as children between 1940 and 1959. We argue that disabled students with polio received an education about the differences ascribed to them by individuals in authority (teachers, principals), by other young people, and through the dominant negative discourses of polio and normalizing, ableist practices of schooling. Using narrative accounts from participants’ interviews, we analyze their school experiences of difference: inaccessible physical and temporal spaces, bullying at school, exclusion from classes, and negotiating youth culture related to shoes, clothes and friendships. However, participants were not passive and they discussed how, along with families, they negotiated and occasionally defied normalizing processes. This research gives voice to a generation of disabled English-speaking Canadians, whose stories about school have not been heard before. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Medical discourse currently dominates as the defining framework for madness in educational praxis. Consequently, ideas rooted in a mental health/illness binary abound in higher learning, as both curriculum content and through institutional procedures that reinforce structures of normalcy. While madness, then, is included in university spaces, this inclusion proceeds in ways that continue to pathologize madness and disenfranchise mad people. This paper offers Mad Studies as an alternative entry point for engaging with madness in higher education, arguing that centring madness in pedagogical praxis has the potential to interrupt hegemonic ways of knowing, being, and learning. We illustrate how this disruption is facilitated by examining particular aspects of pedagogical praxis mobilized in Mad Studies, including building curriculum alongside mad community, centring madness in course design and student assessment, and the practice of mad positivity. Ultimately, this approach provides a metacurriculum of unlearning, challenging students to consider how their engagement with madness in the classroom, and beyond, has the potential to disrupt sanist systems of oppression and the normalcy they reconstitute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]