OISE team receives international funding for disability and health research

OISE is playing a large role in a groundbreaking initiative in disability studies – an initiative that has received significant funding.

Disability Matters, a major six-year pan-national programme of disability and health research, is being funded by a Wellcome Trust Discretionary Award, from 2023 to 2029.

With £3 million of support behind this initiative, a pan-national research team is exploring, and transforming, how disability is perceived in fields of health. The team’s ambition is to contribute to a fuller understanding of disability and help to create a world where disabled people are not only objects of study but active participants and leaders in shaping health education and research.

Professor Tanya Titchkosky of OISE is leading the Canadian portion of Disability Matters, with support from OISE alumna Dr. Elaine Cagulada, a Queen’s University SSHRC postdoctoral fellow and recipient of the Alice Wilson award from the Royal Society of Canada; and Dr. Devon Healey, a faculty member in the Department of Social Justice Education. OISE spoke with Professor Titchkosky to contextualize the funding announcement and the importance of this crucial research at this time.

Disability Matters is developing ways to transform traditional conceptions of disability as merely individual lack, limit and loss. This transformative shift is revealing multiple ways that disability is a complex experience that can inform health research. Building disability experience into health research and education is all the more important when health disparities are increasingly recognized in the global arena.

The six year project is poised to develop pro-disability approaches to scholarship, reshaping the priorities of health research and promoting inclusivity.

The Spirit of Disability Matters

The Disability Matters research team bring their own experiences of disability to the project. They come from Australia, Canada, India, Singapore, and the UK, led by Principal Investigator, Prof. Dan Goodley from the University of Sheffield, UK.

Professor Titchkosky has been teaching and researching in disability studies in OISE’s Department of Social Justice Education since 2006. “My own experience of dyslexia,” she says, “as well as my life and work with blind scholar and storyteller Dr. Rod Michalko, combined with working with many other disabled graduate students and scholars means viscerally knowing that how disability is perceived matters.”

“How we conceive of disability matters for our life chances, for what is imagined as possible and impossible, and it matters for anyone who experiences disability,” she added. Conceptions of disability shape the ways we perceive and subsequently treat disabled people leading to innumerable physical and social barriers in our environment. This is no less true in research and education environments.

“The trick,” explains Titchkosky, “is to make the conceptions and perception of disability what we study.”

Such an approach shows that disability, rather than being rare, is a common experience that can be engaged in more life affirming ways, she says. 

Titchkosky’s work in disability studies is influenced by the interpretive approaches in Critical Indigenous Studies and Black Studies. This intersectional approach focuses attention on how we perceive people, revealing conceptions of human difference more generally. “My primary interest is to find ways to reveal how disability is perceived and the social and political consequences of this.” Tanya emphasizes that “OISE has offered an environment where how we perceive each other, how we perceive who has a problem, who is a problem, and who is the professional problem solver, can be critically engaged.” That, Tanya suggests, “is the gift disability studies offers.”

It is this gift that Titchkosky wants to bring to the pan-national Disability Matters research team.

A Global Initiative with Local Impact

The UK Wellcome Trust is a global charitable foundation which is supporting efforts to enhance health research by funding this project.

In the words of the principal investigator, Dan Goodley “disability is the driving subject of inquiry transforming health research and environments.” It was Dan’s years of effort and his international reputation as a Critical Disability Studies scholar that brought the Disability Matters research team together. Disability Matters realizes a shared commitment by scholars and communities across multiple countries who recognized the need for change in how disability is positioned in health research.

Involving diverse communities and fostering dialogue between universities, health organizations, and disabled people's communities around the globe, means getting involved at the local level.  And Tanya says she’s thrilled to do that kind of work at OISE.

Joining Titchkosky on the OISE contribution to this research project is Dr. Elaine Cagulada. As of Sept. 1, Dr. Cagulada has become the first Disability Matters Research Officer. Her work on representations of disability, d/Deafness and race in police encounters will serve to enhance Disability Matters research endeavors.

Along with more than 13 years of research work, Dr. Cagulada’s diverse experience with hearing differences and numerous academic and poetic publications, Elaine is bringing a critical narrative focus to public health news about disability.

Dr. Cagulada says this project is a way to “understand the complexity, life, and nuance held within meanings of disability,” a commitment that Tanya shares. Bringing her disability studies perspective to courses as well as the physical, social and administrative environment at U of T has not only provided many encounters with disability representations that Titchkosky has theorized in her publications but has also resulted in access and teaching awards.

Adding to this pro-disability environment, is Dr. Devon Healey – who does arts informed disability studies inquiry through a critical engagement with visual culture, including ophthalmology. Dr. Healey’s research is conducted from her perspective in blindness, she says.

Titchkosky along with Dr. Healey and Dr. Cagulada have developed disability studies course offerings at OISE that are as globally unique as they are diverse and dynamic – these include Disability Studies: An Introduction, Disability Studies and the Human Imaginary, Disability Studies and the Media, and Disability Studies – Interpretive Methods.

All of this is making Social Justice Education at OISE a hub of graduate level engagement in disability studies in Canada and beyond.

The Promise of Disability Studies at OISE

Disability Matters questions traditional ways of relating to disability while promoting the sense  that disability is always more than a problem. Making disability matter as a critical space for critical health inquiry, means pursuing new, creative and critical ways to think, move and live together.

Receiving the Wellcome Trust Discretionary Award is a significant milestone for disability studies teaching and research at OISE, says Titchkosky.

This prestigious award enables disability studies to expand its research efforts, support early-career researchers, and disseminate transformative knowledge on equity, diversity, and inclusion. The award underscores the importance of pursuing pro-disability practices while resisting disablism within health research. All the while the research team is working to affirm the vital role that disability experience, knowledge and theory play in shaping education and health.