Publications

Collins, K., & McGonegal, J. (2024). Persistent Narratives: Intellectual Disability in Canadian Children’s Literature. Studies in Social Justice, 18(1), 44–58. https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v18i1.3989

Canadian children’s literature rarely depicts characters labelled with intellectual disabilities, yet when it does it often remains mired in stereotypes that recycle prevalent myths and misconceptions. Even as more recent literature attempts to push back against such stereotypes, it nevertheless predominantly remains caught in these dangerous representational repertoires. This article offers a brief history of Canadian literary depictions of intellectual disability and a critique of the Canadian publishing spheres. Through a critical analysis of Lorna Schultz Nicholson’s book Fragile Bones, we discuss the limits of representation of intellectual disability in children’s fiction. We also offer a critique of the ableist publishing climate in Canada and suggest that structural barriers prevent disabled writers from entering the literary marketplace on an equal playing field. These barriers to publishing lead to the vast underrepresentation of disabled authors and the misrepresentation of disability in general and intellectual disability in particular in Canadian children’s literature.

Collins, K. (2023). Critical posthuman ethnography: grappling with human-more-than-human interconnection for critical public health. Critical Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2023.2273199

To address the intertwined health issues of our time, from climate change to colonialism, from mass extinction to mass consumption, this commentary argues that critical public health must grapple with relationality onto-epistemologically. In it, I offer the provocation that entangling ethnography, both as method and methodology, with critical posthumanism can offer the potential to hold the tensions, nuances and multiplicities needed to account for human-more-than-human relationality as multiple inputs of data. This argument is made in three parts: first, via a discussion of relationality within public health; second, by means of a cartography of critical posthumanism; and third, with a discussion of how a critical posthuman ethnography might disrupt anthropocentric approaches to health. The paper concludes with a discussion of the possibilities of, and potential for, critical posthuman ethnography in public health research. In summary, critical posthuman ethnography provides one way of methodologically approaching some of the intertwined health issues of our time.

Collins, K., Jones, C.T. & Rice, C. (2023). On heartbreak, livelihoods and art: affect and crip desire in art making assemblages. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2023.2250926

This article explores the affective dimensions of disabled, D/deaf, mad, and neurodiverse artists’ work through a livelihoods framework informed by the social and tacit dimensions of heartbreak. Heartbreak emerged during interviews with twenty artists in Canada in 2020, during a time of significant state-based policy changes that impacted disabled people’s livelihoods in the province of Ontario. Taken together, the artists’ stories form a rhizomatic cartography that takes crip wisdom and desire as significant elements of artmaking amid wider relational assemblages of affect. Drawing on Deleuzian and Guattarian concepts of desire and Puar’s difference-in/as-assemblage, researchers assert that although crip artmaking is not without joy, heartbreak is embedded in the politically aesthetic work of cultural production.

Jones, C.T., Chatsick, J., Collins, K., & Zbitnew, A. (2023). “The Fuzzy Mouse”: Unresolved Reflections on Podcasting, Public Pedagogy, and Intellectual Disability. The Palgrave Handbook of Disability and Communication. Palgrave Macmillan.

This chapter describes the behind-the-scenes work of “The CICE Team” podcast—a public-pedagogy communication project led by college students with intellectual disabilities in Toronto. The students uniquely positioned podcasting as a disability-led method that ultimately challenged the norms of broadcast media production. Podcasting made space for overlapping communication methods led by embodied difference: renaming equipment, expressive writing, drawing, and moments of silence. In a departure from traditional form, this co-authored reflection is written partly in plain language and offers a critical account of podcasting in institutional spaces, drawing on podcasters’ arts-based testimonies. Ultimately, this critical account uncovers unresolved empirical tensions between non-disabled researchers doing critical access work with podcasters whose place in higher education is precarious, including the authors’ attempts to share power amid the complexities of media production. Findings reveal that classroom accessibility must go beyond compliance-based checklists in order to account for disabled media-maker’s intersectional “knowing-making,” and that silence can teach us what it means to drastically revise a method that traditionally relies on consistent verbal communication. The writing closes with key realizations about supporting disability-led podcasting in inclusion/ist contexts.

Collins, K., Jones, C.T., & Rice, C. (2022). Decolonizing Relaxed Performance: A Visual Translation of Vital Ecosystems. Research in Arts and Education.

This essay draws on the visual translations produced by artist Sonny Bean in response to the 2022 report, Relaxed Performance: Exploring University-based Training Across Fashion, Theatre and Choir. Relaxed performance (RP) is a wide-reaching movement toward accessibility in arts that challenges normative comportment in performance contexts and has evolved into a contemporary cross-sector vital practice rooted in disability justice. Through a selection of illustrations, Bean transforms human-centric data about RPs into a vital ecosystem that extends to the more-than-human world, denoting the complex interconnectedness of RP production in a settler colonial state.

Collins, K., Jones, C.T., & Rice, C. (2022). Keeping Relaxed Performance Vital: Affective Pedagogical Praxis in the Arts. Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. 16(2), 179-196. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/855333

Relaxed Performance (RP) has emerged as an arts-based praxis implemented across sectors in response to disability and other justice-seeking communities’ desire to access the arts. Across Turtle Island (North America), RP is becoming the “gold standard” for accessible performance arts, as sector norms evolve to demand accessibility and inclusion, prompting a desire for RP training in higher education. The upswell of interest raises concerns that RP is at risk of becoming an increasingly sought-after pedagogical commodity whose vitality could be co-opted in the interests of standardization and universality. Taking up Relaxed Performance (RP) as a justice-driven, arts intervention, we argue for maintaining RP’s vitality in the face of access standardization. Drawing on RPs at three universities, we describe the affective potential of non-standardized and crip theory-informed RP now and in the future.

 

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