Towards renewed descriptions of Canadian disability movements: Disability activism outside of the non-profit sector

Abstract

There are a limited number of academic accounts of disability movements in Canada; however, the existing literature provides relatively consistent descriptions. According to this literature, the disability movement seeks incremental, rather than radical, change through government-led policy, legislation and legal challenges. This work explicitly or implicitly uses the activities and actors from non-profit disability organizations as the platform for documenting and analyzing the movement. In this article, I argue the documented parameters of the Canadian disability movement are only part of the picture. There is a much broader and conflicted world of activism in Canada, constituting multiple disability movements. This article looks beyond the non-profit sector and incorporates expanded definitions of 'activism' inspired by third-wave feminisms to reveal a more complex picture of contemporary Canadian disability movements. The article proceeds with a brief summary of existing descriptions of the disability movement in Canada. I then discuss the challenges faced by non-profit organizations in a period of hyper-neoliberalism and suggest social and economic factors push radical and creative disability activism outside of this sector. I provide five counter examples of Ontario-based disability activists and artists who disrupt the existing accounts and broaden our understanding of who and what constitute disability activism. The article concludes by providing some questions and tentative characteristics that head towards renewed descriptions of disability movements in Canada.

FCJ-188 Disability’s Digital Frictions: Activism, Technology, and Politics

“…The relationship of disability activism to larger histories is highlighted in the often remarked story of wheelchair users in New York receiving help from the revolutionary group Weather Underground to dynamite kerbs that were not modified for wheelchair access (Pelka, 2012: 445, 593;Shakespeare, 1993). New kinds of disability activism have emerged around new categories and concepts, not least cognitive impairments, mental health and psychiatric disabilities, episodic and chronic conditions, and responses to genetics and biopower (Hughes, 2009;Kelly, 2013;Snyder and Mitchell, 2001;Scotch, 1988;Shakespeare, 2015).…”

Alterity In/Of Happiness: Reflecting on the radical possibilities of unruly bodies

“…This is evidenced by US and Canadian government-sponsored childhood anti-obesity campaigns that though ostensibly motivated by the laudable desire to prevent disease, expose another, more moralizing, drive: to uphold certain notions of national fitness and strength. It is also evidenced in the ways that cutbacks by New Labour, Conservative, and Democratic governments in the UK, Canada, and the US have dramatically decreased the supports for disabled people by eliminating programs such as home support and various disability living allowance programs (Kelly, 2013;Owen & Parker Harris, 2012;Prince, 2012;Reaume, 2012;Stewart, 2010). Such cutbacks obviously have negative effects on disabled people's quality of life.…”

Reconsidering Knowledge and Power: Reflections on Disability Communities and Disability Studies in Canada

“…The overall community is a diverse sector of service organizations (Bach 2002;Levesque 2012), a policy community of interest groups and coalitions (Boyce, Tremblay, McColl, Bickenbach, Crichton, Andrews, Gerein, and D'Aubin. 2001), a comparatively new social movement (Chivers 2008), multiple movements that include radical, do-it-yourself, and creative forms of activism (Kelly 2013 (Malacrida 2003;Panitch 2007) and the effects of systemic oppression (Devlin and Pothier 2006;McCreath 2011;Reaume 2000;Withers 2012). …”

“…To remain aloof risks appearing unrealistic and/or unreasonable, and denies possible access to much needed resources" (1995: 115). Disability movement organizations with a radical orientation typically seek to avoid these risks by not engaging directly with the state officials in any case, preferring more confrontational forms of activism (Kelly 2013). Organizational and social movement tactics, then, are both effect and object of state power and knowledge.…”