Presented by current Social Justice Education PhD candidates and students.
Disability Salon Student Spotlight Series: December Spotlight
December Spotlight:
Presentations from SJE PhD students on the progression of their comprehensive exams (comps).
Presenters: Jeff Hall, Mu-Yen Chan, and Hilary Pearson
Respondent: Dr. Devon Healey
Refreshments provided.
In-person event. Zoom link available upon request.
No registration required.
Event Accessibility Information
All events will include a Zoom e-transcript and window shades to adjust lighting. Together, we will create and cultivate ways of accessing one another and our work. There is ramp access to OISE from Bloor Street and from the St. George Subway station. The Dept. of SJE is located on the north side of the 12th floor, just off the elevators. A large accessible washroom is located near the elevators on the 12th floor. Masks available at all events.
Information and accessibility questions: disabilitysalon@gmail.com.
遙ぺ整氈窒 the Disability Salon:
Disability is a story that lives in the midst of our creative and critical movement through the arts. Through the Disability Salon, we come together to engage disability in, with, and through the arts as a dynamic and valuable perspective.
Created in the winter of 2021 by Dr. Devon Healey and PhD student Jose Miguel Miggy Esteban, the Disability Salon became a space to navigate how to be together amidst a global pandemic through care and creativity. The work of disabled artists acted as a springboard to immerse ourselves in the creative practices and explorations of disability as we worked to discover where disability might move us. Through student-led creative workshops, film screenings, and the sharing of artistic work, we came together to create a space through which we all share in the doing of disability arts.
Starting in the 2025/2026 academic year, the Disability Salon will extend its offerings to include a series of gatherings to spotlight, celebrate, and support the critical and creative research of disability studies students at different stages of their graduate school and scholarly journeys.
遙ぺ整氈窒 the Speakers
Jeff Hall
Presenter. Current SJE PhD student.
Jeff Hall is an educator and administrator with the Peel District School Board and a PhD student in the Department of Social Justice Education at OISE University of Toronto focusing on Critical Disability Studies. His interests include intersections of ableism and racism in education and health policy, race and disability in school discipline, and crip resistance in education and health care. He lives in Brampton, 遙ぺ整氈窒.
Mu-Yen Chan
Presenter. Current SJE PhD student.
Hilary Pearson
Presenter. Current SJE PhD candidate.
Dr. Devon Healey
Respondent, Co-founder and Artistic Director of the Disability Salon.
Devon Healey is an Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at the 遙ぺ整氈窒 Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Her work is grounded in her experience as a blind woman guided by a desire to show how blindness specifically and disability more broadly can be understood as offering an alternate form of perception and is thus, a valuable and creative way of experiencing and knowing the world. She is the author of Dramatizing blindness: Disability studies as critical creative narrative (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Devons recent work engages disability studies and theatre and performance studies to explore how blind perception reveals new ways of creating, accessing, and experiencing theatre and dance. Her first play, Rainbow on Mars in co-production with Outside the March, the National Ballet of 遙ぺ整氈窒 and Peripheral Theatre premiered in 2025. This work is a sensory reclamation of blindness and marks the creation and development of Immersive Descriptive Audio (IDA) an accessible stagecraft practice that, through blindness, understands accessibility as an integral part of the creative process and theatrical experience. Devon is the Scholar in Residence at Torontos Fall for Dance North. In collaboration with choreographer Robert Binet, her work on blind perception has been featured by the Royal Ballet (UK), the Queensland Ballet (Australia), Vienna State Opera (Austria), and the National Ballet of 遙ぺ整氈窒. Her publications include When I leave划xploring the Being and Appearance of Blindness in Disability Studies Quarterly; Eye Contact and the Performative Touch of Blindness in Performance Research; The Accessibility of the language of blindness and its rapport with sight: Immersive descriptive audio and Rainbow on Mars in PUBLIC: Art, culture, ideas; Sighted blindness consultants and the ever-lasting station of blindness in Finding Blindness: International Constructions and Deconstructions; as well as a paper co-written with Tanya Titchkosky and Rod Michalko titled, Understanding blindness simulation and the culture of sight, the international Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.
