Two members of Women of Inspiration are among contributors to the latest issue of Critical Disability Discourses (CDD), a bilingual interdisciplinary annual produced by graduate students of York University’s disability studies program. The open-access journal seeks to encourage academic discussion of disability-related issues and provoke social change to remedy discrimination and exclusion. It invites articles both from emerging scholars in diverse fields of study and from activists and community members.
With the poem “Don’t Write Me Off”, Toronto-based injured worker activist and researcher Beryl Brown writes of her own lived experience dealing with a workers’ compensation system that can, with the stroke of a pen, add further deprivation and despair to the person suffering work-related injury or illness. The issue includes also a link to the poet reading her work. (Aug. 2018 – video link no longer available)
Rachel Gnanayutham, community legal worker with Injured Workers Community Legal Clinic (IWC), offers a critique of rehabilitation and disability in “Salvaging Injured Bodies: Injured Worker Reintegration in Ontario.” Through the lens of Ontario’s workers’ compensation system, she “explores the contradictions of rehabilitation that emphasizes the ongoing exploitation of disabled bodies, or as a way to dispose of injured bodies if they cannot be exploited.”
IWC Board member and lead on the ONIWG Poverty Survey, Bonita Heath, was a member of the CCD editorial team.