Political Theory

H11(b) - Disability and Care Ethics

Date: Jun 4 | Time: 10:15am to 11:45am | Location:

Chair/Président/Présidente : Missila Izza (Université de Montréal)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Barbara Arneil (University of British Columbia)

Barred From Entry: How Inaccessible & Neoliberal Post-secondary Institutions Alienate the Disabled Student: Hussain Alhussainy (University of Alberta), Joshua St. Pierre (University of Alberta)
Abstract: This paper examines the historical eugenic influences that came to shape how Canadian post-secondary institutions operate and what values they hold. I explore how the university’s physical structure itself is designed to bar disabled people from full participation, acting as a mirror opposite of an asylum. The modern-day University upholds these practices through limitations to accommodations and accessibility, influenced by deeply rooted eugenic ideals. Additionally, this paper explores the gaps and lack of accommodation within the university structure. Currently, accommodation must be earned rather than given as a right, which creates not only gaps within equality of opportunity but places the burden on the disabled individual. The university continues to be an inaccessible environment that bars disabled people from full participation because of its eugenic histories, but also through its ongoing influence by neoliberalism. Neoliberal values have put universities in a place to award students based on perceived merit without consideration of external factors; because of this, disabled and otherwise marginalized students who need additional resources in order to complete their post-secondary education properly are perceived as less meritorious, despite facing more significant barriers than students deemed more meritorious and “valuable” to the university. Universities are unlikely to provide accommodations or resources unless it is perceived that these will create more value for the university. Furthermore, I will be concluding this paper by incorporating my experience as that of a physically disabled person who found crip politics within the university through my challenges and encounters with ableist ideologies and structures that are not designed to incorporate myself or others into the academic community. My desire is to address these barriers not just through traditional academic research methods but also through an auto-ethnographic account of my experiences to help the reader vicariously understand the experiences of disabled students.

Affecting Attitudes: Intellectual Disability and the Accessible Canada Act: Rachael Desborough (University of Toronto)
Abstract: This paper will examine how attitudinal barriers impede the political participation of people with intellectual disabilities, focusing on the 2019 Accessible Canada Act (ACA) as a case study. While physical and institutional barriers to accessibility are more readily identified and addressed through policy, attitudinal barriers rooted in stigma and prejudice present a more complex challenge. The paper asks: How does the ACA conceptualize and address attitudinal barriers to political participation, and what theoretical insights can affect theory offer for understanding and transforming these barriers? The study will conduct a preliminary review of the ACA and associated government documentation and communications to examine how attitudes are framed as barriers to accessibility within this legislation. Affect theory will then be used to evaluate these policy mechanisms and explore potential new approaches to attitudinal transformation. Drawing on theories of embodied interaction and relational politics, the analysis will consider how affective dimensions of human interaction might inform more effective strategies for addressing attitudinal barriers. This research will provide the first focused examination of how the ACA approaches attitudinal barriers, addressing a significant gap in the literature on Canadian disability policy. Additionally, by bringing affect theory into conversation with disability policy, this work aims to contribute to theoretical understandings of how stigma and discriminatory attitudes toward intellectual disability might be transformed in political contexts.

Eschatological Belonging and Disability Erasure: Joshua St. Pierre (University of Alberta)
Abstract: Mobilizing a “cripistemological” approach that “think[s] from the critical, social, and personal position of disability,” (Johnson and McRuer 2014, 134), this paper engages a fundamental site of Christian ableism: the expected cure of disability in the afterlife. I offer the term “curative eschatology” to describe the affectively charged promise that a transcendent, final deliverance will (in the future perfect tense) remake the nature of bodyminds without the possibility of decay or suffering. I argue that insofar as eschatology is itself defined by a temporal structure of “already / not yet” that mingles present and future, curative eschatology shapes present-day religious thought and practice by circulating preconscious affects like dread and resentment against conditions of existence that necessitate pain and suffering. Christian ableism and curative eschatology are related yet distinct, and reinforce and support each other in a mutually constitutive relationship. I conclude by imagining Crip nontheistic religious practice that affirms, through Crip ritual, a joyful world of becoming and the tragic view of life it entails.