Colloquium Presentations + Presenter Bios (May 2024)

Aidan Cowling (he/him) is the Exhibition Coordinator at The Blackwood. Previously, he was Coordinator of Public Programming and Outreach at the Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto, since 2019. He supported in-person and hybrid lectures, exhibitions and symposia as part of the Faculty’s annual public programming series. During the last several years, he has worked with students and stakeholders to develop outreach programs and supported the funding and creation of access programs like Building Black Success Through Design and Minecraft Building Blocks. He holds a Master of Fine Art from the University of Guelph and Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Toronto in Visual Studies and Art History. He recently exhibited works at Trinity Square Video, Critical Distance, Birch Contemporary, MacLaren Art Centre and Small Arms Inspection Building, and has been featured in C Magazine, Canadian Art, CBC Arts and KAPSULA.

Jacqui Usiskin (she/her) is the Curatorial Assistant / Collections Archivist at The Blackwood. She supports the gallery’s programs through fostering educational opportunities for UTM students, overseeing the care of collection materials, and participating in the development of public programs, exhibitions, and publications. Previously, she has held positions at the Yukon Arts Centre, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and Border Crossings. She completed her Masters of Studies in the History of Art and Visual Culture at University of Oxford. Her writing has been published in the Moving Image Review and Art Journal, and she has presented research in conferences at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media, University of Westminster and the 2017 UAAC-AAUC Conference at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Jacqui embraces methods that nurture community engagement, challenge hegemonic narratives, and cultivate space for transdisciplinary and pedagogical dialogue about artistic practice.

Devon Healey is an Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. All of 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). In 2020 she was awarded a commission by Outside the March (Dora award-winning Toronto theatre company) to both write and perform in, Rainbow on Mars, a sensory reclamation of blindness. This play marks the creation and development of, Immersive Descriptive Audio (IDA), an artistic practice that, through blindness, understands accessibility as an integral part of the creative process and theatrical experience. In 2023, Devon was awarded the Connaught New Researcher Award to support her research project titled, ‘Ways of Seeing: An Exploration of Blindness as a form of Perception.’ Her publications include “Eye Contact and the Performative Touch of Blindness” in Performance Research (2022); “The Accessibility of the language of blindness and its rapport with sight: Immersive descriptive audio and Rainbow on Mars’ in PUBLIC: Art, culture, ideas (2022); “Sighted blindness consultants and the manyness of blindness” in Finding Blindness: International Constructions and Deconstructions (Bolt, 2022).

Tanya Titchkosky is a Disability Studies Professor in Social Justice Education at OISE, the University of Toronto. Her books include Disability, Self, and Society, as well as Reading and Writing Disability Differently and The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning. Tanya works from the position that whatever else disability is, it is tied up with the human imagination,  mediated through interpretive relations steeped in mostly unexamined conceptions of “normalcy.”  This orientation is reflected in her co-edited collection DisAppearing: Encounters in Disability Studies   (2022) as well as her co-edited collection with Rod Michalko, titled Rethinking Normalcy: A Disability Studies Reader. Using critical approaches such as phenomenology influenced by Black, Queer and Critical Indigenous Studies, Tanya reveals the restricted imaginaries that order disability encounters. Her current work is funded, in part, by an Insight SSHRC grant, “Reimaging the Dis/Appearance of Disability in the Academy.” Tanya is also part of the international research project, Disability Matters , and holds an Institute for Pandemics (U of T) research award where her focus is on how medical and corporate health archives mediate the meaning of disability. Tanya is recipient of the OISE 2019 Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award.  She is also a member of the Disability Circle in Toronto and the Centre for Global Disability Studies and founder of Doing Disability in Everyday Life Research and Activist group.

Dr. Elaine Cagulada is a SSHRC post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Gender Studies and Black Studies at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. She researches and writes in the fields of critical disability studies, black studies, gender studies, and sociology, and she also teaches in these areas. Elaine's work is concerned with stories as sites of containment and possibility, and with disturbing carceral logics and enclosures through the constitutive force of narrative. Alongside Professor Tanya Titchkosky and Madeleine DeWelles, Elaine is co-editor of DisAppearing: Encounters in Disability Studies published in 2022 by Canadian Scholars' Press. Elaine is a member of the Disability Circle in Toronto and an alumni member of the Centre for Global Disability Studies. She is also a constituent of the League of Canadian Poets. In 2023, Elaine was awarded the Alice Wilson award by the Royal Society of Canada.

Jose Miguel ‘Miggy’ Esteban is a dance/movement artist and educator based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Miggy’s artistic work develops improvisational practices of navigating mad and queer routes to embody Filipinx remembering and belonging. Currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Social Justice Education, OISE/University of Toronto, Miggy’s research and teaching is oriented through disability studies, black studies, and dance/performance studies. Influenced by disability arts and culture, black radical traditions, indigenous storytelling, and queer performance, Miggy’s dissertation project engages in embodied practices of improvisation to re-interpret curriculum as a choreographic site for inspiring pedagogies of/through dance. Miggy’s work has been published in Canadian Theatre Review, Disability Studies Quarterly, Journal for Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Liminalities, Theatre Journal, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, and in various edited volumes.

Kristen Allen is an Assistant Professor of Writing Studies at the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy (ISUP) at the University of Toronto Mississauga. She holds a PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto and draws on her experience learning and researching in five languages to support students learning English for Academic Purposes and English as an Additional Language. She has taught at the university level for over 20 years, developing and teaching courses in Medieval Studies and History at U of T, Carlton University, and Sheridan College. She became a Writing Instructor in 2016, working one-on-one with students at the New College Writing Centre and the Robert Gillespie Academic Skills Centre. From 2018-2019, she was a research administrator for OCAD University's Writing Across the Curriculum Initiative. Since joining ISUP in 2022, she has taught ISP100, which cultivates academic reading and writing practices in first-year university students, introducing them to Writing Studies using research-informed educational approaches. She is a member of the Executive Board of the Canadian Writing Centres Association and the co-lead of ISUP’s Linguistic Equity Working Group. She has been published in The Sixteenth Century Journal, The Medieval Review, and the Journal of Response to Writing, and her work will appear in Thinking About Writing, a forthcoming open educational textbook for multilingual international students in first-year university writing courses. Her current research interests include developing classroom applications of Critical Language Awareness and using ChatGPT to foster genre awareness in first-year students.

Phoebe Kang is an Assistant Professor, Teaching stream in Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy in University of Toronto, Mississauga. She developed curriculum for English for Academic Purposes programs for students with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds at Brock University for over 15 years before joining ISUP in September 2022. Her teaching at Brock included a variety of programs from English language preparation programs to pre-Master’s programs in Business and Education disciplines. She has also taught in New College's International Foundations Program at the University of Toronto and at Niagara College in the School of English Language Studies. She has been a long-time member of TESL Ontario and held the president of TESL Niagara for 6 years. She is a current board director of Canadian Society for Studies in Higher Education. Her research interests and publications have been on internationalization in higher education, international students’ teaching and learning about policy issues, equity for non-native English speaking international students in Canadian higher education, equitable and inclusive curriculum, and university pedagogy. She has recently developed interests in researching on AI guidelines and Academic Integrity policies in Canadian universities.

Nancy Johnston is an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Centre for Teaching and Learning, as well as the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at UTSC. She develops writing programming across the disciplines and promotes inclusive design and access in education. She teaches “Gender and Disability” (WSTC40), an introduction to disability advocacy. In the spring of 2024, she has received funding for her programme, Foundations for a mentorship group for Neurodivergent and Autistic faculty, librarians, and educators, which will launch over two years. This peer mentorship programme and network will be a peer-led group for autistic and neurodivergent faculty, librarians, and educators at U of T.

Jeff Bale is an Associate Professor of Language and Literacies Education at OISE and serves as Vice President, University & External Affairs of the University of Toronto Faculty Association. His research applies political-economic, anti-racist, and critical perspectives to educational language policy and teacher education. He is lead author of Centering Multilingual Learners and Challenging Raciolinguistic Ideologies in Teacher Education: Principles, Policies and Practices (Multilingual Matters, 2023). He was a Humboldt Fellow in 2021-2022 at the Universität Bremen in Germany. Currently, he is Principal Investigator of a SSHRC-funded study on Language, Race, and Regulating Difference: The Heritage Languages Program in Ontario, 1977-1987. His academic work is rooted in the decade he spent teaching English as a Second Language in urban secondary schools in the United States.