Infrastructure barriers, inequitable urban planning, and discriminatory bylaws and policies disproportionately impact and prevent marginalized communities, particularly those who are poor, disabled, or racialized, from fully participating in urban life. As a result, Ottawa is home to some of the most pressing social issues, including food scarcity, inaccessible transit, housing insecurity, police violence and surveillance, a poisoned drug supply, and more.

The Disability Justice and Crip Culture Collaboratory (DJCCC) invites you to engage with some of Ottawa\'s emerging and established disability justice activists and artists striving to make the city a more accessible and just environment for all its inhabitants. Disability justice centres the transformative role of disability politics, cultures, and communities to collectively dismantle ableism and build, through cross-movement solidarity, more accessible and socially just relations in the national capital region and beyond. Join us as we explore what it means to transform our city through the lens of disability justice.

Panelists or Invited Speakers: Kenzie McCurdy (StopGap Ottawa), Farnaz Farhang (Coalition Against More Surveillance Ottawa), Dr. Menna Agha (Carleton University) and Cameron Jette (Disability Drag Collective)

Kenzie McCurdy has been making ramps as part of the core organizing team of StopGap Ottawa since 2016. Ottawa.

Farnaz Farhang is a researcher at Vivic Research, residing and working on unceded Algonquin territory. Holding a Bachelor of Arts in Criminology and a Masters of Arts in Criminology, Farnaz's academic focus has centered on understanding white nationalist groups and right-wing extremism within the broader structures of settler-colonial Canada.

Dr. Menna Agha (Carleton University) is an Assistant professor of design and spatial justice at Carleton University, where she is leading the Architecture Action Lab, a community service laboratory that aims to promote architecture activism in public space. The Lab has worked on several community service projects, such as the Public Foods community fridge and pantry in Centertown, Ottawa, and Wellness Hub for young women+ ageing out of the foster system. Currently, the Lab is working with the community in Russell Heights on the design and construction of a public kitchen and play area. Before coming to Ottawa, She coordinated a spatial justice agenda at the Flanders Architecture Institute in Belgium. In 2019/2020, she was the Spatial Justice Fellow and a visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon. Menna holds a Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of Antwerp and a Master of Arts in Gender and Design from Köln International School of Design. She is a third-generation displaced Fadicha Nubian, a legacy that infuses her research interests in race, gender, space, and territory. Among her publications are: Nubia still exists, The Utility of the Nostalgic Space; The Non-work of the Unimportant; and Liminal Publics, Marginal Resistance.

Cameron Jette (he/they) is a trans, neurodivergent and disabled drag performer, multidisciplinary artist, small business owner and community event planner. With his Bachelors of Arts in Human Rights and Social Justice from Carleton University, and nearly a decade of non-profit experience in so-called Ottawa, Cameron is passionate about disability justice, anti-zionist activism, community engagement, program development, and event planning.

In October 2022, as his drag alter-ego Boy Vey, Cameron founded the Disability Drag Collective, a global collective of disabled drag performers working to create change in their communities. He has also recently began planning diverse, community-focused events as Wheelie Productions, where he focuses on creating spaces that focus on accessibility, and disability justice.

Discussants: Megan Linton and Adele Ruhdorfer

Megan Linton (she/her) is a researcher, writer, and creator of the Invisible Institutions podcast. Her research uses critical disability & carceral studies to challenge disability institutionalization and their profit motives. Her writing has been published widely in Briarpatch Magazine, the Disability Visibility Project, Canadian Dimension, and the Ottawa Citizen. Megan is a doctoral student at Carleton University in the Department of Sociology & Political Economy, where she is also a member of the Disability Justice and Crip Culture Collaboratory.

Adele Ruhdorfer is an emerging writer, researcher, and curator with a creative practice centred on photography, lens-based, digital media, and collage. Drawing upon her own lived experiences as a neurodiverse and chronically ill person, she focuses on the embodied creative practices of disabled, mad, and sick artists in her research and curatorial practice. Her research complicates the definition of Disability Arts beyond a politics of visibility, to include non-representational, abstract, and immersive art. Focus is given to artists using an aesthetics of error in their lens-based, time-based, chance-based, digital media, and/or glitch art, highlighting how technological relationships extend their body’s capacity for creative expression, while remaining grounded in their embodied experiences and lived crip knowledge.

Event Organizers and DJCCC Co-Directors: Dr. Kelly Fritsch and Dr. Fady Shanouda

Dr. Kelly Fritsch is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. She is cross-appointed to the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation and the Institute of Political Economy and is co-director of the Disability Justice and Crip Culture Collaboratory. She is co-author of We Move Together (2021), a children’s book about ableism, accessibility, and disability culture, and co-editor of Disability Injustice: Confronting Criminalization in Canada (2022) and Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle (2016).

Dr. Fady Shanouda is an assistant professor at the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation (FIST) at Carleton University and co-director of the Disability Justice and Crip Culture Collaboratory. His scholarly contributions lie at the theoretical and pedagogical intersections of disability, mad, and fat studies and include socio-historical examinations that surface the interconnections of colonialism, racism, ableism, sanism, fatphobia and queer- and transphobia.