Esther Ignagni

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Associate Professor Director, School of Disability Studies Faculty of Community Services School of Disability Studies Toronto, Ontario eignagni@torontomu.ca Office: (416) 979-5000 ext. 4286

Bio/Research

My research interests centre on intimate citizenship within dis/ableist cultures. I want to better understand how our private lives as disabled people are shaped by public institutions and cultures that assume and demand ‘able’ and sane’ body-minds. Specifically, my work explores how we create fa...

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Bio/Research

My research interests centre on intimate citizenship within dis/ableist cultures. I want to better understand how our private lives as disabled people are shaped by public institutions and cultures that assume and demand ‘able’ and sane’ body-minds. Specifically, my work explores how we create families, parent children, engage in caring relations, exercise reproductive rights and intimate justice within contexts shaped by dis/ableist and eugenic legacies, but aspire toward ‘crip kinship’. My broader research interests extend to disability and death, and how in a post-MAiD Canadian context, we must find new meanings of disability vitality, futures and finitude. I am also committed to the deployment of disability aesthetics, forum theatre and design fiction to reimagine disabled/mad/Deaf/sick selves, bodies, communities and worlds as affirmed and valuable. My research and scholarly ethic is participatory - reflecting my work and activist roots in the anti-violence, AIDS action and disability movements - I try to work closely with the public to generate and disseminate new knowledges through co-production and other collaborative approaches. As part of this effort, I use the arts and work with artists whenever possible within my research process. Arts informed approaches I believe, have the potential to make university research more accessible and engage a broader array of audiences.

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