Kathryn Church

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Professor Emerita Faculty of Community Services School of Disability Studies Toronto, Ontario k3church@torontomu.ca

Bio/Research

I am an Albertan social democrat, a small town girl turned urban loft dweller, and a feminist who likes clothes. I am an academic who resists Grand Theory, a writer whose best stuff goes into email, and a lifelong learner. Currently in my second term as director of Disability Studies, I studied P...

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Bio/Research

I am an Albertan social democrat, a small town girl turned urban loft dweller, and a feminist who likes clothes. I am an academic who resists Grand Theory, a writer whose best stuff goes into email, and a lifelong learner. Currently in my second term as director of Disability Studies, I studied Psychology at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, and Sociology at OISE/ University of Toronto during radical periods in the history of these departments. Neoliberalism notwithstanding, I still believe in the possibilities that academia offers for personal transformation and social justice. A foundational contributor to the field of Mad Studies, I started by studying the “unsettling relations” that psychiatric survivor involvement produces for professional practice. In the 1990s, as an independent researcher, I documented the knowledge that survivor-led organizations produce through community economic development. Amongst my “publications” you will find a dozen plain-text documents written for that community, and an NFB documentary film called Working Like Crazy. As a researcher I connect dilemmas from everyday life with arts-informed knowledge dissemination often through exhibition. My curatorial projects include Fabrications: Stitching Ourselves Together, an inquiry into the domestic construction of wedding dresses in western Canada (1999-2007), and Out from Under (with Frazee and Panitch), an activist disability history created from collective storying of 13 ordinary objects.

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