Mobilizing Metaphor

Mobilizing Metaphor illustrates how radical and unconventional forms of activism, including art, are reshaping the rich and vibrant tradition of disability mobilization in Canada – and in the process, challenging perceptions of disability and the politics that surround it.

Until now, research on Canadian disability activism has focused on legal and policy spheres and overlooked how disability activism is as varied as the population it represents. Mobilizing Metaphor combines contributions by artists, activists, and academics (including an insightful concluding chapter by renowned disability scholar Tanya Titchkoksy) with rich illustrations and photographs to reveal how disability art is distinctive as both art and social action.

As the contributors sketch the shifting contours of disability politics in Canada and show how disability oppression is not isolated from other prejudices, they challenge us to re-examine how we enact social and political change.

Christine Kelly is an assistant professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba and a former Banting postdoctoral fellow in the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa. Michael Orsini is a full professor in the School of Political Studies and vice-dean of graduate studies in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa.

Contributors: Paula Bath, Drew Danielle Belsky, Eliza Chandler, Nadine Changfoot, Kathryn Church, Diane Driedger, Lindsay Eales, Catherine Frazee, Gabriel Blouin Genest, Melissa Graham, nancy viva davis halifax, Kevin Jackson, Véro Leduc, Alex McClelland, Pamela Moss, Kristin Nelson, Melanie Panitch, Jeffrey Preston, Carla Rice, Jen Rinaldi, jes sachse, Tanya Titchkosky, and Jessica Whitbread

Lennard J. Davis, author of The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era:
A comprehensive look at disability activism and art in Canada and beyond ... showing the interconnected nature of creativity and politics.

Petra Kuppers, author of Disability Culture and Community Performance and Studying Disability Arts and Culture:
Mobilizing Metaphor is a testament to the thriving of critical disability studies in Canada, and to arts-based activisms’ coalitional potential to move toward more just futures. The collection brings together multiple perspectives on what contemporary radical acts of knowledge creation and creative protest can do in the world.

Jay Timothy Dolmage, author of Disability Rhetoric:
I can’t imagine a collection doing a better job of representing the liveliness, complexity, and spread of disability art, culture, and activism in Canada.

Robert McRuer, author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability and co-editor of Sex and Disability:
Mobilizing Metaphor is the essential disabled handbook for living with, through, against, across, and alongside metaphor. Canadian spaces, in this collection, open onto a world of possibility – a necessarily and desirably disabled world where metaphors take surprising and unexpected new forms. For anyone thinking about the cultural work generated by the vibrant languages of disability art and activism, Mobilizing Metaphor is required reading.