The Whole World in Our Hands Forum

This public forum includes four workshops and a response that foreground multivalent experiences of access, including its sounds, scents, motions, and textures. Embracing what Disability Studies scholar Tanya Titchkosky calls the “politics of wonder”—a “pausing in the face of what already is”—this forum confronts barriers to access that shape current exclusionary systems, environments, and interactions.1 Through experiential, participatory, and conversational modes, each session holds space for processes of learning and unlearning to destabilize able-bodied, high-sensory, and fast-paced ways of being that are too often deemed acceptable.

Welcome and Introductions

Rehearsal Hall C, Deerfield Hall room 1065
9:45am

Session 1: Developing a Rapport between Blindness and Sight: Immersive Descriptive Audio and "Rainbow on Mars"

Facilitator: Devon Healey
Rehearsal Hall C, Deerfield Hall room 1065
10—11am

Blind Disability Studies scholar, theatre creator, and actor Devon Healey expands on her theatrical practice called, Immersive Descriptive Audio (IDA). IDA is an artistic practice that, through blindness, understands accessibility as an integral part of the creative process and theatrical experience. IDA disturbs the isolation of the senses. Sight, the silent act of watching the dancing/moving body; and sound, the voice description of that body, comingle in IDA. This work develops a rapport between blindness and sight through a soundscape giving voice to that which does not always appear. IDA disturbs the senses and brings the intrigue of blindness to the fore. This workshop explores the creative process of writing IDA and will showcase some of Healey’s most recent work in blind perception including a reading from her new play, Rainbow on Mars.

Session 2: A Wall Isn’t Broken Piece by Piece but Rather with a Single Decisive Blow

Facilitators: Nina Leo and Moez Surani
Rehearsal Hall D, Deerfield Hall room 1061
11:15am—12:15pm

Interdisciplinary artists Nina Leo and Moez Surani share Heresies, an olfactory project in response to heavily mediated cities. This workshop considers how scent operates, how it can be used as a subversive corporate and political tool, and how it may also be employed to counter rhetoric, access shared experiences, and enlist empathy.

Lunch Break

12:15pm

Session 3: Hybrid Embodiment: Exploring Relationships Between Digital Bodies and Real-World Movement Possibilities

Facilitator: Shay Elich
Blackwood Gallery, Kaneff Centre room 140
1:15–2:15pm

In a digital world where anything seems possible, disability justice world builder, educator, and artist Shay Erlich asks: why is it so difficult to find digital spaces that radically include disabled people? This workshop traces the feedback loops between the design of the physical world as we currently know it, and the imagined physical worlds of video games. Erlich will draw on two of their projects to demonstrate this relationship: Pushmakers, a national manual wheelchair dance curriculum development project, and Cycles of Care, a video game concept focused on the futures available to young disabled people. Fostering connections between our understandings of the ways that disabled people move in the physical world and the worlds that we create in the digital universe, participants are empowered to imagine how the digital worlds they create can disrupt physical world futures. Participants should be prepared to explore some light movement activities together.

Session 4: Heavy Air/Light Water: Gestures Across Deaf and Auditory Cultures

Facilitators: Maryam Hafizirad and Ely Lyonblum
Blackwood Gallery, Kaneff Centre room 140
2:30–3:30pm

This conversation with Deaf Canadian Persian artist Maryam Hafizirad and hearing Canadian-American music researcher Ely Lyonblum asks: What are the relationships and tensions between auditory and deaf cultures? First brought together by Signed Music, they reflect on collaborating across historically divided cultural and artistic practice and share examples of Deaf musical performances that have been a galvanizing force for their collaboration. Drawing on a combination of professional and lived experience—Hafizirad as a culturally Deaf “insider” and Lyonblum as a non-signing “outsider”— they discuss their work and their projects together (The Black Drum; The Artists Broadsheet) in complementary roles as artist, curator, and researcher.

Response and Closing Remarks

Respondent: Eliza Chandler
Blackwood Gallery, Kaneff Centre room 140
3:30—4pm

Deerfield Rehearsal Halls are located on the ground floor of Deerfield Hall and the Blackwood Gallery is located on the ground floor of the Kaneff Centre/Innovation Complex at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Both buildings include open spaces and windows to facilitate visual communication and navigation. Accessible multi-user gendered washrooms are located at ground level. Both venues are accessible to people who use mobility devices, with doorways measuring over 32” wide. All entrances to the ground floor are equipped with power-assisted doors.

The Blackwood is located on University of Toronto Mississauga campus. Click here for a detailed campus map and here for directions to UTM.

This forum is part of The Whole World in Our Hands, an invitation to break apart, remodel, and act out new grammars of empathy and togetherness. Composed of public artworks, experiential workshops, and a film made by, for, and with disabled artists and collaborators, this program asks: how does the presence of blindness, deafness, illness, and neurodiversity nurture a language that is sensed rather than spoken? What are the syntaxes of touch, smell, sound, and movement? With the understanding that everyone plays a role in how disability is experienced, The Whole World in Our Hands embraces our shared responsibility for making livable worlds for all.

Curated by Jacqui Usiskin, The Whole World in Our Hands exhibition in campus spaces runs September 3, 2024–January 7, 2025 at the University of Toronto Missisauga.

To learn more about The Whole World in Our Hands and the contributors, visit the .

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Image: Nina Leo and Moez Surani, Heresies (My Hiroshima), 2018. Courtesy the artists.

Image description: A feminine-presenting person with dark hair and clear classes leans towards a perfume bottle containing a yellow liquid. To the left of the image ,white text reads: "Open Research Forum." At bottom right, white text reads: "November 13, 2024 / University of Toronto Mississauga." At bottom left, white texts lists the contributors names in alphabetical order. At top, white text reads: "The Blackwood." Text and image are against a gradient background with hues of orange, yellow, and green, with two circular shapes.

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1 Tanya Titchkosky, The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), p. X.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

University of Toronto Mississauga, 3359 Mississauga Road, Mississauga, Canada