Full course description
Date: Wednesday December 2nd 2026
Time: 10-11am PDT
Location: Zoom webinar (continue to register through WPL) OR in-person at Marine Drive Ballroom (register for the in-person event here)
Speakers: Anne McGuire, University of Toronto and Kelly Fritsch, Carleton University
Topic: The Future Is Disabled: Building Disability Culture on Campus
Accessibility: American Sign Language interpretation and Zoom autogenerated captions will be available. Please contact The Centre for Workplace Accessibility (workplace.accessibility@ubc.ca) or Access Coordinator Alexandria Dupont (alexandria.dupont@ubc.ca) if you have any additional access requests.
Event Description: The Centre for Workplace Accessibility, in recognition of the UN International Day of Persons with Disabilities, welcomes Anne McGuire (University of Toronto) and Kelly Fritsch (Carleton University) to discuss what universities might learn from—and how they might be transformed by—disability cultures of interdependence, care, collective access, friction, and creative flourishing that challenge dominant ideals of independence, productivity, and excellence.
Speaker Bios: Anne McGuire is a Professor of Disability Studies and Director of the program for Critical Studies in Equity and Solidarity at the University of Toronto. With Kelly Fritsch, McGuire is co-author of Broken Worlds, Disabled Kin: Strategies for Collective Survival (2026). She is also author of War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence (2016), which received the 2016 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities. She is also a community educator and co-author of We Move Together (2021), a picture book about disability justice and winner of the 2022 Harriet McBryde Johnson Award for Nonfiction and the 2022 ILBA silver medal for best educational education children's picture book in English.
Kelly Fritsch is Canada Research Chair in Disability, Health, and Social Justice and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. Her research centres disability politics and culture, attending to disabled futures as sites of friction, ingenuity, and collective world-making. Her most recent book, Broken Worlds, Disabled Kin: Strategies for Collective Survival (2026), co-authored with Anne McGuire, explores how disabled ways of knowing, relating, and surviving can cultivate shared responsibilities for sustaining life in worlds broken by design. She is also the co-author of We Move Together (2021), an award-winning 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).