Presented by current Social Justice Education PhD students
Disability Salon Student Spotlight Series: October Spotlight
OI 12– 252 (Air Space)
Â¥·ïÌìÌÃ
252 Bloor Street West
Toronto ON M5S 1V6
Canada
October Spotlight:
Presentations from current SJE PhD students on their master’s MA Thesis and Major Research Paper (MRP) research.
Presenters: Matida Daffeh and Paola Madrigal
Respondent: Dr. Efrat Gold
Refreshments provided.
In-person event. Zoom link available upon request.
No registration required.
Event Accessibility Information
All events will include a Zoom e-transcript and window shades to adjust lighting. Together, we will create and cultivate ways of accessing one another and our work. There is ramp access to OISE from Bloor Street and from the St. George Subway station. The Dept. of SJE is located on the north side of the 12th floor, just off the elevators. A large accessible washroom is located near the elevators on the 12th floor. Masks available at all events.
Information and accessibility questions: disabilitysalon@gmail.com.
About the Disability Salon:
Disability is a story that lives in the midst of our creative and critical movement through the arts. Through the Disability Salon, we come together to engage disability in, with, and through the arts as a dynamic and valuable perspective.
Created in the winter of 2021 by Dr. Devon Healey and PhD student Jose Miguel ‘Miggy’ Esteban, the Disability Salon became a space to navigate how to be together amidst a global pandemic through care and creativity. The work of disabled artists acted as a springboard to immerse ourselves in the creative practices and explorations of disability as we worked to discover where disability might move us. Through student-led creative workshops, film screenings, and the sharing of artistic work, we came together to create a space through which we all share in the doing of disability arts.
Starting in the 2025/2026 academic year, the Disability Salon will extend its offerings to include a series of gatherings to spotlight, celebrate, and support the critical and creative research of disability studies students at different stages of their graduate school and scholarly journeys.
About the Speakers
Matida Daffeh
Presenter. Current SJE PhD student.
Matida Daffeh is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Social Justice Education at the Â¥·ïÌìÌà (OISE), University of Toronto. She is the co-founder of The Girls’ Agenda (TGA), a young feminist grassroots movement dedicated to eliminating female genital mutilation (FGM) and other practices that undermine the rights and well-being of women and girls in The Gambia and within the Senegambian subregion.
Matida’s research explores the intersections of disability (particularly deafness), race, gender, and immigration. She is deeply passionate about sexual and reproductive health rights for women and girls and gender justice.
Matida is an anti-FGM and feminist activist from Republic of The Gambia, West Africa. She is the co-founder of The Girls Agenda, a grassroots feminist movement working to end FGM and other traditional practices that violates the rights of women and girls. Matida has over ten years of experience working in both nongovernmental and community based organizations (at national and subregional levels) in the field of women’s empowerment, including promoting the leadership and political participation of women, issues related to gender based-violence among others.
Paola Madrigal
Presenter. Current SJE PhD student.
Paola Madrigal received their Master's of Education in Social Justice Education at the Â¥·ïÌìÌà (OISE), University of Toronto. They have their British Columbia Teachers Licence from the British Columbia Ministry of Education.
Dr. Efrat Gold
Respondent.
Dr Efrat Gold is an AMS History of Medicine postdoctoral fellow at York University, engaging in mad and disability studies. Using interpretive and critical theory and methods, Gold critiques the psy-complex, moving toward contextualized and relational understandings of suffering, crisis, and distress, and foregrounding those most vulnerable and marginalized by psychiatric power, discourse, and treatments. Her scholarship focuses on constructions of psychiatric legitimacy that naturalize and reproduce medicalized understandings of human suffering, thereby casting off all other possibilities. Through explorations of norms and meaning-making, Gold unsettles psychiatric ideology by unearthing the present absences of those deemed mad and exploring life-affirming possibilities for mad inclusion. Gold’s publications appear in scholarly and community venues, indicating her commitment to producing research and pedagogy that is accessible to and includes mad and disabled people through consultation, activism, and solidarity. Using archival material and artefacts related to mad and disabled people’s history, Gold’s unique scholarly approach unearths the often-overlooked active role of mad and disabled people in pushing back against oppressive boundaries of normalcy and creating affirmative alternatives and potentials. Motivated by social justice-informed approaches to madness and disability, Gold works across difference, moving towards an emancipative politics that recognizes the entwined landscape of oppression within efforts to build different futures.
