{"id":403,"date":"2025-09-02T13:29:59","date_gmt":"2025-09-02T17:29:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/advancingculturalaccessibilitypractices\/?post_type=chapter&p=403"},"modified":"2025-09-04T17:27:15","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T21:27:15","slug":"syllabus","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/advancingculturalaccessibilitypractices\/chapter\/syllabus\/","title":{"raw":"Syllabus","rendered":"Syllabus"},"content":{"raw":"Link to syllabus document: DST 604 Syllabus<\/a>\r\n

DST 604: Access Activations: Building Disability-Centred Access Plans (A Workplace-Integrated Course)<\/h1>\r\n

\u00a0School of Disability Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University<\/h1>\r\n

Please note: This syllabus is a companion document to the course Press Book. This document collects course descriptions, polices, and schedules, many of which are outlined in more detail in the Press Book.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

September 2nd - December 1, 2025<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

Fall Study Week: October 12th - 18th, 2025<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\nCourse Content Delivery:<\/strong> This is a hybrid course. If you\u2019d like to join us in person, we will be at 99 Gerrard Street E, 5th floor, room 576. We request that everyone wear a high quality, high-filtration mask (N95 or better, which can be provided. We have red-strap 3M Auras and duckbills). We will also have a HEPA air filter in the space. If you\u2019d like to join online, here is our Zoom link: https:\/\/torontomu.zoom.us\/j\/98456768380?pwd=1Shbj0npYspN8hypv7efwG3MtttM1M.1<\/a>\r\n\r\nYou are welcome to switch between in-person and online attendance.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nJoining our discord server here<\/strong>: https:\/\/discord.gg\/e7vbz4NF<\/a>\r\n\r\nFor in an introduction to discord: Discord 101<\/a>\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nCourse coordinator:<\/strong> Eliza Chandler (eliza.chandler@torontomu.ca<\/a>)\r\n\r\nCourse instructors<\/strong>:\r\n\r\nSama Nemat Allah (sama.nematallah@torontomu.ca<\/a>)\r\n\r\nFinn Stanners (fstanners@torontomu.ca<\/a>)\r\n\r\nEliza Chandler (eliza.chandler@torontomu.ca<\/a>)\r\n

Relationship to Land<\/h1>\r\nOur engagements, exchanges, knowledge makership, and mobilizations within this course reflect the intercorporeal and inextricable entanglements between land, spirit, mind, and bodies (this includes beings and non-beings, humans and non-humans alike). We understand land as kin (Simpson, 2017) and come to our political labours from new and old learnings, grounded in insights of Indigenous onto-epistemology and worldviews.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nTMU is a settlement in Tkarontoa\u2014a Mohawk word and the original denomination of what is colonially known now as Toronto, meaning \u201cthe place in the water where the trees are standing\u201d\u2014on the unceded, expropriated, and stolen lands of the Mississauga\u2019s of the Credit, the Haudenasaune, the Anishinaabe and the Chippewa. Tkaronto is in the 'Dish With One Spoon Territory\u2019. The Dish With One Spoon is a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee that bound them to share the territory and protect the land.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nWe also name that the computers and technology that allow us to traverse space, to exchange time and temperatures virtually is fed and fueled by Congolese blood in the DRC and the exploited labour of our Third World siblings.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nIn this space, we ask how our disability justice access activationist work changes in its actional, praxistical iterations when we understand the disablement of al-ard, or the Earth, as bound to the disablement of the earth\u2019s peoples and bodyminds. We refuse to merely name Indigenous sovereignty. We choose instead to orient ourselves and the architectures of care we build towards it, both here on Turtle Island and across Indigenous lands this world over. As disabled Palestinian and Southern justice poet Rasha Abdilhadi reminds us: \u201cWhat happens here and there are one.\u201d We are all but a hologram of (land) struggle everywhere.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nAll our work towards Otherwise is rendered null and void unless and until the land makes a safe return to the stewardships of its original caretakers: our moments and movements and makings and meetings with madness and its outcroppings should act accordingly\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nLandback, first, foremost and forevermore.\r\n\r\n \r\n

Access Commitments and Political Orientations<\/h1>\r\nWe interdependently take up the past, present, and promissory futures of both disability and accessibility through the oft-obscured and oft-uncited genealogies, stories, imaginations, and realities of transnational disability onto-epistemologies. Our access praxis is made wholly, relational, and decolonially generative when it dethrones and defamiliarizes itself with whiteness settler knowledge-power as both its axis and nucleus. We task ourselves with, in the words of Jasbir Puar (2023), a refusal to \u201creify Global North\/South divides\u201d and instead foreground \u201cthe intermeshed matrices of settle-colonialism, empire, and infrastructures of disablement that cut across otherwise self-apparent geographies.\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nWe ask (knowing that there is no one answer and that our answers might fall short, need to be amended, nourished, repaired) as Laura Jaffee and Lara Sheehi (2024) do, \u201cWhat does it mean to do disability justice transnationally while avoiding imposing epistemologies of the north on southern contexts?\u201d How do we imagine our struggles\u00a0 as doubly rooted in and indebted to an internationalist and cross-movement coalition of decolonial assemblages? We thusly read, theorize, and engage with disability (justice) not as an identity to be claimed, but as a felt methodology that breathes against a ribcage of relationality and power. How is power wielded, weaponized, honed, disrupted, re-serviced for and against the grain of our decolonial futurities?\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nWe name this common as a politically noisy one first and foremost in order to turn askew the oft-depoliticized arena of disability (studies), which materially and ideologically inheres a political and liberationist orientation. We dually commit to this way of being and engaging in order to reject the propensity for political spaces that elide criphood, madness, eldership, debility, illness and disability, erroneously deeming them as unnecessary to (or even more violently, incongruent with) intercommunal projects of liberation.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nFinally, we take guidance from Dean Spade\u2019s organizing rubric to forge a \u201cleaderless\/leaderfull\u201d space grounded in\/with collective stewardship: \u201cWe work upon the world and we ourselves are changed by doing so. We experiment with strategies that intervene in our material reality and find communion\u2026a purpose to our work greater than the sum of its parts, an intergenerational commitment for building a future unlike our present, a future worthy of us and our love.\u201d (Rosenthal & Vilchis, 2024).\r\n\r\nThis course is grounded in a justice-oriented understanding of access, recognizing access as a collective and creative practice rather than only an individual responsibility. We will work together to imagine, practice, and sustain access in ways that reflect disability justice and decolonial approaches. We recognize that access needs extend beyond formal accommodations, though we will of course work with formal accommodation requests that come through TMU\u2019s Academic Accommodation Services. Together, we will create and return to a collective access commitment<\/a> that reflects how we want to learn, teach, and care for one another in this space. We have already begun shaping this commitment through the survey responses you shared before the course began, and we will continue to revisit and revise it throughout the term as our needs and circumstances shift.\r\n\r\n \r\n

Course Delivery<\/h1>\r\nThis will be a small class with a cohort of only 14 people. In place of a singular instructor, students will work together with three course leads: Sama Nemat Allah, Finn Stanners, and Eliza Chandler. Who have been thinking about, planning for, and creating material for this course over the past year. These leads, as well as community experts, are here to work alongside you, support you, work through challenges with you, and have conversations with you throughout the course. Though you will be leading the access plans, we all bear a collective responsibility for them.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThis is a hybrid course. If you\u2019d like to join us in person, we will be at 99 Gerrard Street E, 5th floor, room 576. We request that everyone wear an N65 mask and we will have a HEPA air filter. If you\u2019d like to join online, here is our Zoom link<\/a>. You are welcome to switch between in-person and online attendance.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nOn a more material note, the first half of this course will be run as a seminar. We will animate topics through brief lectures, conversations, engaging the readings and materials, and participate in activities that will allow us to apply what we are learning to thinking about and practicing access. In these first six weeks, we will cover topics such as crip wisdom, political frameworks for understanding and practicing access, intersectionality and intersectional justice, as well as understanding what access texts are and how they communicate political orientations to community and pre-figure particular approaches to access. These will be two hour classes, and if we don\u2019t cover all of the material during these two hours, we will record the content that we didn\u2019t get to and post the videos on the Press Book. After study week, this course will shift into a studio course: you will be working with your small groups, community mentors, and organizations to create access plans and implementation strategies. We will continue to meet informally and offer collective support for these developing outputs as well as have discussions about specific access practices, such as relaxed performances and fragrant-free policies.\u00a0 We will come back together in December to present the final plans.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nA note on visiting Tangled Art + Disability: On September 26th, we will be visiting Tangled Art + Disability, Canada\u2019s leading disability art gallery that is dedicated to advancing disability art, disability justice, and cultural accessibility. Importantly, Tangled is disability-led. Our visit to Tangled will show us what cultural accessibility led by crip wisdom, disability justice, and decoloniality feels like. You are welcome to join this visit in person following these directions<\/a> or virtually (joining virtually will give you the chance to experience a virtual tour, an important cultural accessibility practice) through this link. Please note that like our classroom, Tangled is a masked space with a HEPA air filter.\r\n\r\n \r\n

Course Description and What you will be doing<\/h1>\r\nThe Access Activator course\/workshops offers a unique opportunity to learn and engage with cultural accessibility practices informed by critical access, decolonial, and disability justice frameworks both in the arts and culture sector and in community. Over 12 weeks, you will be trained in critical access frameworks, focusing on access practices designed by and for disabled people. These practices are rooted in an anti-assimilationist approach, prioritizing disability justice and decolonial principles rather than traditional inclusion models. You will explore how to analyze and rewrite organizational access texts, such as access statements and policies, that reflect a disability-led and justice-based approach to access and create access practices that reflect justice, equity, and transformation and that are tailored for individual organizations.\r\n\r\nThroughout the training, you will apply these new skills in a practiced-based project, working in pairs or groups of three with an arts organization in Toronto to co-develop a tailored access plan with them. This plan will include re-written access texts and adjoining cultural accessibility practices. You will also create an\u00a0 implementation strategy to help the organization adopt these texts and practices within 6 months in order to better serve disabled, Deaf, mad, and neurodivergent communities.\r\n\r\nAt the beginning of this course\/workshop, we will give you an access report for your organization. This report will summarize the organization\u2019s current practices, based on interviews, focus groups, and surveys we held with the organizations\u2019 staff and community stakeholders. By collaborating with mentors and community experts, you will deepen your understanding of cultural accessibility and learn how to create real, systemic change using a critical access, disability justice, and decolonial framework.\r\n

Learning Objectives<\/h1>\r\n