Intersections in Rehabilitation

Intersections in Rehabilitation Virtual Speaker Series

What is this about? 

This Virtual Speaker Series brings perspectives stemming from Critical Race Theory to inform clinical practice, teaching and research in rehabilitation sciences. Specifically, the Speaker Series will provide Critical Theoretical frames and research to understand racism, equity, and social-justice in the context of rehabilitation sciences in Canada. Critical perspectives are needed to transform and reframe our understanding of health outcomes for all Canadians.  With regards to Indigenous perspectives, we aim to incorporate the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Call to Action #22: “We call upon those who can effect change within the Canadian health-care system to recognize the value of Aboriginal healing practices and use them in the treatment of Aboriginal patients in collaboration with Aboriginal healers and Elders where requested by Aboriginal patients”

Who are our speakers? 

The Virtual Speaker Series brings together leaders who incorporate Critical Theory to understand health outcomes and experiences in populations who are marginalized. A renowned international panel of speakers from across Canada, the US and the UK bring knowledge from Indigenous perspectives, lived experience, and expertise in disAbility studies, social justice, and Critical Race Theory. 

It's more than talks!

As we move through the Speaker Series, we have developed associated modules to support reflection and continued learning related to each Speaker's talk.  We encourage you to explore each one as they become available!

Some words of thanks...

Thank you to our speakers who share their time and knowledge with us.  

Thank you to all of you for joining these talks and bringing your listening, energy and creativity to transforming and refraiming our work in rehabilitation.  

Thanks to the University of Alberta Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine for funding to support this series in 2022; and thank you to SSHRC for funding a Connection Grant to support the series in 2022-2023.  

Organized by Drs Andrea MacLeod, Cary Brown & Allyson Jones

Questions? Send us a note!

The speaker series is hosted by us at the University of Alberta in ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (Amiskwacîwâskahikan) (Edmonton, Canada).  We are working and living on Treaty 6 territory, a traditional and continued gathering place for diverse Indigenous peoples including the Cree, Blackfoot, Metis, Nakota Sioux, Iroquois, Dene, Ojibway/ Saulteaux/Anishinaabe, Inuit.   

Registration Information

We ask that you register by completing the form below to receive the link.

1. You can attend the Virtual Speaker Series for free, simply register here. 

2. Pay a modest fee for a season (November 2022 to June 2023 now open) and receive a certificate of completion (i.e., June 2023). 

• • $50 for students (includes all speakers)

  • $100 for non-students (includes all speakers)

2022-2023 Speaker Series

Decolonise, Destroy, Dream - Thought experiments on becoming

Warda Farah

November 29, 2022

From 12-1:15 (Mountain Time/Edmonton)

Our profession cannot move to the future without confronting and acknowledging its racist and colonial knowledge base. We know that children from Black backgrounds are overrepresented as having Speech & Language Impairments, due to biased assessment protocols. We know that our current models, practice base & service delivery is not good enough to bring about equitable change for these children/families. This will be a personal talk sharing my journey in trying to address the above issues and how I believe that we can all use our SLT skills to create meaningful change and social impact.

Erasing, Problematizing, Hedging and Other EDI pitfalls

Danielle Peers, Janelle Joseph, Lindsay Eales, Nathan Viktor Fawaz (presenting authors) of the Re-Creation Collective

January 19, 2023

From 12-1:15 (Mountain Time/Edmonton)

“EDI,” as a set of policies and broader discourses has increasingly become the go-to technology for addressing widespread exclusion, inequitable treatment, and harm.  However, many people from equity-denied groups–including this presentation’s authors–continue to experience erasure, denial, and ignorance— not despite such policies, but sometimes because of them. In this talk, we present our Collective’s case study of all (143) national-level EDI sport policies in Canada. From this analysis, we created a model that explains common ways that EDI policies can serve to reproduce the very exclusions they seek to address. Our first theme, Reproducing the Status Quo, features subthemes Alleging Inclusivity, and Refusing Accountability. Our second theme Reproducing the Excludable Other features subthemes Erasing, Problematising, and Hedging. This framework’s application far exceeds sport policy, and  has proven useful in analyzing and intervening into EDI policy and practice in sport, recreation, education, and health sectors.

Working through Shame: 

A Revolutionary Affect to Catalyze Socially Transformative Scholarship

Pier-Luc Turcotte  & Tim Barlott

March 15 2023

From 12-1:15 (Mountain Time/Edmonton)

Pier-Luc and Tim offer an affirmative reading of shame and outline it as a pre-personal affect that opens people to seeing intolerable human cruelty. They present the potential for shame to act as a catalyzing affect, one that can unsettle mechanistic blindness to oppression. Pier-Luc and Tim explore shame as the inward anger that comes from seeing our complicity in the atrocities of others like us. Through shame, we see that the ‘other’ exists and what has happened to them is intolerable. Shame brings to the surface the ways that we are complicit in oppression at an affective level and produces creative impulses of desire (that may potentiate action). Socially transformative scholarship may be catalysed at the level of affect and desire, forced by shame to see and act on what is intolerable. 

Tim Barlott & Pier-Luc Turcotte

arch 20

Critical and Transformative Pedagogy in Speech-Language Pathology: 

Journeys of Transformation and Liminality

Maria Rosa Brea-Spahn

Apri 12 2023

From 12-1:15 (Mountain Time/Edmonton)

This talk will illustrate my pedagogical stances and moves, which are influenced by the teachings of critical pedagogue, Paulo Freire. A critical pedagogy is one that disrupts widely accepted perceptions of “knowledge ownership,” that asks us to welcome the notion of incompleteness in our own learning journeys, and that engages us in dialogical inquiry that accommodates doubt, curiosity, openness, and freedom to reflect, re-structure, and re-imagine our own frameworks (Freire, 1987). As such, this way of relating in the classroom disrupts traditional roles of teacher-student and it is actioned through critical stances and critical literacies.  Specifically, in these co-learning spaces, our compass is Freire’s (1987) urgent call to “name our world” that is used to identify, define, and disrupt our knowledge and myths of “good languaging, good learning, and good knowing” in ourselves and others through reflection and action -- a process that Freire referred to as praxis. 

Challenging Colonialism in Canadian rehabilitation practice: 

Where all professionals should start

Angie Phenix & Kaarina Valavaara

Apri 27 2023

From 12-1:15 (Mountain Time/Edmonton)

This presentation is intended for all rehabilitation professionals and students who recognize their responsibility to advance justice and equity for Indigenous Peoples in their practice but aren't sure where or how to start. Angie and Kaarina will illuminate how ongoing colonial systems, structures and actions influence current rehabilitation practice in order to advance participant's awareness of how power and privilege is maintained in their own practice. They will draw from their own lived experiences as Métis occupational therapists, educators and advocates to provide concrete actions for participants to promote rights based, equitable rehabilitation with Indigenous Peoples.

This session is offered in collaboration with Alberta Health Services.

 More to come... 

2021-2022 Speaker Series

June 7 (Tuesday) 

12:00 pm - 1:15 pm Mountain Time

Towards Justice: Equity and Accountability in Rehabilitation 

Hiba Zafran

McGill University 

White supremacy and structural violence are at the root of health and social inequities in complex ways. Such systemic problems require systemic solutions. Social accountability emerged in the 1970s in the Global South, and draws on multiple critical theories to bridge between systemic institutional design and social movements intended to empower and liberate. It focuses on creating processes that hold individuals and groups responsible for ensuring that their decisions and actions embody the forms of justice that marginalized groups demand and deserve. This lecture will outline and illustrate principles and strategies for an intersectional approach to social and community accountability, with examples and implications from/for institutions and organizations that teach about and offer rehabilitation. 

May 17 (Tuesday) 

12:00 pm - 1:15 pm Mountain Time

Taking responsibility for culturally fitting approaches in speech and language services 

alongside Indigenous peoples 

Sharla Mskokii Peltier 

University of Alberta

& 

Jessica Ball

University of Victoria 

This presentation calls upon rehabilitation practitioners to think critically about the canon of theory, methods and tools that are held as universal, standardized, and mainstays of professional practice, and to consider carefully whether and which of these are truly representative and responsive to the goals, values and needs of service recipients. The speakers refer specifically to speech and language services, and to the frequent mishandling of speech-language service delivery with Indigenous children. However, much of our critique and call to action are applicable across all kinds of diagnostic and intervention services. 

Our emphasis is on relational practice that opens opportunities to learn about the values, goals and needs of families and communities in regard to communication, and to generate novel approaches that are culturally and community-fitting.  A good outcome of this presentation will be that listeners will get beyond intonations about Indigenous children and families being “hard to serve” and will instead turn their gaze upon their own professional practice, and how this can result in Indigenous people experiencing cultural unsafety when they encounter the clinical ancillary service system. 

April 19 (Tuesday) 

12:00 pm - 1:15 pm Mountain Time

 Language, discrimination, and access to early intervention 

R. Sabah Meziane

University of Ottawa

& 

Andrea A.N. MacLeod

University of Alberta 

In this talk, we will draw on Critical Race Theory, particularly Yosso (2005)’s conception of Community Cultural Wealth, to explore how language background and experiences of discrimination can lead to barriers in accessing early intervention.  Early intervention is essential for children with developmental disabilities to become healthy and productive adults. Early intervention rests on the collaborative efforts of parents, communities, and service providers to identify and support children at risk. For children from marginalized families, particularly those who are new Canadians, early identification is a major challenge due to differences in languages, knowledge of the health care system, and perspectives and expectations relating to development.  Since commonly used screening and assessment tools are not adapted to diverse cultures or different language backgrounds, practitioners both over and under identify children who could benefit from early intervention.  The “wait and see” approach disadvantages children from minoritized communities as early intervention, when adapted to the needs of families, can greatly improve a child’s prognosis.  We will wrap up by exploring strategies to engage families and center their home language and culture in early intervention.

March 22 (Tuesday) 

12:00 pm - 1:15 pm Mountain Time

A DisCrit-informed examination of racial discrimination, ableism and pathologization in 

speech-language pathology and other rehabilitation sciences 

Betty Yu

San Francisco State University 

Betty Yu will discuss how normative ideologies about language, race and disability result in the systematic pathologization of race and the persistent racialization of disabilities in the field of speech-language pathology. She will support this argument using illustrations from her recent work, including 1) a Disability and Critical Race Theory (DisCrit)-informed critique of the language differences and language disorders distinction in speech-language pathology, 2) the role of colorblind racism in the conceptualization of the ideal speech-language pathologist, and 3) how the practice of accent modification perpetuates raciolinguistic discrimination. She will discuss the implications of these findings for disciplines in the rehabilitation sciences that are rooted in the medicalization and pathologization of difference. 

February 22 (Tuesday) 

12:00 pm - 1:15 pm Mountain Time

Intersectionality and the Health of Black Canadians

Dr. Bukola Salami

University of Alberta

The COVID 19 pandemic has highlighted health inequities experienced by Black Canadians. Black Canadians are more likely to have COVID 19 infection and also die from the disease. Evidence also indicates that Black Canadians experience poorer mental health outcomes and poorer maternity outcomes. Diverse social determinants contribute to the health status of Black Canadians. An intersectionality approach can provide useful insight to understanding the health of Black Canadians. This presentation will draw on data collected with Black communities to illustrate how intersecting identities contribute to the health of Black Canadians.