Author, poet, scholar Kenny Fries presents “Stumbling over History: Disability and the Holocaust”

“We need to have these conversations more,” says Michelle Mahoney, the first accessibility officer at the University of King’s College. Mahoney is talking about a new lecture series that begins Tuesday, Jan 21 at UKing’s, called “Representations of Disability in Historical, Scientific and Artistic Perspectives.”

The series is meant to “challenge stereotypes, highlight marginalized voices and rethink what it means to live, work and create with disabilities,” says Mahoney. Running until Apr 1, it will examine how ideas of “disability” and “normality” are formed through lectures every other week from leading disability scholars, researchers, writers and artists. Presenters will throw these ideas into question by exploring historical and contemporary representations of disability within the arts, science, philosophy and activism.

Award-winning author Kenny Fries opens the series with his lecture on Jan 21 at 7pm, in Alumni Hall in the New Academic Building on the King’s campus at 6350 Coburg Road. Fries is a poet, author, journalist and Disability Futures Fellow of the Ford Foundation/Mellon Foundation/USA Artists. His works include In the Province of the Gods, The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory and Body, Remember: A Memoir.

Fries will present his talk, “Stumbling over History: Disability and the Holocaust,” which is the name of his current writing project about the Nazi program Aktion T4—a program of mass murder of people with disabilities.

“This is my way to bridge the silence, to keep alive something that is too often forgotten,” writes Fries in a description of his work. The writings of “Stumbling over History” continue the project Fries began in a six-part video series, “What Happened Here in the Summer of 1940?”

Everyone is invited to attend. For those who can’t make it, his lecture will be recorded and available to watch on YouTube here.

“We’re all people—some people just have more needs than others.”

“Having this series is wonderful because students are being exposed to people with disabilities,” says Mahoney. “And guess what? We’re all people—some people just have more needs than others.”

In 2021, Mahoney was working as a receptionist at Dalhousie University. During COVID-19 shutdowns, that job became impossible. She decided to enroll and complete the Rick Hansen Foundation Accessibility Certification course through the Nova Scotia Community College.

“I am now nationally certified to rate buildings for accessibility,” she says. “Really, what that has done for me is it heightened my awareness.” She can’t go into a public building and not be assessing them, looking for accessible buttons, looking if doors have knobs or if they’re lever styled. “If you have an accessible entrance and an accessible bathroom, then that’s golden.”

Mahoney has put this awareness into action before. In 2021, she collaborated with the Planning for Equity, Accessibility and Community Health, PEACH, Research Unit within Dal’s School of Planning to launch the “Cheers! to Access” merit badge system, which awarded restaurants for their accessibility. She says she could write a book on toilet paper dispensers and how inaccessible most are. She could also write a book on straws.

“As a person with a disability, I can’t lift up a glass to my mouth to drink, so every beverage that I consume—coffee, tea, beer, wine, water—anything is through a straw.” She says getting rid of straws in most places and replacing them with paper straws has…sucked. “Not literally. Because in a hot beverage, guess what? They disintegrate.”

Mahoney discussed this at a meeting with the province’s Public Transportation Standard Development Committee, which she is a member of and which is working to build standards for an accessible Nova Scotia by 2030. “ I said, ‘If you serve a meal on an airplane, you’re going to serve a fork with that meal. To have a beverage on an airplane, I need a straw. So, a straw for me is like a fork for you; that’s how important a straw is.”

After more than two decades working at Dal, Mahoney joined King’s in January 2023 to work a leadership role in accessibility services—something she’s wanted to do in an official capacity for a while. “This is my dream job,” she says, “because as a student with a disability, I would have done anything to have had somebody like me.”

**King’s uses social models when thinking about disability or the experiences of people living with disabilities, which works on removing structural and societal barriers, including discriminatory attitudes and ways of thinking. Says Mahoney, “the social model is where the world adapts to a person with a disability, whereas with the medical model, the onus is on the person to ‘fix themselves.’”

Mahoney’s “office-of-one” has helped facilitate and plan for the series, along with co-organizing King’s faculty members Dorota Glowacka and Susan Dodd—with cross-university collaboration from the Contemporary Studies, the History of Science and Technology and the Early Modern Studies programs.

For students, these biweekly lectures are part of a second-year course within the Contemporary Studies Program at King’s, taught by Contemporary Studies professors Dorota Glowacka and Susan Dodd. It includes a weekly tutorial component.

For the public, this series is a chance to hear from leading disabilities scholars, artists and researchers and “open up conversations,” says Glowacka. “There’s still so much stigma and so many taboos around different dimensions of accessibility and disability.

This series aims to dismantle some. Glowacka points to the film Our Hearts aren’t Disabled from director and disability activist Josh Dunn, which will be presented as a part of the series on Mar 11. It’s a movie about disability, sexuality and romantic relationships. “Unless we normalize these conversations instead of shun them as shameful topics, it will always remain an unspoken or horrific social taboo that will continue to harm a large percentage of the population.” Glowacka says “we want to stress the celebratory aspect of beginning to understand disability in a very different way.”

“Implement and not just talk about”

Glowacka was part of a working group that, with King’s’ Accessibility Advisory Committee, developed the school’s first Accessibility Plan in 2022. The three-year Accessibility Plan—which will be updated into a new three-year plan by Mar 31—is in accordance with the provincial Accessibility Act of 2017. This Act outlines a strategy for reaching “an accessible Nova Scotia by 2030,” and includes the need for public institutions like universities to develop plans for identifying and removing barriers to all forms of accessibility. At King’s, this plan meant hiring an accessibility officer—Mahoney.

Thinking about barriers at a university includes physical ones, “but also other forms of more systemic barriers that are inherent in all aspects of King’s life, in terms of student admissions, scholarships and other types of access,” says Glowacka. As a faculty member, dismantling harmful stereotypes and ableist thinking within a university also “has to be implemented into the curriculum.”

From there, a lecture series flowed “under the aegis of the Accessibility Office at King’s.” She wants the series to “implement and not just talk about” removing barriers so that anyone can attend. However, she says that “we constantly see different things in terms of how the classrooms are inaccessible in so many ways,” because of old buildings, yes, but more so because of not setting up a space through a disability lens.

“For example, we have this large podium that is screwed to the floor—immovable—which takes up the entire space where the speaker is,” says Glowacka. “Our speaker is in a wheelchair. There are no provisions in the classroom to accommodate that kind of speaker, and that goes also for [Mahoney], who will be giving the opening remarks.

“The classrooms are not equipped for that. And, moreover, it doesn’t really cross our minds.”

Mahoney points to another example of conditioned ableist thinking: imagine a classroom, or any space, with a sign that says, “Please leave the room set up as is.” Often, she says, “people don’t follow that—and the room could be set up with the tables moved to one side so that a wheelchair could fit in.”

When Mahoney introduced this new lecture series to students last week, she asked them about the word “normal” and its shifting definition. Mahoney was born with arthrogryposis, which means a lack of muscle in certain joints. She has limited mobility in her arms, hands and knees and was born with clubbed feet and a dislocated hip.

“To me, this is my normal,” she says. “This is all I have ever known. I don’t know what it’s like to pick something up off the floor because I’ve never done that—I don’t think I’m missing much, but you know what I mean. When I get up, get ready for work, get into my car, and use special devices—everything I do- that’s my normal.

“Although I have a disability, to me, I don’t because that’s all I’ve ever known.”

Upcoming speakers in the series are:

February 4: Elizabeth Bearden, who will present “Crip Touches Across Time or Getting in Touch with Disability in the Renaissance”
February 25: Nicole Ineese-Nash, who will present “Decolonizing Disability: Indigenous Perspectives on Children with Disabilities and the Colonial Construction of Disability”
March 11: A screening of the film Our Hearts Aren’t Disabled and a Q&A with the film’s director, Josh Dunn
March 18: Dr. Saul Green Memorial Lecture featuring Mara Mills, who will present “Vent: Disability Distributive Justice and the History of Ventilator Allocation Protocols”
April 1: An art showcase and celebration with presentations by artists with intellectual disabilities from three L’Arche Communities across Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Much of their work is currently on display at King’s on the second floor of the New Academic Building.