Collaborations: Problem-Solving to World-Making in Disability Arts by Carla Rice
In her presentation, Carla Rice, Professor and Tier I Canada Research Chair Feminist Studies and Social Practice, explained that collaboration changes when disabled people and disabled artists take the lead. Instead of focusing only on solving problems or “fixing” bodies, she argued that disability can help create new ways of living, learning, and imagining the future.
Rice highlighted the collaboration between video artist Deirdre Logue and creative technologist David Bobier who created vibrotactile installations that transformed sound into vibrations, allowing audiences to experience art through the whole body rather than through hearing alone. She shared how this approach created new sensory experiences and changed the relationship between bodies and technology.
Rice encouraged that disabled people should be involved as experts and collaborators from the very beginning of technological design. She argued that technology should not aim to make people fit existing systems, but instead should help create more caring, accessible, and inclusive worlds.
from 7 mins 30
Calling Up Justice: Access Across Space and Time by Claudia Alick
Claudia Alick is a national leader, performer, producer, designer, writer, designer and inclusion expert. In her presentation, Claudia Alick introduced Calling Up Justice their transmedia, disability-led organisation that builds collaborative art, performance, education, and community practices across space and time. She described it as a “mycorrhizal network,” where disabled artists and collaborators distribute labour across interconnected projects, shaped by access needs, shared learning, and collective capacity.
Claudia shared examples such as Accessible Virtual Pride, Gathertown environments, QR-code systems linking audiences to participatory materials, livestreamed and hybrid theatre convenings. Claudia also described practices of resource-sharing through newsletters, community calendars, text-only formats, and collaborative content creation where stories were transcribed, edited, and redistributed across platforms.
Across these examples, Claudia emphasized education, community-building, and shared infrastructures of support, showing how access was embedded into design from the beginning and sustained through ongoing collective care and knowledge-sharing.
from 30 mins
Cripping Collaboration: Working toward Technology by Louise Hickman
In her presentation, Louise Hickman explored how access was not a fixed property of technology but something actively produced through labour, collaboration, and sociotechnical systems. Drawing on critical disability studies, feminist labour theory, and science and technology studies, she argued that accessibility was shaped as much by human effort and institutional structures as by technical design.
She illustrated this through examples of collaborative creative and research practices, including work on captioning systems, co-designed installations, and media projects with artists such as Finnegan Shannon and Andrea Geyter. These works showed how access emerged through layered processes of transcription, annotation, and embodied engagement, rather than being a simple technical add-on.
Hickman emphasised interdependence and challenged standardized accessibility models, instead framing access as relational, contextual, and continually negotiated across people, tools, and environments. She also highlighted storytelling and fiction as methods for rethinking how technological systems and disability knowledge were co-produced.
from 55 minutes
Cripping Collaboration eSymposium transcript