Members

Photo of Kelly with short brown hair and round glasses

Kelly Fritsch, Co-director

Kelly Fritsch is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University and co-director of the Disability Justice & Crip Culture Collaboratory. As a feminist disability studies scholar and crip theorist, her work mobilizes social and cultural theory, arts-based research, and everyday hacking and tinkering to engage the generative frictions of disability politics and culture. She is co-author of We Move Together, a children’s book about disability culture, community, and accessibility, and co-editor of Disability Injustice: Confronting Criminalization in Canada and Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle.

Fady Shanouda, Co-director

Fady Shanouda is an assistant professor in the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation at Carleton University and co-director of the Disability Justice & Crip Culture Collaboratory. His scholarly contributions lie at the theoretical and pedagogical intersections of Disability, Mad, and Fat Studies and include socio-historical examinations that surface the interconnections of colonialism, racism, ableism/sanism and fatphobia. He has published scholarly articles on disability/mad-related issues in higher education, Canadian disability history, the anti-fat bias in medicine, and community-based learning. He is also host of Disability Saves the World podcast.

Megan Linton, Student member

Megan is a disabled deinstitutionalization researcher, writer and advocate based in Unceded Algonquin Territory. Her research and advocacy focuses on contemporary forms of institutionalization and the possibilities of abolition. She works collaboratively with the Joint Task Force on Deinstitutionalization and the Disability Justice Network of Ontario. She has written for Winnipeg Police Cause Harm, Canadian Dimension and the CBC among others. 

Photo of Rachel Jobson

Rachel Jobson, Student member

Rachel is a PhD student in Sociology at Carleton University on the unceded territories of the Algonquin nation. She is a white, settler, queer, disabled and neurodivergent student researching the socio-legal construction of the nuclear family as the only sanctioned site of care outside of paid care work and institutionalization. She is particularly interested in how crip theorizing around interdependence and collective care intersects with family abolition and anti-carceral movements. She is a member of the CUPE 4600 Disability & Accessibility Caucus, and the Sociology and Anthropology Graduate Student Caucus. 

Jess, a Filipino-white person with long straightened black hair and brown eyes, who is slightly smiling at the camera. Jess is wearing a black blouse with flowers on it. There is a bush with flowers in the background.

Jess Rocheleau, Student member

Jess is a neurodiversity advocate and PhD researcher in Sociology at Carleton University. She is passionate about disability justice, accessibility, and intersectional community-based participatory research and technology design. Jess earned a Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction in 2019, where their research focused on Autistic and non-autistic teenagers’ privacy attitudes and behaviours on social networking sites. For her PhD research, Jess hopes to shed light on the systems of power, privilege, and oppression that are preventing Autistic adults from safely engaging in self-advocacy online, and to recommend community-led solutions that can enable Autistic self-advocates to not only survive but also thrive, online and offline. 

Lisanne, a fair-skinned woman with hair pulled back and tied up is smiling directly into the camera. The background is blurred. Lisanne is wearing a shirt with flowers and cat-eye glasses.

Lisanne Binhammer, Community member

Lisanne is a digital product designer and educator. She is a passionate builder, maker, and tinkerer with a drive to build better (more humane) technologies for our future selves. She completed her MA at Carleton in Anthropology with a specialization in digital humanities. Her research looks at the intersections between autistic girlhood and the slow violence of corrective technologies, as well as the possibilities as afforded by virtual reality platforms for autistic girls.

A picture of Amy, a disabled Chinese-Canadian woman sitting in a manual wheelchair. She has long, straight, black hair. She is wearing a pink t-shirt and silver glasses. The background consists of blurred trees, and pink and white flowers. She is smiling at the camera.

Amy Li, Student member

Amy is a fourth year undergraduate student in the Bachelor of Public Affairs and Policy Management at Carleton University. She is concentrating in Social Policy and minoring in Disability Studies. Her research interests include: social policy, social welfare, disability policy, disability arts, and social justice. She values community-building and believes in the importance of the arts in facilitating these connections. In her free time, she enjoys painting and reading.

Sophie Jin, Student member

Sophie is a writer, researcher, and master’s student looking at long-term care beyond institutionalization. Their work on penal abolition, disability justice, and labour has appeared in Briarpatch, This, and the Monitor, among others, and they sat on the editorial collectives of the Prison Abolition and Disability Justice issues of Briarpatch Magazine.

Photo of Natalie Hart from the chest up. A white woman smiling softly with brown auburn hair and grey green eyes wearing a short-sleeve black turtleneck and pierced ears with gold coloured hoops; each earring is composed of several hoops descending from the ear from smallest to largest hoop just below the base of the neck. The slightly blurred background is split almost at the halfway point of the photo: the left side is different shades of dark brown, light brown and auburn; and the right side is wood panelling that has been painted a light grey/off white.

Natalie Hart, Community member

Natalie has degrees in Art History and Music Performance from Carleton University and the Jacobs School of Music and is currently studying American Sign Language. Given her background and lived experience as a queer person living with two chronic conditions, she takes a multidisciplinary approach to access and inclusion in museums and galleries. Her research interests include disability aesthetic in art and bringing visibility to stories of people with disabilities in museums and galleries. She currently works with the City of Ottawa Museums as an Education and Interpretation Program Officer.

Adele Ruhdorfer, Student member

Adele is an emerging writer, researcher, and curator, with a creative practice centred on photographic, lens-based, digital media, and collage. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Art History at Carleton University, located on the unceded territories of the Algonquin nation. Drawing upon her own lived experiences as a neurodiverse and chronically ill person, she focuses on the embodied creative practices of disabled, mad, and sick artists in her research and curatorial practice. Her research complicates the definition of Disability Arts beyond a politics of visibility, to include non-representational, abstract, and immersive art. Focus is given to artists using an aesthetics of error in their lens-based, time-based, chance-based, digital media, and/or glitch art, highlighting how technological relationships extend their body’s capacity for creative expression, while remaining grounded in their embodied experiences and lived crip knowledge.

A photo of Kai, a white transmasculine person. They have short blonde hair and are wearing a black t-shirt. They are smiling and sitting in a restaurant

Kai Jacobsen, Student member

Kai is an MA student in Sociology at Carleton University. They are a neurodivergent trans researcher interested broadly in how normative discourses about queer and trans identities impact queer and trans people’s lives and wellbeing. More specifically, they are interested in how autistic trans people experience gender-affirming care readiness assessments. 

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Keely Grossman, Student member

Keely is a Blind theorist and PhD student in Sociology.

Genevieve Hart, Student member

Genevieve is currently completing her Bachelor of Social Work degree with a double minor in Disability Studies and Psychology. 

Photo of Amanda Cannella

Amanda Cannella, Student member

Amanda is a PhD student focusing on critical disability studies at the intersections of comic studies and the health humanities.

Photo of Andy Zubac, a white non-binary person, smiling into the camera while sitting on a bench in the middle of a grassy field. They are wearing a hat, sweater, and jewellery all following a flower motif and the bench is also carved with a matching flower design.


Andy Zubac, Student member

Andy has a master’s in mathematics and is currently working on a master’s in sociology at Carleton University. They are trans and AutDHD and passionate about mutual aid, peer support, and community building. She is a member of the local neurodivergent self-advocacy organization Autistic and Neurodivergent Liberation Front of Ottawa (ANLFO).


Melanie Coughlin, Contract Instructor member

Melanie teaches philosophy and religion at Carleton University. Her research focuses on the historical relationship between 20th century Japanese philosophy and European philosophy with a focus on how that history can inform issues we still struggle with today. She is a disability advocate, currently fighting for a centralized accommodation process for all CUPE 4600 members and safer rides through the ParaTranspo Customer Service Working Group.


Caitlyn Rose, Student member

Caitlyn is an undergraduate student working towards her BA in Disability Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. She feels most at home when connecting with other disabled people or in a comfy chair with a book and her pets. Her research interests include disability arts, access, and care.

A photo of Kendra Guidolin from the chest up. She is a white woman with blonde, curled hair and light brown eyes. She is wearing a small gold necklace and a white shirt with thin straps and is smiling softly at the camera.


Kendra Guidolin, Student member

Kendra is a doctoral student, writer, and dancer based on the unsurrendered territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. Her work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, carte blanche, Contemporary Verse 2 (CV2), Cosmonauts Avenue, and Arc Poetry Magazine online, among others. She writes mostly about the body

Alex Mclean, Student member

Alex is a masters student in English with a specialization in Digital Humanities and a Type 2 diploma in Curatorial Studies.