Tanya Titchkosky

Tanya Titchkosky is a Disability Studies Professor in Social Justice Education at OISE, the University of Toronto. Her books include Disability, Self, and Society, as well as Reading and Writing Disability Differently and The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning. Tanya works from the position that whatever else disability is, it is tied up with the human imagination,  mediated through interpretive relations steeped in mostly unexamined conceptions of “normalcy.”  Knowledge producers are, thus, a key place for critical inquiry. This orientation is reflected in her new co-edited collection DisAppearing: Encounters in Disability Studies (2022) as well as her co-edited collection with Rod Michalko, titled Rethinking Normalcy: A Disability Studies Reader. Using critical approaches such as phenomenology influenced by Black, Queer and Critical Indigenous Studies, Tanya reveals the restricted imaginaries that order disability encounters in arenas such as education and medicine. Her work is supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Grant, “Reimaging the Dis/Appearance of Disability in the Academy,” and she is also part of the international research project, Disability Matters, where her focus is on how corporate health archives mediate the meaning of disability. Tanya is the recipient of the OISE 2019 Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award and a member of the Disability Circle.