Changing how we support disability in Canada — Twenty years of Disability Justice activism and research shows we need to spend less time fixing individuals and more time transforming worlds broken by design

Date published: December 03, 2025 | Estimated read time: 5 min Social SCiences and Humanities Research Council

Can Disability Justice (DJ) save the world? Dr. Kelly Fritsch thinks so. And she’s not alone. A growing number of researchers in critical disability studies believe that if we shift our focus away from fixing individual bodies and, instead, transform society to support all bodies, we could make life immeasurably better, not only for the eight million Canadians over the age of 15 who identify as disabled—but for everyone.

To that end, research led by Fritsch is mapping the impact DJ has had over the last two decades—a project that could help build a foundation for a more equitable life for all Canadians.

Mapping 20 years of Disability Justice

One of the country’s most celebrated contributions to accessibility is Canadian inventor George Klein’s development of the electric wheelchair in the 1950s. Fritsch, Canada Research Chair in Disability, Health, and Social Justice, and an associate professor in Carleton University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology, explains that this innovation grew out of a postwar “Disability Rights” movement driven by advocacy for disabled soldiers who wanted to get back to work and fully participate in society.

Dr. Margrit Shildrick presents her research at the Frictions of Futurity and Cure in Transplant Medicine Project, SSHRC-funded Afterlives of Transplantation event, at Tangled Art + Disability on August 18, 2023.

Photo: Kelly Fritsch

“At the same time that veterans were being ‘capacitated’ through rehabilitation programs and access to new kinds of assistive devices, thousands of people across Canada who were deemed intellectually and developmentally disabled were taken away from their families,” she explains. “They were institutionalized and faced all sorts of terrible forms of abuse.”

The divide between disabled people who are more readily accommodated by existing social systems and those who experience persistent exclusion is a key barrier DJ seeks to dismantle.

DJ represents a departure from rights-based disability activism. Over the past 20 years, queer, trans, Black, Indigenous and other marginalized disabled populations have been at the forefront of articulating DJ as a radical framework that centres the intersectional needs of multiply marginalized people—not just a privileged few.

Fritsch and the rest of her team, supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant, are conducting interviews with over 100 activists, artists and scholars involved in DJ across Canada about what they’ve been doing over the past two decades.

“Disabled people are imagining futures where interdependence, solidarity, care and justice shape every part of Canadian society,” says Fritsch. “We see this through the leadership of disabled people fighting for safe supply and regulation of street drugs, as well as those fighting against warehousing disabled people in long-term care.”

Fritsch says the project, which will amplify these collective efforts, will eventually produce scholarly papers and books. For now, it’s focused on more immediately accessible outputs for a wide range of audiences with diverse needs, including a podcast series launching in February 2026, infographics, a digital portal of DJ history and events, as well as a graphic novel.

How we think about living well

This isn’t Fritsch’s first “multimodal” project. As co-principal investigator, alongside the University of Toronto’s Dr. Suze Berkhout, on the New Frontiers in Research-funded Frictions of Futurity and Cure in Transplant Medicine project, she co-led the team as they held pop-up galleries, produced a soundscape of a transplant ward, and supported multiple artist residencies, including one that led to the full-length documentary film Thanks for the Liver.

A weathered sign declaring “No Disabled Access” is nailed to a fence along the cliffside in Peterborough, Victoria, Australia, marking an exclusionary boundary along the shoreline.

Photo: Kelly Fritsch

Their transdisciplinary project centred participants’ lived experiences of transplant to complicate narratives focused on “the gift of life” and the “miracle” of medical intervention.

“As a society, we often think about wellness as the absence of illness and disability,” says Fritsch. “I really believe in health equity and access to good quality health care. But, when we put so much emphasis on curing and fixing, we can lose track of other initiatives that can make living with disability manageable and offer people a high quality of life.”

Building different worlds

Along with co-author Dr. Anne McGuire, Fritsch will launch a new open access book, Broken Worlds, Disabled Kin: Strategies for Collective Survival, next spring. She says the book is about interdependence and the “often invisible labour of care and maintenance that make it possible for all bodies to move, live and thrive.”

“The book maps the deeply ingrained ways it has become socially permissible to abandon one another,” says Fritsch. “We’re living in a world broken by design, in which social, economic and political systems actively debilitate and harm. And this is not a world I’m interested in saving.”

The alternative, she and McGuire argue, lies in DJ and practices of “disabled kin-making”—a way of being in solidarity with those harmed by broken systems.

“Disability, as I have come to experience it, offers a radical way of being in the world,” Fritsch says. “You can’t be disabled without intimately feeling how interdependent we are, and yet so many of our policies are written and social structures built as if we don’t need one another.”

All bodies rely on one another, even when that reliance goes unnoticed. Recognizing this makes it clear that building a better world requires ensuring full participation from everyone.

“And that means committing to care, committing to access, and cultivating communities that can collectively reject abandonment,” Fritsch adds. “When you engage with disability from this perspective, you’re not just improving the world as it is, you’re building different worlds altogether.”

Want to learn more?

To find out more about Kelly Fritsch’s work, visit her project website, Disability Justice and Collective Change in Canada. Also check out We Move Together, her picture book about disability culture and politics co-authored with Anne McGuire and Eduardo Trejos.