Conference Sessions

This session explores work that shifts from childhood innocence and sentiments of youth as social problems to the many ways that children and youth are deeply affected by challenging threats to their existence. The papers in this session bolster Blackness and Indigeneity by centering Black flourishing practices and anti-colonial resistance strategies. The three papers in this session include: Awakening the African Personality to re-imagine Possibilities in Pursuit of Inclusive Black Futurities, Writing historical wrongs: Why Black children deserve the joy of pro-Black play-based learning, and Mica, Talk That Talk: Reflections on Power-Consciousness in Action Research with Black Girls.

Over thirty years ago, Susan Wendell (1989) proposed the need for a “feminist theory of disability.” Since then, scholarship and research from within feminist disability studies has highlighted that disability is indeed a feminist, and intersectional issue. Feminist disability studies has been instrumental in challenging dominant assumptions about ab/normal bodies, disability, and impairment. In addition, feminist disability studies scholars have highlighted the importance of taking into account personal and embodied experiences of impairment and disability, thus making the personal political and fundamentally reframing lived experience as expertise. In view of sustaining shared futures that are diverse and inclusive, we need to consider new challenges and opportunities for developing feminist scholarship that is up to the task of resisting sanism, ableism and other intersecting systems of systemic discrimination and oppression. We believe this can be done by inviting in perspectives from other critical study domains such as Mad Studies, Disability Studies, and Gender Studies in understanding mental health needs and supports, and by combining our efforts in highlighting the voices and expertise of lived experience.

This session focuses on the impact of social context on mental health outcomes, including changes over the life course. We define social context broadly, ranging from financial and economic context to neighbourhood residence, country of origin, workplaces, or social and demographic contexts including institutions of family, gender, race, and ethnicity. The papers in this session will emphasize patterns of differential vulnerability by individuals' social position within those contexts, including age and socioeconomic status, for example.

This session focuses on the impact of social context on mental health outcomes, including changes over the life course. We define social context broadly, ranging from financial and economic context to neighbourhood residence, country of origin, workplaces, or social and demographic contexts including institutions of family, gender, race, and ethnicity. The papers in this session will emphasize patterns of differential vulnerability by individuals' social position within those contexts, including age and socioeconomic status, for example.

This session will focus on the myriad and multifaceted political, social, and environmental stressors, along with variation in their mental health consequences as a function of social status. Examples of these stressors include, but are not limited to: climate change and other related natural disasters such as wildfires and floods; the Covid-19 pandemic and its far-reaching impacts on work, family, and social life; and political, social, and economic unrest associated with war or activist movements.