Access despite the institution: The work and praxis of cross-movement solidarity in community-based workshop planning


Mary Jean Hande, Trent University

Direct-care workers and care receivers are often constructed as opposing interest groups, yet low-income seniors, disabled people and im/migrant direct-care workers all experience precarity, exploitation and violence in long-term residential care and homecare in Ontario. Our community-based participatory research project, Towards Just Care (TJC), aims to support the creation of homecare services that promote justice in care organizations and infrastructures, including working conditions and service delivery. With emphasis on unifying efforts to develop solutions that consider the mutual interests and needs of those who provide and receive home care, disability justice and migrant justice frameworks informed our methodology. A central tenet of disability justice is leadership of those most impacted. TJC centred and sought direction from direct-care workers and care receivers by creating a Community Advisory Council composed of representatives from im/migrant worker and older and disabled service user advocacy groups. In Fall 2023, TJC, hosted a visioning workshop for direct-care workers and care receivers to share space and engage in dialogue about delivering and receiving homecare in Ontario. The goals of this event were to to gain feedback and guidance on the project from the communities it aims to impact, and to build solidarity and coalition between groups historically imagined and constructed to be in opposition. The focus of this presentation is not the outcomes of the community visioning workshop, but the complex tasks and significant work involved in planning an event with concurrent anticipation and consideration for the access needs of multiple diverse groups. We will discuss the range of efforts taken and the substantial institutional barriers we encountered throughout the process. Working with the concepts of access friction and access intimacy, we reflect on the institutional tendency towards, and limitations of,  performative or “checklist” approaches to accessibility. We will articulate a vision for relational access as a counter-approach, emphasizing collective responsibility to support access and the benefit of adapting access practices to the specific needs of event participants. We suggest there is an ethical imperative for institutions to support and resource relational access, since the participation of historically marginalized communities is predicated on meaningful access praxis. This is particularly important in community-based research with communities that have been excluded from and/or harmed by academic institutions.

Non-presenting authors: Sarah Malik, Trent University; Erika Katzman, King's University College at Western; Alessia Di Virgilio, Humber College; Leah Nicholson, Trent University; Jill-Anne Santiago, Migrants Resource Centre Canada; Bharati Sethi, Trent University; Ethel Tungohan, York University

This paper will be presented at the following session: