Dispatches from Disabled Country (Paperback). This item is unavailable.Dispatches from Disabled Country (Paperback)

“Disability is not our worst-case scenario – our worst-case scenario would be its annihilation.” This is the starting point for this powerful collection of writing by and about Catherine Frazee, disability activist, Officer of the Order of Canada, and poetic scholar of justice.

For Frazee, disability is not something to be dreaded or overcome but a force to be reckoned with – a prism of insight and experience that refracts new light upon our fundamental ideals of justice, beauty, and community.

Catherine Frazee has been a central figure in the disability rights landscape in Canada for decades. Her reasoned and passionate insights are topical and often ahead of their time. Always bold, always progressive, and frequently provocative, Frazee’s work presents an unwavering, fierce commitment to engage in public debate from a position that centres the lives of disabled people.

Taken together, these writings chronicle the rising consciousness of a social movement of disabled people staking their claim in public policy and popular culture, a claim that is overdue for honest recognition.

Catherine Frazee is a professor emerita at Toronto Metropolitan University, where, prior to her retirement in 2010, she served as a professor of distinction and codirector of the Ryerson RBC Foundation Institute for Disability Studies Research and Education. She also acted as the chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission from 1989 to 1992. She has provided expert testimony before Federal and Superior Courts on human rights and disability disadvantage and has contributed actively in Supreme Court of Canada interventions of strategic concern to disabled Canadians, most recently regarding the legalization of euthanasia and assisted suicide. Frazee has written extensively on human rights, precarious citizenship, and the activist resistance of disabled people.

Dr. Frazee has received honorary degrees from Carleton University, Dalhousie University, the University of New Brunswick, and McMaster University. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2014 for “her advancement of the rights of persons with disabilities, and as an advocate for social justice.”

Christine Kelly is an associate professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba. Michael Orsini is a full professor in the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies and School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa.

Contributors: Eliza Chandler, Harvey Chochinov, Kathryn Church, Laverne Jacobs, Christine Kelly, Michael Orsini, and Melanie Panitch