VIRTUAL Prague Research & Teaching Conference

Abstract

The Transformative Access Project in Art and Design Education is a culmination of a year’s collaboration organizing and developing creative practices and pedagogy dedicated to transformative access in art and design education in Canada. This online performative dialogue between Laura Thrasher, Educational Developer, Inclusive Teaching and Maria Belén Ordóñez, queer ethnographer and faculty at OCAD University in Toronto, animates scenes and reflections that came out of a two-day event organized in May 2025. Artists and designers (from OCAD University) created art, design, and on-site activations that supported accessible pedagogy, collectively documenting and disseminating those collaborations to unsettle the terms by which accessibility has been defined in post-secondary education. Thrasher and Ordóñez’s speculative dialogues are creative provocations for knowledges that decenter neurotypicality and spatial ways of knowing, underscoring the generative value of experiencing the classroom as an event-site. They narrate ethnographic flashes of what happens when critical pedagogy, disability studies, art, and design are thrown together to transform and multiply what counts as knowledge. Thrasher and Ordóñez shift attention away from representation and legibility in the classroom towards what Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart describes as affect that “registers surprise at what and how things happen” (In the World that Affect Proposed 2017, 194).