Director's Message

Welcome to the virtual home of the MA & PhD Program in Critical Disability Studies (CDS) & thank you for your interest. Our  transdisciplinary & interdisciplinary focussed program is situated within the School of Health Policy & Management in the Faculty of Health. Critical Disability Studies offers both MA & PHD programs; CDS admitted its first MA students in 2003, & the first PhD students in 2007. We were the first & remain the only PhD program in Canada.

The diverse scholarship of CDS faculty supports an intersectional framework. Faculty expertise is contributed from areas within & outside of critical disability studies including critical race, legal studies, gender & sexuality, history, education, the fine arts & humanities, geography, media studies, political science, public policy, & bioethics.

CDS is research intensive, values excellence in teaching and learning, & contributes nationally and internationally to the contemporary & historical discourses within which the ideas & materiality of disability are located. Class sizes are small for our graduate students, offering ongoing opportunities for extended conversations with faculty & peers. Students in CDS explore disability from critical perspectives in relation to social policy, equity, social justice, human rights, cultural & social movements in Canada & internationally.  In our program students have opportunities to be involved as members of governance at the school level, faculty & institutional levels as well as research centres & student organizations.

Some graduates have returned to jobs with new perspectives. Others continue their scholarship as PhD students & postdoctoral fellows. Our students have been prepared for work as policy advisors & analysts, teachers at both the college & university level, research scientists, counsellors, curators, directors of NGOs, physicians, & research managers.

Thank you again for your interest,

Nancy Viva Davis Halifax
Graduate Program Director, Critical Disability Studies

_{Professor Nancy Viva Davis Halifax}