We are very excited to announce our keynote speakers for this year, Dr. Fady Shanouda and Virginie Abat-Roy!
Professor Virginie Abat-Roy
Virginie Abat-Roy is a professor of inclusive education in the Faculty of Education at the Université de Moncton. Her doctoral research explores the experience of accessibility and inclusion for people with disabilities who have a guide or service dog through a participatory PhotoVoice approach. Her research is funded in part by SSHRC and the FRQSC. She is passionate about equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility in both academic and social settings.
In recent years, Virginie Abat-Roy has contributed to the training of teachers and administrators in several fields, as well as to the accompaniment of students with special needs in the Ottawa region. She is constantly looking for ways to amplify the voices of marginalized folks and to celebrate the uniqueness of students. Her areas of interest are inclusion, exclusion prevention, universal accessibility, innovative educational practices and intersectionality. She is always accompanied by Toulouse, a service dog from the Mira Foundation.
Learn More About Professor Abat-Roy’s Talk
Dr. Fady Shanouda
Dr. Shanouda is a critical disability studies scholar who draws on feminist new materialism to examine disabled and mad students’ experiences in higher education. His scholarly contributions lie at the theoretical and pedagogical intersections of disability, mad, and fat studies and include socio-historical examinations that surface the interconnections of colonialism, racism, ableism, sanism, and queer- and transphobia. He has published scholarly articles on disability-related issues in higher education, on Canadian disability history, and on community-based learning. He is an assistant professor at the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation (FIST) at Carleton University. He conducts this research diversely-positioned as a disabled, fat, POC, immigrant and settler who is living, working and creating on the ancestral and traditional territories of the Algonquin nation.
