Composite image and original digital illustration, created by Megan Ingram, 2026.
Project Overview
Launched in 2024, Queer & Disabled Activisms in Tkaronto is a documentary oral history project developed by Creative Scholar in Virtual Residence Megan Ingram in collaboration with the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory. Responding to the scarcity of primary source narratives that centre queerness and disability together, the project documents the lives, labour, and strategies of queer and disabled arts-activists working at the intersections of service access, housing, poverty, and community care in Tkaronto (Toronto).
Conceived as a series of short documentary films, the project combines oral history interviews with creative documentary practice to foreground activist knowledge that is often excluded from both queer and disability archives.
Historical & Community Context
Despite the long histories of both queer activism and disability justice movements in Ontario—particularly in Tkaronto—archival records and public histories rarely document their intersections. Queer archives have often distanced themselves from disability due to histories of medicalization and pathologization, while disability archives frequently lack sustained engagement with queerness.
This project emerges in response to these archival gaps, situating queer and disabled activism within broader social and political contexts shaped by austerity, healthcare precarity, housing insecurity, and ongoing debates around Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). By centering community activists’ own narratives, the project challenges normative definitions of activism and archives, emphasizing everyday practices of survival, care, and resistance.
Project Goals & Methodology
The project seeks to create a small but meaningful archive of queer and disabled activist narratives through documentary oral history interviews. Guided by Ingram’s positionality as a queer and multiply disabled scholar, artist, and activist, the project adopts an ethics of care that prioritizes relational accountability, accessibility, and participant agency.
Methodologically, the project blends oral history interviewing with documentary filmmaking, treating testimony not as extractive “data” but as collaborative knowledge production. The project resists anonymization in favour of preserving narrators’ stories as theirs, attending to memory, context, and the emotional and political dimensions of lived experience.
Interviews were conducted in locations that narrators identified as significant to their arts-activism and creative work. We are grateful to the participants for welcoming us into their apartments, galleries, and studio spaces—including Tangled Disability + Art and RAW Taiko—and for sharing these spaces alongside their stories.
Research Scope
This project focuses on queer and disabled arts activists working in Tkaronto, with attention to forms of activism that operate across multiple registers, media, and spaces. Ingram conducted interviews with five arts activists identified through their involvement in hubs of queer and disabled arts communities, as well as through snowball sampling within broader community networks.
An initial list of six potential participants was developed with the aim of representing a range of artistic media and lived experiences. These individuals were contacted directly and invited either to participate or to recommend others who might be interested. Two of these initial contacts resulted in referrals, and the final group of five participants reflects a combination of direct outreach and community-based recommendations.
Emergent Themes
- Queer and disabled histories of activism and community organizing
- Care work, mutual aid, and relational survival
- Activism beyond protest: everyday practices of resistance
- Archival absence and the ethics of remembrance
- The politics of visibility, representation, and erasure
- The role of mentorship, community, and friendship in self-understanding
- Arts as a vehicle for change, both internally, and in social contexts
Project Outputs
The Queer & Disabled Activisms Project is currently in development. Anticipated public history outputs include:
- 3–5 short documentary films (10–15 minutes each)
- Recorded and transcribed oral history interviews with queer and disabled activists, to be preserved at The ArQuives
- Public-facing screenings and/or online dissemination
Together, these outputs reach academic, activist, and public audiences across digital, artistic, and physical spaces. Crucially, this initial collection provides an entry point for queer and disabled communities seeking representation in contemporary and archival media. The outputs foreground accessible ways of thinking about memory in relation to rising authoritarian violence and the enduring legacies of eugenics.
Impact & Significance
Queer & Disabled Activisms in Tkaronto contributes urgently needed primary source documentation to queer, disability, and activist histories in Canada. By centering voices that have been systematically excluded from archives, the project affirms that queer and disabled people have always been engaged in meaningful activist work—often in forms that fall outside dominant narratives of protest and visibility.
The project also models alternative approaches to archival and documentary practice, foregrounding care, accessibility, and community accountability. In doing so, it offers both a record of past and ongoing activist strategies and a framework for future queer and disabled archival work grounded in lived experience, memory, and collective survival.
