We’re excited to welcome Megan Ingram as the Collaboratory’s inaugural “Creative Scholar in Virtual Residence.” Supported by the Collaboratory and supervised by filmmaker and educator Dr. Chase Joynt, Megan is developing a new documentary project titled “Queer & Disabled Activisms in Tkaronto.” In response to an absolute lack of primary source narratives that centre queerness and disability, the project seeks to produce three documentary shorts, using oral history interviews conducted with community activists working at the intersections of disability, queerness, healthcare access, housing, and poverty.
“What is a Creative Scholar in Virtual Residence,” you ask?
This is a new term we’ve proposed to conceptualize Megan’s role with the Collaboratory, which is part scholarship and part cultural production. You may have heard of an “artist-in-residence” or even a “scholar-in-residence.” These programs invite an artist or scholar to reside temporarily at the host educational institution or cultural organization. During their residency, scholars engage in activities such as research, teaching, lecturing, and collaborating with members of the host community to foster interdisciplinary dialogue. Artists, on the other hand, may receive a stipend and access to studio space so that they can generate new work, explore their artistic practice, and engage with the local community through exhibitions, workshops, lectures, or other forms of outreach. Megan’s work blends the scholarly with the creative, so neither term seemed to capture Megan’s role on its own. Also, at the Collab, most of our work happens remotely, so there is no place for invited artists or scholars to “reside,” so to speak.
Always in search of new language for making our research initiatives legible, “Creative Scholar in Virtual Residence” captures the nature of our collaboration with Megan, a supportive relationship with an invited scholar who is working remotely with us while conducting research for the purpose of creation.
Let’s get to know a little more about Megan and this much anticipated new project.
COLLABORATORY:
Tell us a bit about you. Where are you in your career?
MEGAN INGRAM:
I identify as an academic, an artist, an activist, and an educator while simultaneously feeling some discomfit with all of those terms! More than anything, I am someone who cares really deeply — about people, about my communities, about ethics — and who uses the tools available to me in each of the above roles to enact that care! As someone who is both queer (in gender, sexuality, and political orientation) and multiply-disabled, I find joy and fulfillment in carving out spaces in systems and settings that allow me, and others, to exist in relation to each other in careful ways.
In terms of career, I’m an early career scholar and artist, with an emphasis on the early! I earned my Master of Arts in sociology from Queen’s University in May of 2023, and was fortunate to immediately land a Teaching Adjunct position with the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies. I’ve been lucky to teach courses there and with my mentor Dr. Chase Joynt at the University of Victoria that continue to affirm that education, archives, and art spaces can look different. This access to university spaces, and incredible mentors who continue to merge art and academics have led me to continue seeking out funding for moving image/documentary projects, including a series of mini documentaries and teaching resources on queer and disabled sex education for the University of British Columbia, work on the limits of medical records as archives for Queen’s University, and ongoing experimental work. This project with the Collaboratory truly feels like the next step in uniting the projects I’ve done so far in my short career thus far!
COLLAB:
You locate yourself as a “Creative Scholar.” What does this term make possible for you?
MI:
While I identify with the terms academic, activist, and artist in turn, each of them leaves me feeling a little discomfited with the constraints that they place on what “good” or “correct” production looks like in each of those areas. I genuinely feel that my research and scholarship are inextricable from my artistic practice, and vice versa, and that both are submerged in the ethics, activism, and communities that I exist within. For this reason, “Creative Scholar” feels like a breath of fresh air! This language points to the ways that scholarship is creative, and simultaneously, how creativity is often embedded in scholarship and research! For me, this term makes possible the “formal” identification of what I try to do across institutions, while also removing some of the constraints, expectations, and bounds of what that looks like! It is beautiful and expansive in ways that feel exciting and label-resistant, while simultaneously providing visibility to a label! In essence, this term is both an embracing of the difficulty of language and the good parts of identification. It’s messy and in the grey area, but that’s what this work is all about!
COLLAB:
How did the “Queer & Disabled Activisms in Tkaronto Documentary Project” come to be?
MI:
About two years back now I was co-instructing with Dr. Chase Joynt on a trans theory course in the Gender Studies Department at the University of Victoria. One of the assessments was based around students exploring the (virtual) Transgender Archives at UVic and doing a critical assessment/engagement with what they found. In my own efforts to explore the archives to be able to provide adequate feedback and grading to these students I found myself falling down the research hole, as I clicked link after link after link and failed to find any disability representation. This was curious to me, as so much of queer identity and history has been deeply medicalized and pathologized, let alone the profound overlap of disability and queerness in the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
As I scrolled, I contemplated the limits of the trans archive as it existed, and the ways that, for many valid political reasons, queerness has sought to distance itself from disability. Simultaneously, I went looking for archives and archival material on disability justice and found it both incredibly lacking generally, but with a specific gap in relation to queerness. I started brainstorming ways to bridge these gaps! I had fairly recently moved to Ontario and had been hopeful that perhaps these gaps were a result of not being in these big urban centres that exist here; however, upon arriving, it was clear that despite the long history of both queer and disabled activism in this province, and particularly centered in Tkaronto, these gaps persisted. After speaking at length with many of the queer and disabled people in my life, I pitched the idea to Chase, who put me in touch with Collaboratory, and the project was born!
COLLAB:
What connects you to the project’s research topic? Why this topic?
MI:
Queer and disabled communities, and queer and disabled activist and artistic spaces are the places where I have come to feel the most seen, heard, safe, and held — places where I have sought and continue to seek refuge from the ways that life and the current political system feel crushing. As someone who grew up in a deeply conservative and religious town in southern British Columbia, my access to stories, and particularly positive stories, about queer and disabled people’s lives and activism were extremely limited. When I moved out of my hometown to so-called Victoria, BC at 17, I finally was able to come out of the closet, and was immediately embraced by a community that affirmed not only that these communities and lives existed, but crucially that there was a long history of beautiful lives, lives that also deserved ongoing and liberating futures.
As I went into graduate school, I did research with queer and disabled participants, but the process of anonymizing their stories, de-identifying their transcripts, and representing these people without their whole context continued to be a source of ethical confusion for me. While the “data” that I was “collecting” from these people was important, the stories of my participants, many of whom were queer and disabled elders, continued to pull at me. I couldn’t help but wish that I could present their stories as theirs, and really hold space for the incredible work and care that they had enacted in their lives. As someone who is, for many reasons, preoccupied with the role of memory — what I remember, what there is to remember, whether what I remember is the Truth — creating archives of other people’s stories is a way to affirm those individual and collective memories. Showing that beautiful and impactful queer disabled lives and activism have always existed and offering pathways for future liberation is crucial to ongoing activism. I know I would’ve benefited from these stories back when I was a teen!
COLLAB:
What are three key outcomes you’d like the project to offer the community?
MI:
1. Representations that queer and disabled people have always existed.
2. A model for future archival work in this area and an archive of activist strategies that have worked in the past.
3. The preservation of activists’ stories that may not otherwise be remembered/valued by normative ideas of what an activist/archive “should” be.
With these outcomes together, I hope to point to the ways that queer and disabled people have been doing activist work and to acknowledge the continued impact of this work. The struggles and wins of people existing at the intersections of queer and disabled activism can provide a model for ways forward, especially under the current political circumstances of austerity, M.A.i.D (Medical Assistance in Dying), and rising right-wing extremism in so-called Ontario and beyond. I also want to emphasize that activism, while it can look like protests, sit-ins, campaigns, and the other things that we often associate with the word, can also look like “smaller” moments of community building, mutual aid, and medical self-advocacy — things that are crucial to queer disabled activism but often do not get highlighted as activism in and of themselves.
COLLAB:
As you embark on the first stage of the project, what’s captivating your attention?
MI:
I recently learned about the underground gender affirming surgical clinic run by two trans women out of a tractor barn near Olympia, Washington in the mid-2000s, and I have not stopped thinking about it! As a queer person who grew up in farm country and spent my childhood in abandoned blueberry fields at that same time, thinking about the rural trans people who were making a difference about 4 hours away from me fills my heart with joy! To say I haven’t stopped thinking about it would be an understatement!
We’re so looking forward to watching this project unfold. Stay tuned for more updates as phase one gets underway.
Alisha Stranges is a queer, community-based, public humanities scholar, theatre creator, and performer. She holds an MA in Women & Gender Studies + Sexual Diversity Studies from the University of Toronto. At present, she serves as the Collaboratory’s Research Manager.