Race and Disability Research

The IDEA Project uses an applied research framework to identify practical and innovative solutions that support the accessibility and inclusion of Indigenous, Black, and Racialized people with disabilities across Canada. Our research is guided by our academic advisory committee and includes literature reviews, surveys, focus groups, and interviews.

Literature Review of EDI Toolkit

Race and Disability Canada has conducted a comprehensive literature review of inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility (IDEA) toolkits in Canada and the USA with a particular focus on the intersection of race and disability.

Plain Text Version

For the plain text version of our literature review (readable via screen reader), click the button above.

Styled Version

For the styled version of our literature review, click the button above.

Academic Advisory Committee

  • A middle aged white woman with medium length brown hair. She is smiling at the camera with a living room as her background.

    Dr. Rachel da Silveira Gorman

    York University, Critical Disability Studies

    Rachel da Silveira Gorman is Associate Professor and former Program Director in the Graduate Program in Critical Disability Studies at York University. Gorman is an interdisciplinary disability studies scholar working across fine arts, humanities, and the sciences. Gorman’s current projects focus on critical race studies and anticolonial aesthetics; data justice and co-design; community-based AI applications; environmental justice and climate science; research-creation; disability arts; dance and VR; screendance; biochemical and cellular mechanisms of health inequity; embodied and community-based aesthetics; dialectics of disability and disablement; and social movement learning.

  • A Guyanese Canadian woman with long brown hair smiling, wearing a black suit.

    Dr. Chavon Niles

    University of Toronto, Critical Disability Studies and Health Equity

    Chavon is a Guyanese Canadian community-based researcher. She holds a PhD from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education where her doctoral thesis explored the experiences of racialized immigrant youth with disabilities living in the Greater Toronto Area to better understand how they navigated education, rehab/health, and social services drawing on critical social theories. Her academic and community research and teaching intersect as she makes visible systems of inequities embedded in rehab, health and social services that further invisiblize the experiences of underserved communities.  Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physical Therapy, cross appointed in the Rehabilitation Sciences Institute, Temerty Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto.

  • A Black woman with no hair wearing large, square shaped glasses and red lipstick looking to the side. Behind her is a grey backdrop.

    Dr. Idil Abdillahi

    Toronto Metropolitan University, Disability Studies

    Dr. Idil Abdillahi is an assistant professor in the School of Disability Studies, cross-appointed to the School of Social Work, and the advisor to the dean on Anti-Black racism at the Faculty of Community Services (2020-2021). Dr. Abdillahi is a critical Black Interdisciplinary scholar, researcher, policy analyst, grassroots organizer, and experienced practitioner across healthcare, institutional, policy, and social service settings. She is the author of Black Women Under State: Surveillance, Poverty & the Violence of Social Assistance, (2022), author of Blackened Madness: Medicalization, and Black Everyday Life in Canada (forthcoming), co-author of BlackLife: Post-BLM and The Struggle For Freedom, (2019), and a co-editor of the forthcoming edition of Mad matters: A critical reader in Canadian mad studies.

  • A woman with short wavy hair wearing glasses, and a grey plaid suit.

    Dr. Parin Dossa

    Simon Fraser University, Anthropology

    Dr. Parin Dossa, Emerita Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, received her education on three continents: Africa, Europe, and North America. Her published works include: Transnational Aging and Reconfigurations of Kin Work (2017, ed. Dossa, Parin and Coe, Cati), Afghanistan Remembers: (2014), Racialized Bodies, Disabling Worlds: (2009), Politics and Poetics of Migration: (2004). The Circle Unfolds: Envisioning Social Justice from the Margins, 2023 (graphics/C. Corden), Social Palliation: Canadian Muslims’ Storied Lives on Living and Dying (2020), nominated for New Millennium Book Award, Society for Medical Anthropology.

  • A man with curly hair smiling. He is wearing a white striped dress shirt.

    Dr. Yahya El-Lahib

    University of Calgary, Social Work

    Yahya El-Lahib is an Associate Professor with the Faculty of Social Work, University of Calgary. His research and teachings question the operation of coloniality and colonial powers that manifest through dominant knowledge and culture. Situated within disability justice, critical migration and refugee studies, Yahya’s academic and community work focuses on disability activism and centers on the intersection of disability and displacement to challenge the racist, ableist and colonial construction disabled displaced populations. His current research focuses on interrogating social work’s role in facilitating coloniality and white supremacy that manifest through neoliberal and neocolonial professional spaces.