As we share our exploration of "belonging," we reflect on what has brought us together in this pursuit. We have come to collaborate and learn about and with each other's work as students taking courses in Disability Studies and Black Studies. Moreover, these orientations have kept inspiring us to understand our own shared experiences and questions of belonging to the Philippine diaspora. The critical and creative work of the scholars, activists, and artists we have been in conversation with have further called on us to return to stories of belonging that intend our performances within Canadian multiculturalism, stories that implicate us in Canadian settler-colonialism and entangle us in the very structures of imperialism that have brought us to the place of longing for a connection to community, to family, to ancestors, to the lands that we long to be in relation with. And through this, we wonder how we might release different stories of belonging by weaving together our own stories, our memories, our forgetting, and our remembering. We wonder how our explorations might gesture to a story of community and care that we attempt to navigate as we find and search for belonging within academic expectations of rigor and success through our creative practices.
» Elaine Cagulada is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Social Justice Education at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of University of Toronto. She is interested in the single stories of deafness, disability, race, and policing produced and reproduced by the ruling relations, her focus primarily being on the institution of police. Influenced by teachings abound in disability studies, Elaine wonders what different stories of deafness, disability, and race, what radical possibilities for Being, might be let loose with and through interpretation. She is a co-editor of recently published collection, DisAppearing: Encounters in Disability Studies, with Canadian Scholar's Press. Her poetry and work have been published in various journals such as Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, New Sociology: Journal of Critical Praxis, and Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry.
» Jose Miguel (Miggy) Esteban is a dance/movement artist and educator based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Miggy is currently a PhD student at the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, where his research is oriented through disability studies and dance/performance studies to reimagine educational praxis. Influenced by disability arts and culture, Black radical traditions, Indigenous storytelling, and queer performance, his dissertation project engages in embodied practices of improvised research-creation to re-interpret curriculum as a choreographic site for inspiring pedagogies of/through dance. His work has been published in Canadian Theatre Review, Disability Studies Quarterly, Journal for Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Liminalities, and in various edited volumes.
