Ableism: Ableism refers to an oppressive “system of assigning value to people’s bodies and minds” using socially fabricated notions of “normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness” (Lewis, 2022). Based in eugenics, as well as colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, and capitalism, this system leads to some people being valued, and others devalued, on the basis of their appearance and abilities.

Ableism (Plain Language): Ableism is a type of discrimination based on the idea that people who don’t have disabilities are better than people who do have disabilities. Ableism hurts disabled people in many ways. It means that they are treated differently, get less opportunities, and have a difficult time going places and doing things.

Accessibility: Accessibility asks us to think about how oppressed groups might find certain spaces difficult to enter and feel comfortable in for physical as well as political and historical reasons. It refers to the design of objects, services, and environments—both material and digital—and the extent to which they are usable and/or habitable for disabled people and other marginalized populations.

Accessibility (Plain Language): The word accessibility is used to describe how easy something is for everybody to use, whether they are disabled or non-disabled. For example, a building with stairs, but no ramps or elevators is not accessible to someone who uses a wheelchair.

Access Intimacy: Access intimacy is a term used by writer and educator, Mia Mingus. She uses the term to describe the feelings of safety and acceptance that come from being with people who understand and accept you and your access needs. Access intimacy can develop in a variety of situations and circumstances, with people you know well, and even with strangers.

Access Intimacy (Plain Language): Access Intimacy is how writer and teacher Mia Mingus explains the feeling of closeness and comfort that a disabled person gets when they are with a person who understands them and the kind of help and support that they need.

Accommodation: Accommodation is the word used to identify something that has been modified or adapted to become accessible. In a school setting it could refer to changes to an assignment, or providing extra time to write a test or complete a task. An example of an accommodation to a physical structure could be the addition of a ramp or an accessible bathroom. An accommodation is an afterthought, like a retro-fit. Accommodations wouldn’t be necessary if accessibility was part of the original design.

Accommodation (Plain Language): When something has been changed to make it work for everyone, it is called an accommodation. For example, disabled students might need accommodations to be able to complete some of their school work. Accommodations would not be needed if everything was made in a way that worked for everyone.

Barriers: These are obstacles that prevent people from fully participating in human society, either through their presence or absence. As the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) recognizes, these obstacles can be physical/architectural, organizational, technological, informational/communicational, and attitudinal. Barriers are often built into the way that places and things are designed, and their existence is often invisible to nondisabled people (see also, NonDisabled Privilege). Before these barriers can be dismantled, they must first be identified and recognized; ideally, barriers are prevented from existing in the first place through inclusive design and accessibility practices (AODA).

Barriers (Plain Language): Barriers are things that stop disabled people from being able to do what they want or need to do. Some examples of barriers are buildings without ramps or elevators, signs or other information that are written in a way that someone can’t understand, or people’s attitudes about disability. People usually don’t notice barriers if they don’t cause problems for them.

Bodymind: Brought to prominence by Margaret Price (2015), bodymind acknowledges that “mental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give rise to each other” (p. 269). The term has also been used by Eli Clare (2016) to articulate how the ideology of “cure” and the Western dualism that separates mind from body also works to separate humans from non-humans.

Bodymind (Plain Language): Our senses are working all the time and they help us to understand the world around us. We might think that we experience our senses in just our bodies or just our minds, but our bodies and minds are connected. This is called “bodymind”. People often think of the mind and body as separate and that the mind is more important. The word “bodymind” shows that our bodies and minds are closely connected and equally important.

Class Action Lawsuit: When several people have suffered injuries or wrongdoing as a result of someone else’s action, they can come together to take legal action as part of a class. This legal action is known as a class action lawsuit. In the case of the Huronia Regional Centre, survivors successfully brought a class action lawsuit against the Ontario government for the harm and abuse suffered as residents of the institution. As part of a resulting settlement in 2013, they were awarded monetary compensation as well as non-monetary benefits, such as the issuing of a government apology, restoration of a cemetery fence, and resurrection of historic plaques and signage. See also, Huronia Regional Centre Apology.

Class Action Lawsuit (Plain Language): A Class Action Lawsuit is when a group of people who have been hurt or treated very badly come together to sue the people or organization who hurt them. The survivors of the Huronia Regional Centre sued the Ontario government because of how they were treated when they lived there.

Colonialism/Settler Colonialism: Colonialism is a system of control over another country or nation and the land that it inhabits. It involves practices and policies that both control and dominate the inhabitants, and that cast some human beings as essentially inferior. For example, when Britain colonized Turtle Island, or what is now North America, Indigenous people were forcibly disconnected from their land, as well as their culture and community, by settlers. Settler colonialism refers to how European powers sought to claim vast territories and displace Indigenous peoples through having (mostly or typically) white settlers move into and displace land occupied by Indigenous people. Settler colonialism involves not only land theft and cultural genocide but also resource extraction. Mark Rifkin argues that settler colonialism disguises itself as “settler common sense” (2014), making Canadian sovereignty seem natural and normalizing the elimination of Indigenous peoples and ways of life.

Colonialism/Settler Colonialism (Plain Language): It is called colonialism when people from another country come to a new place and take over. These people are called colonizers. An example of colonialism is when the British came to Canada and tried to control the Indigenous people who already lived here. Colonization involves stealing other people’s land, not allowing them to live the way they want, and forcing them to follow the colonizers rules.

Community: Community is a feel-good word; it is good to be in community and to have a community (Bauman, 2000). Community is a term that conveys security, belonging, and inclusiveness. But to be in community comes with responsibility and obligation. Strong community is essential for disabled people, and is tied to the search for social equality.

Community (Plain Language): A community is a group of people who live in the same place or have something in common. A community should be a place where everyone belongs and feels safe. The members of a community have a responsibility to take care of each other.

Crip time: Crip time is about functional accommodations, such as flexible deadlines, that recognize that disabled people often require more time than nondisabled people to complete tasks. But as Ellen Samuels (2017) points out, crip time can also be something “beautiful and forgiving” that “‘bends the clock’” to redefine normal and revolt against neoliberal notions of time that impose strict deadlines as disciplinary measures that control people’s waking and sleep schedules as well as their activities of daily living—not to mention the marking of life passages such as birth and death, and rituals like grieving. Crip time as a concept acknowledges that disabled people mark time differently, and celebrates its potential as a form of temporality (see definition of “Temporality”) with alternative rhythms.

Crip time (Plain Language): The term “crip time” is used to explain how disabled people can have a different relationship with time than nondisabled people. Things like when people usually sleep, work and eat may be different for disabled people. It can also be used to explain accommodations, like needing more time to complete a task.

Deinstitutionalization: Deinstitutionalization is a counter-response to the mass incarceration and institutionalization of oppressed and marginalized groups of people. Disability scholar Liat Ben-Moshe says that it is “a social movement, a mind-set, a logic to counter carceral logics” that “calls for an ideological shift in the way we react to difference among us” (2020). Deinstitutionalization has arguably already taken place in some spheres, as witnessed in the closure of psychiatric hospitals and residential institutions for people with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities due to policy shifts in recent decades. While the incarceration of large proportions of Indigenous and black populations, for example, is not equivalent to these forms of institutionalization, abolitionists argue that both are premised on the same underlying carceral logic—a mentality and practice that legitimizes the regulation and segregation of marginalized groups. Deinstitutionalization resists these forms of power, with activists advocating for the closing down of carceral spaces like prisons, residential facilities, etc.

Deinstitutionalization (Plain Language): An institution, like the Huronia Regional Centre, is a place where some disabled people were forced to live. Closing an institution and finding a better home for the people who lived there is called deinstitutionalization.

Difference: “Difference” is a broad term used to describe bodyminds that do not align with dominant ways of living and being in the world. According to Carla Rice and Ingrid Mündel (2019), Canada promotes “dominant representations of non-normative bodies and minds” through nationalist and neoliberal structures and practices that promote competition and hyperindividualism.

Difference (Plain Language): The word difference is used to describe the ways that people are unlike other people. Our society is often not very accepting or understanding of people’s differences.

Direct Funding: A program in some provinces (such as Ontario) that allows physically disabled adults to become the employers of their paid attendants, such as the people who assist them with their day-to-day activities. The program allows disabled people to exercise greater control and autonomy over their lives, and to continue to live independently in their own homes. It is accessible to those who want to take on the extra responsibilities and risks of hiring and managing an attendant. However, it is limited to residents 16 years of age or over who are able to complete a written application, meet with a selection panel, and manage attendants, among other requirements.

Direct Funding (Plain Language): This is a program in some provinces that gives money directly to disabled adults so they can hire and pay their own support people. This funding gives people more control over their own lives by allowing them to pick who they want to be their support people and to decide for themselves what kind of support they want or need. Support people can help with daily activities like dressing and bathing.

Disability Justice: Disability justice refers to an intersectional activist movement led by Indigenous and Black people, people of colour, and queer and trans disabled people who have experienced marginalization in the broader culture and the mainstream disability rights movement. It calls for a radical shift in societal attitudes and structures.

Disability Justice (Plain Language): Disability justice is different from the disability rights movement. Disability justice and the disability rights movement are both focused on fighting against ableism. The difference between the two is that disability justice is led by Indigenous people, Black people, people of colour, and queer and trans disabled people who were left out of the disability rights movement.

Emplacement: Anthropologist David Howes (2005) suggests that the concept of “emplacement” can help us better understand the relationship between our bodies and our minds. Emplacement is the process through which we come to know ourselves in relation to other elements of the environment (Pink, 2011). It highlights the interconnectedness of our body, mind, and environment, emphasizing how our senses and surroundings influence each other.

Emplacement (Plain Language): Emplacement is a way of thinking about how our bodies and minds are connected to each other, and to the places we spend time in. Our bodies and minds influence each other through the things we see, hear, smell, taste and feel. We are also influenced by the things around us in our homes, schools, workplaces and other places that we spend time in.

Eugenics: First coined in the 19th century, eugenics describes the modern pseudoscience of selective breeding aimed at “improvement” of the population. It names a host of policies and actions through which governments have discriminated against and controlled disabled, poor, Indigenous, and immigrant populations, including both so-called “positive eugenics” that encourage those with purportedly desirable traits to breed and “negative eugenics” that dissuade or prevent those with ostensibly degenerative traits from reproducing. Throughout the 20th century, modern eugenics were used to “purge” societies of characteristics considered biologically impure or undesirable, perhaps most notably during the Holocaust, where Nazi Germany’s Aktion T4 program began by sterilizing disabled Germans before developing gas chambers and bogus medical experiments “tested” on disabled Germans that would later be used to exterminate Jewish people. Despite the advocacy of scientists, policymakers, disability rights activists, and others, modern eugenics (sometimes referred to as “newgenics”) is a 21st-century reality, which comes to the fore in practices such as selective abortion, prenatal screening, and euthanasia that aim to eliminate disabled people, and marginalized populations more broadly, or to “improve” all of humankind.

Eugenics (Plain Language): Eugenics is the belief that society could be ‘improved’ by getting rid of ‘bad’ genes by controlling who can have babies. People who believe in eugenics think that the world would be a better place if there were no disabled people. Eugenics was used in Nazi Germany and in many other places around the world, including Canada. Unfortunately eugenics still exists in many places today.

Group Homes: A group home is a place where members of marginalized populations—such as children and youth in care, disabled people, unwed mothers, people in recovery from substance abuse, or victims of domestic violence—live together in a group and receive assistance from paid staff. Group homes are supervised living environments that, to varying degrees, normally involve the surveillance and control of residents’ daily lives. See also, Institution and Transinstitutionalization.

Group Homes (Plain Language): A group home is a place where people who are marginalized (people who are treated differently by society) live together and get support from paid staff. People who live in group homes have to follow a lot of rules and don’t have the freedom that people who don’t live in group homes have.

Huronia Regional Centre: Once known as the Ontario Hospital School, Orillia, and before that as the Orillia Asylum for Idiots, it was a place for intellectually disabled children and adults that was run by the Ontario government between 1876 and 2009. After the school closed, and in reaction to a class action lawsuit, the government offered an apology for the decades of neglect and abuse suffered by survivors.

Huronia Regional Centre (Plain Language): The Huronia Regional Centre has had lots of different names. It was run by the Ontario government from 1876 to 2009. It was a place where many children and adults with intellectual disabilities were forced to live.

Huronia Regional Centre Apology: On December 9, 2013, the Ontario government offered an apology to the residents of the former Huronia Regional Centre. It was the first apology offered by any government for institutional conditions that adversely affected people with intellectual disabilities. Issued by former Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, it was part of the settlement reached in 2013 as a result of the class action lawsuit (see also, Class Action Lawsuit) brought forward on the behalf of the centre’s previous residents. In her apology, Wynne acknowledged that survivors and their families “were deeply harmed and continue to bear the scars and the consequences of this time,” adding that “Their humanity was undermined. They were separated from their families and robbed of their potential, their comfort, safety and their dignity.”

Huronia Regional Centre Apology (Plain Language): On December 9, 2013, the Ontario government apologized to the people who had been forced to live there, and their families. In the apology the government admitted that the people who lived at the Huronia Regional Centre were badly abused.

Huronia Regional Centre Cemetery: At the Huronia Regional Cemetery there are 571 marked graves and numerous unmarked graves. The number of unmarked graves within this cemetery is disputed by survivors. The grave markers listed with patient numbers have been moved and disturbed both by people stealing the markers and the installation of sewage pipes.

Huronia Regional Centre Cemetery (Plain Language): There is a cemetery at the Huronia Regional Centre with 571 graves with markers saying who is buried there. There are many more graves with no markers. We don’t know how many unmarked graves there are.

Incarceration: While incarceration has traditionally been understood to mean systems that confine and limit the movement of people deemed criminals by the courts, it is a much broader phenomenon that also includes the confinement, control, and surveillance of disabled, Mad, Indigenous, and other marginalized and oppressed people (Ben-Moshe, 2020). In this sense, incarceration appears not only in prisons and jails, but also in psychiatric hospitals, treatment centres, and other enclosed spaces that involve the confinement, control, and surveillance of people’s bodyminds, albeit in different context-specific ways.

Incarceration (Plain Language): Incarceration means that you are in a place, like a prison, and you are not allowed to leave. People can also be incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals and treatment centres. Unfortunately, marginalized populations (people who are treated differently by society) are incarcerated more often than other people.

Institution: A place, such as a school, prison, or hospital, run by the government or an organization, where many people live, work, attend school, or engage in other activities together. There are often strict rules and supervision that are enforced to control people’s behaviour, sometimes through punitive measures. For centuries, disabled people have been segregated in physical residences created specifically to house, teach, or or treat people with disabilities, such as asylums and training schools, but they have also been profoundly affected by community-wide social institutions like hospitals and prisons. Disability scholars emphasize the dehumanizing effects of institutions for disabled people, and also the ways that disabled folks have long actively resisted their institutionalization. But institutions as a form of social, economic, and political control have disproportionately affected a range of oppressed groups throughout history, with racialized and disabled people, for example, overwhelmingly represented in the prison system, giving rise to abolitionist movements that contest carceral logics (Lewis, 2023).

Institution (Plain Language): An institution is a place that is run by the government or other organization. Some examples of institutions are schools, prisons or hospitals. Institutions are places where people work, go to school, and sometimes live. When people live in an institution they have to follow a lot of rules and don’t get to make many decisions about their own life. They are usually punished if they break the rules and are often treated very badly. The Huronia Regional Centre was an institution.

Interdependence: Interdependence can be thought of as mutual dependence. We all rely on others, even when we don’t realize it. If you are nondisabled, supports are built into society so that it seems as though you are functioning independently, even when you are not. It is ableist and unfair to expect disabled people to function independently without the benefit of built-in societal supports.

Interdependence (Plain Language): Interdependence is when people rely on each other, help each other and support each other. None of us are completely independent. We all need help and support from others.

Marginalized Populations: Marginalized populations refers to groups of people who are excluded or pushed to the outer edges of society because of aspects of their identity. Marginalization impacts people in all areas of society; politically, economically, socially, and culturally. People can be marginalized because of their disability, gender, sexuality, race or ethnicity.

Marginalized Populations (Plain Language): Marginalized populations are people who are treated differently by society because of their disability, gender, sexuality, race or ethnicity.

Nondisabled Privilege: Rather than understand disability as a problem, this term recognizes prevailing systems of power and oppression as problematic. In other words, the concept of nondisabled privilege begins with the premise that disability is socially and culturally constructed and that the barrier or “stumbling block” is privilege for some and oppression for others, not the existence of disability per se. The sociologist Allan Johnson (2005) builds on the work of anti-racism activist Peggy McIntosh to suggest that the “luxury of obliviousness,” or the privilege of not being aware of privilege, is one of the assets enjoyed by nondisabled people.

Nondisabled Privilege (Plain Language): This means that people who don’t have disabilities are treated better in society than people who are disabled. Nondisabled people have an easier time getting and keeping a job, finding a place to live, going where they want to go, and doing what they want to do. Nondisabled people are often not aware that things are easier for them.

Retrofits: According to Jay Dolmage, buildings are designed first as if for nondisabled people, and only after are retrofits added on to accommodate disabled people. These retrofits, or what we might otherwise refer to as accommodations, are problematic because they take nondisabled experience as normative, and therefore they are always approached as an afterthought. Dolmage challenges this implicit assumption and explores how access would be improved if we began with the experiences of people with disabilities. This question of how the design of services are retrofitted, and how they could be done differently, could also be asked from the perspective of other marginalized groups. The concept of retrofits is also a metaphor for how barriers are built into social attitudes and structures as well as cultural narratives.

Retrofits (Plain Language): When people build buildings, they often don’t think about all of the people that will be using them. This means that buildings are often missing things like ramps that make them accessible for everyone. When things are added later to make them accessible, they are called retrofits.

Social Model of Disability: Rather than understand disability as a health condition, as the medical model of disability does, the social model of disability recognizes built-in barriers (see definition of Barriers, above) as the cause of disability, rather than the diagnosis itself. The social model perspective implicitly challenges the existence of such barriers and supports social change, including disability justice.

Social Model of Disability (Plain Language): The social model of disability is a way of thinking about and understanding disability. According to the social model of disability, disability isn’t a problem that needs to be fixed. The way society sees disability is the problem. Society needs to get rid of the barriers that disabled people have to deal with.

Survivor: This is a word used by many people who lived at the Huronia Regional Centre to refer to themselves. It highlights how they endured an institution that was both neglectful and abusive toward those who lived there, treating them more as prisoners than as residents.

Survivor (Plain Language): Many of the people who lived at the Huronia Regional Centre call themselves survivors. A survivor is someone who experienced terrible abuse and neglect.

Stories: There is no easy way to define stories, as they take a multitude of shapes and forms. For thousands of years, stories have been a way for people to convey their experiences and knowledge, their wonderings and worries. They include everything from ancient myths to literary works, from pop music to podcasts. They give shape to people’s beliefs and assumptions, stir controversy, and offer comfort. They also help people to express their identity and agency, and to explore the big questions of humanity about purpose, meaning, and truth, both individual and collective. Cherokee writer Thomas King has said that “Stories are all we are,” meaning that stories are essential to how people imagine themselves, and their past, present, and future. Sometimes stories can be harmful, as when they celebrate the domination of some groups and subordination of others. Other times, stories can be a powerful form of resistance, as when marginalized groups tell their own narratives as a way of countering stereotypes and imagining new possibilities.

Stories (Plain Language): Stories are a way for us to share our knowledge, experiences and ideas with others. Throughout human history, people have always shared stories with each other. Stories can be shared through writing, art, music, podcasts, videos, movies and more. Stories can help us understand events and people.

Temporality: This is a word used to describe how people exist in, or relate to, different understandings of time. In Western culture, time is typically understood to exist in a linear, progressive way; there are clear distinctions between past, present, and future in terms of how people think about and understand time. A questioning of this understanding of time is at the heart of most struggles for justice, including disability justice movements. For example, crip time critiques and resists how normative temporality oppresses disabled people by imposing structures that assume nondisabled privilege (see definitions of “Crip Time ” and “Nondisabled Privilege”).

Temporality (Plain Language): Temporality is a word used to describe our relationship with time. We don’t all experience, think about, or understand time in the same way. Our culture, and whether we are disabled or nondisabled influences our relationship with time. Reading the definition of “Crip Time” can also help you understand how disability can affect temporality.

Transinstitutionalization: The prefix “trans” in this word speaks to the way that members of marginalized groups are often moved across sites, from almshouses to state facilities, for example, or from prisons to psychiatric hospitals. It is a term that acknowledges how the violence of institutionalization continues in the present, with institutional legacies continuing today. Consider, for example, how disabled people have been transferred from large state-run institutions to rooming houses, hospitals, and community-based facilities in recent decades. Likewise, Indian residential schools have been replaced with a child welfare system that disproportionately affects Indigenous children. Transinstitutionalization takes a broad range of shapes and spaces, spanning generations while also affecting people within a single lifespan, but inevitably points to the persistent power of institutional logic (LeBlanc Haley & Jones, 2020).

Transinstitutionalization (Plain Language): To understand this term, it is helpful to also look at the definitions of “Institution” and “Deinstitutionalization”. Transinstitutionalization is used to describe someone moving from one institution to another institution. For example, someone leaves a prison, but instead of going into the community, they are sent to a psychiatric hospital. Transinstitutionalization effects marginalized populations (people who are treated differently by society) the most.