Notice Board

**Update: March 12, 2023**

Unfortunately, due to travel difficulties, Dr. Challborn is unable to offer the lecture in-person in Lethbridge. The talk will still take place on Monday, March 13, at 2:30 p.m. via Microsoft Teams Webinar (see registration link below). The research methods workshop will not be taking place at this time, but we hope to reschedule it soon! Apologies for any inconvenience. 

This lecture explores preliminary themes and questions emerging from my post-doctoral project Madness, bodily autonomy, and citizenship: the “choice” of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada. This project confronts a central conundrum in the expression of bodily autonomy and self-determination: on the one hand, liberal democracy enhances citizens’ abilities to make decisions about their bodies, including choices surrounding health care and treatment. On the other hand, social, legal, and political forms of governance continue to render certain people – like those with “mental disorders” – less deserving of life-affirming care. In this context, my research asks two inter-related questions: what kinds of life experiences and circumstances bring mad people to consider MAiD and how does the possibility of MAiD impact them? What discursive shifts have contributed to an environment that allows madness to be considered an appropriate criterion for MAiD?

The event will also be available in hybrid format as a Teams Webinar. Please register at this link.

Dr. Challborn is the Ethel Louise Armstrong Post-Doctoral Fellow in the School of Disability Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her doctoral research (Department of Political Science, University of Alberta) examined the governance of intimate life in Canada via expansions to legal parentage for polyconjugal families. In her dissertation, Complicated Love: Parentage, Conjugality, and Family Diversity in Canada, she argued that current reforms to legal parentage, and judicial decisions surrounding poly-conjugal multi-parentage recognition, still adhere to the hetero/homo-normative, monogamous (or “monogamish”), nuclear family form. Moreover, the expansion of multi-parentage in some contexts is made possible by the ongoing criminalization of the deviant, racialized, polygamous “other”. While her doctoral research focuses on the governance of intimate life via parentage and spousal relationships, her postdoctoral research shifts the focus of relationships with others to one’s relationship with death (and thus also, to life). In this way, she extends her current focus on queer, critical race, and feminist approaches to intimacy and governance, to the intersections of intimacy, race, and ability. Margot’s work emerges from her lived experience as a queer, mad-identified, woman of colour.