ACCUTE Webinar Series: Session One: "Pandemic & Institution: Mental Health/Invisible Disability”

Co-ordinated by Dr. Shane Neilson, Dr. Concetta Principe, and Andrew McEwan

ACCUTE inaugurates its new pandemic webinar series with a special focus on "Pandemic & Institution: Mental Health/Invisible Disability”. This panel will feature short talks and creative performances/presentations by Dr. Lucia Lorenzi (Simon Fraser), Andrew McEwan (Brock), and Dr. Ricky Varghese (Ryerson) sharing their insights on the ways that faculty, staff, and students have handled and responded to the pandemic in personal and professional terms, especially regarding the way that universities and departments have had to address the limitations caused by the pandemic. The panel has been co-ordinated by Dr. Shane Neilson (Independent Scholar), Dr. Concetta Principe (Trent), and Andrew McEwan (Brock), who will also be moderating the panel and participating in a roundtable discussion at the end. We welcome everybody from English Departments, Universities, and beyond who might take an interest in reflecting on the twinned issues of mental health and invisible disability in the university in our Covid climate.

Featuring Dr. Lucia Lorenzi (McMaster), Andrew McEwan (Brock), and Dr. Ricky Varghese (Ryerson)

Lucia Lorenzi is an independent scholar based on Kwikwetlem territory, just outside of Vancouver. Lucia is trained as a Canadianist, and her research focuses on trauma and memorialization, with a particular emphasis on representations of sexualized and gendered violence. In addition to her work as a scholar, Lucia is an activist and visual artist.

Ricky Varghese is a psychotherapist in private practice based in Toronto and a candidate in training to become a psychoanalyst at the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis. He currently holds the inaugural Tanis Doe Postdoctoral Fellowship in Gender, Disability, and Social Justice (2020-2022) at Ryerson University, during which he is completing two projects, a monograph on masculinity, suicidality, and the death drive, and editing an anthology titled Sex and the Pandemic.

Andrew McEwan (he/him) is a PhD candidate at Brock University writing on self-representations of mental disability in avant-garde poetics, and is a queer psychiatric survivor with lived experience of the topic. He has written two poetry collections, Repeater and If Pressed, and published essays in the anthologies Literatures of Madness and Imaginary Safe House.

Free for All; Registration Required; URL to the webinar will be circulated 1 hour before the event.