Co-hosted by Law Health Justice Research Centre, UTS Faculty of Law, UTS Faculty of Design and Society, UTS Disability Research Network

Join Madeline Burghardt (Assistant Professor, Department of Occupational Therapy, University of Manitoba (Canada), and member of the St.Amant Research Centre) for a HDR/ECR Masterclass on collaborative, arts-based research methods, using the example of survivors of long-stay disability institutions in their pursuit of justice and reconciliation.

This is a hybrid event.

The event is hosted by Law Health Justice Research Centre, UTS Faculty of Law, UTS Faculty of Design and Society, UTS Disability Research Network. Please direct any questions to Linda Steele (linda.steele@uts.e-du.au).

Please note: this event is only open to HDR and ECR at UTS.

Background

In this session, we will discuss the potential for collaborative, arts-based research approaches to provide avenues toward reconciliation and justice for historically-marginalised and unlistened-to communities.

We will use specific examples from the MDC Artefact Project to examine how the work of transforming objects can be both a metaphoric and tangible way for survivors to come to terms with past harms and to imagine vibrant and inclusive futures.

The objectives of this masterclass are three-fold:

Using examples from the MDC Artefact Project and from Masterclass participants’ own projects and interests, we will discuss the essential principles of and common barriers to collaborative research.
We will consider the ethical considerations that emerge in collaborative projects, particularly in the contexts of academia and funding environments.
We will consider how collaborative projects can be vehicles toward personal and social transformation.

About the MDC Artefact Project: The Manitoba Developmental Centre (MDC) was a large, government-run institution in rural Manitoba, Canada that incarcerated people with intellectual disabilities for over 130 years (1890-2024). Throughout this long history, MDC residents suffered harm, neglect and abuse, both directly from staff and through institutionalization’s broader systemic practices of segregation, control and oppression of people with intellectual disabilities (Burghardt, 2018; Chapman, Carey & Ben-Moshe, 2014; Hubert, 2001; Kennedy & Burghardt, 2025). In 2018, MDC survivor David Weremy successfully sued the Manitoba government on behalf of thousands of former residents for the harm and neglect they had endured while living there. The settlement agreement included “reconciliation initiatives,” one of which allows a researcher to collect artefacts from the institution deemed to be of “social and historical interest,” with the long-term aim of creating an exhibit to educate the public about the MDC and its role in Canada’s institutional history (Weremy vs Manitoba, 2023, pp 12-13). In 2024, Dr Burghardt and an assistant removed several artefacts from the MDC and placed them in safe storage. Soon afterward, a group of MDC survivors—the self-named MDC Artefact Project—began meeting to determine what to do with the objects. In addition to creating an exhibit, the group has decided to transform the artefacts into new objects to represent the transformation that has taken place in their lives since moving out of the MDC and into the community. Beginning in 2025 and with the guidance of two artists, the group began using arts-based methods to transform the artefacts. Through the collaborative and arts-based methods engaged, the project has become a way to ‘talk back’ to the institution and the objects representing their former oppression, and to rewrite the history of the MDC ‘from the ground up’—the project ultimately becoming a vehicle toward survivors’ individual and collective justice.

Participants are encouraged to bring ideas and questions about current and imagined projects to this session.

Supplemental Readings (not required)

Burghardt, M. (forthcoming). Transforming trauma: Collaborative research and reconciliatory justice. In G. Kremsner, O. Dimbath, W. Moskopp & L. Klöpfer (Eds.). Participatory Research Methods: Transdisciplinary Foundations for Inclusive and Emancipatory Inquiry. Routledge.

Burghardt, M., Breton, N., Findlay, M., Pollock, I., Rawlins, M., Woo, K. & Zinyk, C. (2024). Sol Express in the time of Covid-19: Reflections from a Creative Arts Participatory Research Project. In A. Carey, S. Green & L. Maudlin (Eds.). Research in Social Science and Disability, volume 13, Disability in the Time of Pandemic. (175-192). Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-354720230000013010.

Bio

Madeline Burghardt is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Occupational Therapy in the College of Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Manitobaand is a member of the St.Amant Research Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She holds a doctorate in Critical Disability Studies and is the author of Broken: Institutions, Families, and the Construction of Intellectual Disability, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Her work explores the intersection between geopolitical and historical productions of disability and impairment and their personal implications on people living with disability and those closest to them. She has worked extensively with people labelled with intellectual disabilities in professional and artistic capacities, particularly concerning their experiences of institutionalization. Her current project is a collaborative reconciliatory justice initiative with institutional survivors who are re-claiming institutional artifacts as a step toward transformed and agentic futures.

References

Burghardt, M. (2018). Broken: Institutions, Families, and the Construction of Intellectual Disability. Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Chapman, C., Carey, A., & Ben-Moshe, L. (2014). Reconsidering confinement: Interlocking locations and logics of incarceration. In L. Ben-Moshe, C. Chapman & A. Carey (Eds.). Disability incarcerated: Imprisonment and disability in the United States and Canada. (pp. 3-24). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hubert, J. (2001). The social, individual, and moral consequences of physical exclusion in long-stay institutions. In J. Hubert (Ed.). Madness, disability and social exclusion: The archaeology and anthropology of difference (pp. 196-207). London: Routledge.

Kennedy, J. & Burghardt, M. (2025). ‘“Bad Things Happened There”: Family Reflections on Working at the Manitoba Developmental Centre.’ Journal on Developmental Disability 30(2).

King’s Bench, Winnipeg. (2023). David Weremy versus The Government of Manitoba, File #CI 18-01-17220.

Contact the host of Collaborative Arts-Based Research for Transformative Justice: A Presentation and HDR/ECR Masterclass with Madeline Burghardt

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