Jessica Vorstermans | York University (original) (raw)
Papers by Jessica Vorstermans
Summer 2022
This outro is a generative collective conversation between emerging and established scholars in t... more This outro is a generative collective conversation between emerging and established scholars in the field of Global Service Learning, at this moment in pandemic time. We met, on zoom, to think expansively about what these pandemic times of rupture have opened up for us in our scholarship and practice. Our orientation was towards reflexivity and relationality. We developed questions to guide our conversation in these two areas, and each of us responded to the questions and to each other. We think together about our own positionalities and ways that we are called to GSL in ways that are explicitly relational. We end by reflection on our own commitments to the field of GSL and why we stay in it knowing the contradictions, the extractive nature of the field, the deep need for decolonization and fraughtness of the space.
Summer 2022
This introduction to the special section, argues that this pandemic time has been one of ruptures... more This introduction to the special section, argues that this pandemic time has been one of ruptures which unveiled ongoing and intersecting social pandemics such as anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, white supremacy, patriarchy, classism, and ableism in the context of the COVID-19 global health pandemic (Brand, 2020). We proposed three ruptures as moments for imagining - and doing – otherwise: (i) the Black Lives Matter movement and increased mainstream attention to racial inequity, (ii) COVID-19 and new imaginings of travel, mobility, and safety (iii) mutual aid as increasingly necessary in a pandemic and as a possible relational way forward. We take these ruptures as a starting point for re-imagining learning and movement as relational. This introduction takes up a contextualization and conceptualization of the field of GSL, an overview of the critical literature in this space, and introduces the two articles in the special section. It ends with the hope that the grapplings and ...
Handbook of Disability, 2022
York University, Jul 4, 2017
This was a labour of love, challenge, frustration, growth, birth, and an incredible intellectual ... more This was a labour of love, challenge, frustration, growth, birth, and an incredible intellectual space that I feel privileged to have given so much time and energy to. Of course this was, and is, a collaborative project. I don't think we can think and write about community in isolation, and this project is the result of years (!) of conversations, reading, experiences, encounters, more conversations and more reading with countless folks in the North and the South.
This is a précis of the forthcoming book, The Disabled Contract: Severe Intellectual Disability, ... more This is a précis of the forthcoming book, The Disabled Contract: Severe Intellectual Disability, Justice and Morality. It examines how people with severe intellectual disabilities (PSID) fare within the social contract tradition. More specifically, it contends that even recent strategies that attempted to integrate disability within the realm of contractual justice and morality are not entirely successful. These strategies cannot convincingly ground a robust moral status for PSID; or, if they do so, it is at the cost of making this status merely derivative or contingent. The failure of social contract theory to bring severe disabilities within its purview should not be seen as a marginal theoretical defect affecting only a small segment of human populations. At best, it reveals a gap that should impel moral and political theorists to give fiduciary and caring ideals their due weight next to contractual ideals. At worst, the social contract tradition is not only incomplete, but neces...
Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad
In this paper we are concerned with the ways in which hosts are often excluded from scholarship a... more In this paper we are concerned with the ways in which hosts are often excluded from scholarship and programming of global service learning. By global service learning (GSL), we mean a multiplicity of programs that occur facilitating service work for people across borders, generally with volunteers moving from the North to the South. We present findings from a research project conducted in 2014 with 37 host families. We circulated a survey to better understand host experiences of, expectations of, and hopes for GSL. Drawing on these survey results we provide some prompting questions for GSL participants (both students and program designers) to shift focus from student experience to relationship and mutuality. Using global service learning literature, critical disability theory and critical pedagogy through an intersectional lens, we center questions of uneven labor, accessibility, and structures of inequity. Three main themes emerged from our data: mutuality, gendered labor, and prep...
Routledge, Dec 14, 2015
International Service Learning: Engaging Host Communities Edited by Marianne Larsen © 2015 – Rout... more International Service Learning: Engaging Host Communities Edited by Marianne Larsen © 2015 – Routledge International service learning (ISL) programs are growing more popular with students looking to advance their skills and knowledge to become global citizens. While the benefits of these programs among students are well documented, little is known about the implications they have on host communities themselves. This volume explores the impact of ISL programs on members of host communities (e.g. host families and local partner NGOs) who are increasingly influenced by the presence of international students in their lives. Drawing upon post-colonial, feminist and other critical and decolonizing theories, it examines the complicated power relations between North American ISL students and host communities in East and West Africa, the Caribbean and Central America. It stresses the importance of developing trusting relations between ISL students, faculty and individuals in the host communities to create mutually engaging learning experiences.
In this chapter, I argue that the ways that disability is constructed and produced through encoun... more In this chapter, I argue that the ways that disability is constructed and produced through encounters in volunteer abroad (VA) programs functions to (re)produce a caring and benevolent able-bodied Northern global citizen. This subject formation relies on two main processes: (1) the creation of the able/disabled binary; the volunteer/the one being helped and (2) the obscuring of the role the Global North (the place from where the volunteer comes from) plays in producing impairment. The research presented in this paper is from a larger study theorizing encounters with Southern disabled others . Here I engage in a qualitative textual analysis of Projects Abroad, a large VA organization based in North America that provides international volunteer placements to young people from Canada and the United States. I consider how the lack of analysis of Global North/Global South power relations reproduces depoliticized and ahistorical approaches which individualize and pathologize disability, ...
Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 2012
This paper advocates for increased news media analysis within the disability studies field. Using... more This paper advocates for increased news media analysis within the disability studies field. Using a media research project about Canadian news media coverage of disability, this paper explores the shifting nature of recent disability coverage within Canadian newspapers between 2009 and 2010. As a group of researchers in Canada and the USA, who have undertaken numerous content analyses of news media representations of disability, we argue that a paradigm shift is taking place in which some traditional news media representations of people with disabilities are now being framed through a disability rights lens. This paper's analysis is based on data collected by the Toronto-based Disability Rights Promotion International (DRPI). The project investigates Canadian news coverage of disability issues through Joseph Gusfield's theory of societal "ownership" of a public problem, which in this case means discrimination against and societal barriers for people with disabilities become identified problems that need to be solved within Canadian society.
Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 2020
This article describes how researchers from a longitudinal study of early childhood service syste... more This article describes how researchers from a longitudinal study of early childhood service systems generated a visual representation of transinstitutionalization that could facilitate dialogue for change with a variety of audiences. Comprised of seven portable banners, the photo essay that we constructed features snapshots of documents and/or material objects brought forward by mothers, grandmothers, fathers and foster parents in the course of research interviews. Working the theme of tensions in disabled childhoods, we assembled the collection to produce sharp contrasts between the generalizing effects that institutional involvement has on disabled children, and the particular lives that they live out at home with family members. Proceeding banner by banner, the article reveals the “thinking through” that we did to produce the photo essay, and our hopes for informing action on a systemic relation whereby parents are held responsible for producing ‘normal’ children.
Canadian Journal of Public Health
Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research, 2014
http://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-94-007-0753-5\_1475
Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 2012
This paper advocates for increased news media analysis within the disability studies field.
International Service Learning: Engaging Host Communities Edited by Marianne Larsen © 2015 – Rout... more International Service Learning: Engaging Host Communities
Edited by Marianne Larsen
© 2015 – Routledge
International service learning (ISL) programs are growing more popular with students looking to advance their skills and knowledge to become global citizens. While the benefits of these programs among students are well documented, little is known about the implications they have on host communities themselves. This volume explores the impact of ISL programs on members of host communities (e.g. host families and local partner NGOs) who are increasingly influenced by the presence of international students in their lives. Drawing upon post-colonial, feminist and other critical and decolonizing theories, it examines the complicated power relations between North American ISL students and host communities in East and West Africa, the Caribbean and Central America. It stresses the importance of developing trusting relations between ISL students, faculty and individuals in the host communities to create mutually engaging learning experiences.
Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research, 2014
http://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-94-007-0753-5\_1475
Disability, Rights Monitoring, and Social Change is a timely collection that addresses the curren... more Disability, Rights Monitoring, and Social Change is a timely collection that addresses the current theoretical, methodological, and practical issues surrounding disability rights monitoring and offers a detailed look at law and policy reforms, best practices, and holistic methods. This unique compilation crosses the divide between the global South and North and explores the complex issues of intersectionality that arise for women with disabilities, Indigenous peoples with disabilities, and people with diverse disabilities. Appropriate for courses on human rights, social justice, policy, and advocacy, this volume serves as a guide and learning tool for anyone interested in disability rights monitoring and, more generally, the effective practice of monitoring human rights.
Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, May 2012
This paper advocates for increased news media analysis within the disability studies field. Using... more This paper advocates for increased news media analysis within the disability studies field. Using a media research project about Canadian news media coverage of disability, this paper explores the shifting nature of recent disability coverage within Canadian newspapers between 2009 and 2010. As a group of researchers in Canada and the USA, who have undertaken numerous content analyses of news media representations of disability, we argue that a paradigm shift is taking place in which some traditional news media representations of people with disabilities are now being framed through a disability rights lens. This paper's analysis is based on data collected by the Toronto-based Disability Rights Promotion International (DRPI). The project investigates Canadian news coverage of disability issues through Joseph Gusfield's theory of societal "ownership" of a public problem, which in this case means discrimination against and societal barriers for people with disabilities become identified problems that need to be solved within Canadian society.
Editorial team, Jan 1, 2008
This is a discursive analysis of the competing representations of the violent events of March 1st... more This is a discursive analysis of the competing representations of the violent events of March 1st, 2008 when the Colombian government bombed a FARC camp inside Ecuadorian territory. The two competing discourses, of the Colombian government and the ...
Summer 2022
This outro is a generative collective conversation between emerging and established scholars in t... more This outro is a generative collective conversation between emerging and established scholars in the field of Global Service Learning, at this moment in pandemic time. We met, on zoom, to think expansively about what these pandemic times of rupture have opened up for us in our scholarship and practice. Our orientation was towards reflexivity and relationality. We developed questions to guide our conversation in these two areas, and each of us responded to the questions and to each other. We think together about our own positionalities and ways that we are called to GSL in ways that are explicitly relational. We end by reflection on our own commitments to the field of GSL and why we stay in it knowing the contradictions, the extractive nature of the field, the deep need for decolonization and fraughtness of the space.
Summer 2022
This introduction to the special section, argues that this pandemic time has been one of ruptures... more This introduction to the special section, argues that this pandemic time has been one of ruptures which unveiled ongoing and intersecting social pandemics such as anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, white supremacy, patriarchy, classism, and ableism in the context of the COVID-19 global health pandemic (Brand, 2020). We proposed three ruptures as moments for imagining - and doing – otherwise: (i) the Black Lives Matter movement and increased mainstream attention to racial inequity, (ii) COVID-19 and new imaginings of travel, mobility, and safety (iii) mutual aid as increasingly necessary in a pandemic and as a possible relational way forward. We take these ruptures as a starting point for re-imagining learning and movement as relational. This introduction takes up a contextualization and conceptualization of the field of GSL, an overview of the critical literature in this space, and introduces the two articles in the special section. It ends with the hope that the grapplings and ...
Handbook of Disability, 2022
York University, Jul 4, 2017
This was a labour of love, challenge, frustration, growth, birth, and an incredible intellectual ... more This was a labour of love, challenge, frustration, growth, birth, and an incredible intellectual space that I feel privileged to have given so much time and energy to. Of course this was, and is, a collaborative project. I don't think we can think and write about community in isolation, and this project is the result of years (!) of conversations, reading, experiences, encounters, more conversations and more reading with countless folks in the North and the South.
This is a précis of the forthcoming book, The Disabled Contract: Severe Intellectual Disability, ... more This is a précis of the forthcoming book, The Disabled Contract: Severe Intellectual Disability, Justice and Morality. It examines how people with severe intellectual disabilities (PSID) fare within the social contract tradition. More specifically, it contends that even recent strategies that attempted to integrate disability within the realm of contractual justice and morality are not entirely successful. These strategies cannot convincingly ground a robust moral status for PSID; or, if they do so, it is at the cost of making this status merely derivative or contingent. The failure of social contract theory to bring severe disabilities within its purview should not be seen as a marginal theoretical defect affecting only a small segment of human populations. At best, it reveals a gap that should impel moral and political theorists to give fiduciary and caring ideals their due weight next to contractual ideals. At worst, the social contract tradition is not only incomplete, but neces...
Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad
In this paper we are concerned with the ways in which hosts are often excluded from scholarship a... more In this paper we are concerned with the ways in which hosts are often excluded from scholarship and programming of global service learning. By global service learning (GSL), we mean a multiplicity of programs that occur facilitating service work for people across borders, generally with volunteers moving from the North to the South. We present findings from a research project conducted in 2014 with 37 host families. We circulated a survey to better understand host experiences of, expectations of, and hopes for GSL. Drawing on these survey results we provide some prompting questions for GSL participants (both students and program designers) to shift focus from student experience to relationship and mutuality. Using global service learning literature, critical disability theory and critical pedagogy through an intersectional lens, we center questions of uneven labor, accessibility, and structures of inequity. Three main themes emerged from our data: mutuality, gendered labor, and prep...
Routledge, Dec 14, 2015
International Service Learning: Engaging Host Communities Edited by Marianne Larsen © 2015 – Rout... more International Service Learning: Engaging Host Communities Edited by Marianne Larsen © 2015 – Routledge International service learning (ISL) programs are growing more popular with students looking to advance their skills and knowledge to become global citizens. While the benefits of these programs among students are well documented, little is known about the implications they have on host communities themselves. This volume explores the impact of ISL programs on members of host communities (e.g. host families and local partner NGOs) who are increasingly influenced by the presence of international students in their lives. Drawing upon post-colonial, feminist and other critical and decolonizing theories, it examines the complicated power relations between North American ISL students and host communities in East and West Africa, the Caribbean and Central America. It stresses the importance of developing trusting relations between ISL students, faculty and individuals in the host communities to create mutually engaging learning experiences.
In this chapter, I argue that the ways that disability is constructed and produced through encoun... more In this chapter, I argue that the ways that disability is constructed and produced through encounters in volunteer abroad (VA) programs functions to (re)produce a caring and benevolent able-bodied Northern global citizen. This subject formation relies on two main processes: (1) the creation of the able/disabled binary; the volunteer/the one being helped and (2) the obscuring of the role the Global North (the place from where the volunteer comes from) plays in producing impairment. The research presented in this paper is from a larger study theorizing encounters with Southern disabled others . Here I engage in a qualitative textual analysis of Projects Abroad, a large VA organization based in North America that provides international volunteer placements to young people from Canada and the United States. I consider how the lack of analysis of Global North/Global South power relations reproduces depoliticized and ahistorical approaches which individualize and pathologize disability, ...
Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 2012
This paper advocates for increased news media analysis within the disability studies field. Using... more This paper advocates for increased news media analysis within the disability studies field. Using a media research project about Canadian news media coverage of disability, this paper explores the shifting nature of recent disability coverage within Canadian newspapers between 2009 and 2010. As a group of researchers in Canada and the USA, who have undertaken numerous content analyses of news media representations of disability, we argue that a paradigm shift is taking place in which some traditional news media representations of people with disabilities are now being framed through a disability rights lens. This paper's analysis is based on data collected by the Toronto-based Disability Rights Promotion International (DRPI). The project investigates Canadian news coverage of disability issues through Joseph Gusfield's theory of societal "ownership" of a public problem, which in this case means discrimination against and societal barriers for people with disabilities become identified problems that need to be solved within Canadian society.
Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 2020
This article describes how researchers from a longitudinal study of early childhood service syste... more This article describes how researchers from a longitudinal study of early childhood service systems generated a visual representation of transinstitutionalization that could facilitate dialogue for change with a variety of audiences. Comprised of seven portable banners, the photo essay that we constructed features snapshots of documents and/or material objects brought forward by mothers, grandmothers, fathers and foster parents in the course of research interviews. Working the theme of tensions in disabled childhoods, we assembled the collection to produce sharp contrasts between the generalizing effects that institutional involvement has on disabled children, and the particular lives that they live out at home with family members. Proceeding banner by banner, the article reveals the “thinking through” that we did to produce the photo essay, and our hopes for informing action on a systemic relation whereby parents are held responsible for producing ‘normal’ children.
Canadian Journal of Public Health
Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research, 2014
http://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-94-007-0753-5\_1475
Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 2012
This paper advocates for increased news media analysis within the disability studies field.
International Service Learning: Engaging Host Communities Edited by Marianne Larsen © 2015 – Rout... more International Service Learning: Engaging Host Communities
Edited by Marianne Larsen
© 2015 – Routledge
International service learning (ISL) programs are growing more popular with students looking to advance their skills and knowledge to become global citizens. While the benefits of these programs among students are well documented, little is known about the implications they have on host communities themselves. This volume explores the impact of ISL programs on members of host communities (e.g. host families and local partner NGOs) who are increasingly influenced by the presence of international students in their lives. Drawing upon post-colonial, feminist and other critical and decolonizing theories, it examines the complicated power relations between North American ISL students and host communities in East and West Africa, the Caribbean and Central America. It stresses the importance of developing trusting relations between ISL students, faculty and individuals in the host communities to create mutually engaging learning experiences.
Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research, 2014
http://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-94-007-0753-5\_1475
Disability, Rights Monitoring, and Social Change is a timely collection that addresses the curren... more Disability, Rights Monitoring, and Social Change is a timely collection that addresses the current theoretical, methodological, and practical issues surrounding disability rights monitoring and offers a detailed look at law and policy reforms, best practices, and holistic methods. This unique compilation crosses the divide between the global South and North and explores the complex issues of intersectionality that arise for women with disabilities, Indigenous peoples with disabilities, and people with diverse disabilities. Appropriate for courses on human rights, social justice, policy, and advocacy, this volume serves as a guide and learning tool for anyone interested in disability rights monitoring and, more generally, the effective practice of monitoring human rights.
Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, May 2012
This paper advocates for increased news media analysis within the disability studies field. Using... more This paper advocates for increased news media analysis within the disability studies field. Using a media research project about Canadian news media coverage of disability, this paper explores the shifting nature of recent disability coverage within Canadian newspapers between 2009 and 2010. As a group of researchers in Canada and the USA, who have undertaken numerous content analyses of news media representations of disability, we argue that a paradigm shift is taking place in which some traditional news media representations of people with disabilities are now being framed through a disability rights lens. This paper's analysis is based on data collected by the Toronto-based Disability Rights Promotion International (DRPI). The project investigates Canadian news coverage of disability issues through Joseph Gusfield's theory of societal "ownership" of a public problem, which in this case means discrimination against and societal barriers for people with disabilities become identified problems that need to be solved within Canadian society.
Editorial team, Jan 1, 2008
This is a discursive analysis of the competing representations of the violent events of March 1st... more This is a discursive analysis of the competing representations of the violent events of March 1st, 2008 when the Colombian government bombed a FARC camp inside Ecuadorian territory. The two competing discourses, of the Colombian government and the ...