International Disability Rights Affirmation Conference (IDRAC) held in Second Life – November 1st and 2nd

This year’s annual International Disability Rights Affirmation Conference (IDRAC) conference will be held on Friday and Saturday, November 1 and 2.

This year’s theme is “We help each other, we help ourselves”. This theme is broad and open to interpretation by the presenters we invited to this year’s event. If past conferences are any indication, we look forward to lively discussions and information sharing among presenters and our very interested and interactive audience.

Below is an at-a-glance schedule of the presenters who will share their observations of the progress, benefits and challenges in disability rights in different parts of the world as applied to the current theme.

More information about the conference and the speakers here: https://virtualability.org/idrac-2019/

The conference is held in the Sojourner Auditorium on Virtual Ability island. Read more about Virtual Ability and their work here.

The conference is also being live streamed at
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCecFbqrNpnAbfaEohz8HIhQ/live

SCHEDULE
NOTE All times are given as SLT or Second Life Time, which is the same as Pacific time in California. You should use a converter such as https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter-classic.html to confirm your local time.

FRIDAY 1st November
7 am SLT Mari Kimura (PCORI) and Lynne Gauthier (University of Massachusetts Lowell)
“The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI): Mission and Successes”
8:30 am SLT Arleen Ionescu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) and Anne-Marie Callus (University of Malta)
“Reading the Personal and the Social in Disability Studies and Trauma Studies”
10 am SLT Catalin Brylla (University of West London)
“Disability and Media Representation”
11:30 am SLT Frederic Fovet (Royal Roads University)
“UDL in Higher Ed: Shifting access from the remedial to the proactive”
1 pm SLT Nohemi Lugo and Maria Elena Melon (Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico)
“The representation of autism in the narratives of fanfiction.net: Affinity spaces as an opportunity for the negotiation of meaning”

SATURDAY 2nd November
6:30 am SLT panel “Hearing Our Voices” with Alyssa Hillary (blogger and advocate), Rob Castellanos (Syndio Health) and Kirk Munsch (Rare Patient Voice)
8 am SLT showing and discussion of the video “The Bench”
9 am SLT Fleur Heleen Boot (Radboud University Medical Centre, the Netherlands)
“Which factors influence access to assistive products for people with intellectual disabilities?”
10:30 am SLT Sunil Deepak (AIFO, Italy)
“Challenges and Opportunities in Community-based Rehabilitation and Emancipatory Disability Research”
Noon SLT Katherine Breward (University of Winnipeg)
“Disability Accommodation and Intersectional Identities: Evidence for Differential Requesting and Accommodation Rates”
1:30 pm SLT Lydia X. Z. Brown (advocate)
“The Autistic People of Color Fund: Building Networks of Mutual Aid by/for Negatively Racialized Autistic People”