Our team
adam patrick bell
Principal Investigator
Jason Nolan
Co-Investigator
Jason Nolan is autistic and the director of both the Responsive Ecologies Lab (RE/Lab) and the Experiential Design and Gaming Environment (EDGE) lab, as well as the associate professor in Early Childhood Studies at Ryerson University. Nolan graduated with a PhD in Critical Pedagogy from the University of Toronto in 2001, with a dissertation on virtual learning environments. Nolan’s work has appeared in journals such as Information, Communication & Society, New Media & Society, Surveillance and Society, and Canadian Children. In 2006, he co-edited The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments (2006). In 2016 Nolan was featured in the CBC TV program “Disrupting Design, external link” focusing on his project Adaptive Design International that he is starting up in Bolivia.
Kurt Thumlert
Co-Investigator
Kurt Thumlert is associate professor in the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto, Canada, and is an executive member at York’s Institute for Research on Digital Literacies (IRDL) and is a research associate at the Ryerson Responsive Ecologies Lab (RE/Lab). His current research focuses on informal learning, new media, and technology studies, and learning through making with emerging sound-based technologies, including modular synthesizers. Alongside his newfound interest in modular synthesis, he loves to play and compose and continues to learn on the electric bass and the guitar. He has published work on sound-making, technology, and rethinking music education and learning in journals like Studies in Art Education, Music Educators Journal and The Journal of Music, Health, and Wellbeing.
Stefan Sunandan Honisch
Co-Investigator
Stefan Sunandan Honisch is an Honorary Research Associate and Sessional Lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia. His research interests are at the intersection of Critical Disability Studies, Music, and Critical Pedagogy. Honisch has published in such journals as Music Theory Online, Journal of Inclusive Education, Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, and Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies. In addition, Honisch has contributed book and recording reviews to Journal of Musicological Research and Nineteenth-Century Music Review, chapters to The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body, and Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque (Palgrave Macmillan), and has a chapter forthcoming in Defining the Boundaries of Disability: Critical Perspectives (Routledge). Honisch serves on the Review Board of Journal of Teaching Disability Studies and on the Editorial Board of Public Disability History.
Charles Matthews
Co-Investigator
Charles Matthews has been making electronic music in some shape or form for twenty odd years. His current work as an interdisciplinary artist and reluctant technologist has grown out of a dissatisfaction with current tools, which has naturally led to various collaborations with a focus on accessibility. Upon moving from London to Montreal in 2020, Charles established Blurring the Boundaries Arts (a Disability-led not-for-profit organisation) with Gift Tshuma and David Bobier. Having started out as a cross-cultural collaboration through the British Council’s New Conversations program, the team is meeting with artists across Canada and the UK to develop playful, open-source approaches for non-specialists to manipulate sound, light, and vibration.
Gift Tshuma
Co-investigator
Gift Tshuma carries more than fifteen years of experience as a profession artist. He was mentored by Oliver Jones: a Montreal-based jazz pianist who was in turn trained by Oscar Peterson. In 2007 he co-founded the United Tribulation Choir, organising regular performances and overseeing the release of an album ‘Seasons Change’. Over the past decade, as a co-founding member of Accessibilize Montreal, he has been heavily involved in advocacy for disability rights and accessibility issues in Montreal. He currently holds positions at March of Dimes Canada and Matchbox Virtual Media as an Assistive Technologist and Advisor in accessibility and universal design. In 2019 Gift created Blurring the Boundaries with Charles Matthews and David Bobier as an outlet for their emerging music technology development.
Katelyn Anderson
Research Assistant
Katelyn Anderson is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. Her research centers on telecommunications policy, with a focus on community Internet networks. She is also interested in narratives around disability, technology and the public good.
Bhakti Kawa
Research Assistant
Bhakti Kawa is a Undergraduate student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Calgary. Alongside digital and mechanical technology, she is also interested in social ventures and the public good. She has been actively involved with organizations such as Go Baby Go, to help build devices to increase accessibility for children.
Collaborators
Drake Music is a national arts charity working across the UK. They have been pioneering the use of accessible music technology for over 20 years and are specialists in using technology to break down disabling barriers to making music. They have developed lots of imaginative methods of teaching, learning, writing and playing music.
Learn More: https://www.drakemusic.org/technology/
Music Community Lab is a not-for-profit organization that runs a series of events in New York City called Monthly Music Hackathon NYC. Examples of music hacks range from an adapted piano that makes it possible for a wheelchair-user to play the foot pedals, to newly conceived music notation systems aimed at making this form of music literacy more accessible.
Learn More: https://musiccommunitylab.org/
Partners
Blurring the Boundaries began as a cross-disciplinary collaboration between VibraFusionLab (ON), Gift Tshuma (QC), and Charles Matthews (UK). Through creative, hands-on development, they hope to establish dialog between maker communities and Disabled-artist-led performance organizations in the UK and Canada.
Learn More: https://blurringtheboundaries.org/