Disabled people continue to be subjected to extensive structural discrimination in several areas of society, such as working life, education, and arts and culture (Bufdir, 2021; Østern et al., 2023). The research group ‘How to do things with disability’ (DOABLE) sees disability as a value and productive force that can bring about norm-critical change, educational innovation, and new beauty in arts and cultural practices (Donaldson & Kymlicka, 2017). DOABLE designs practical innovations combined with critical disability studies.

This project aims to document, map and visualize the history of The Dance Laboratory (Danselaboratoriet) in Trondheim, Norway. The Dance Laboratory is a unique part of the Norwegian dance field and has for a long time - 22 years - continuously fought for and worked artistically to allow disabled dancers to enter the Norwegian dance field. The work for The Dance Laboratory originates from and is rooted in the environment around DansiT Choreographic Centre in Trondheim, a centre that has grown up in parallel with The Dance Laboratory. The Dance Laboratory started as a small pilot project in 2001, and today has a 22-year long history that should not be lost. It is a history that has involved fighting against the ableist norms of dance, and which has claimed an entrance for disabled dancing bodies in a dance field with strict and normative quality criteria when it comes to what is considered 'perfect' and worthwhile bodies and aesthetics in dance.

Partners:

• Association of Finnish Childrens’ Cultural Centers (Finland)
• Kulturtanken – Den kulturelle skolesekken (Arts for Young Audiences Norway), in collaboration with DansiT Choreographic Center and Cepartment for Teacher Education, NTNU
• Pionirski Dom – Center za Kulturo Mladih (Slovenia)
• Malopolski Instytut Kultury w Krakowie (Poland)

Mind the GAP (MTG) is a project for forwarding the progress of art and cultural education with innovative development laboratories while enhancing the cultural participation of children and youth in Europe. The project answers to the objective of innovation by developing the cross-sectoral cooperation of culture and education to tackle shared European challenges regarding the well-being on children and youth.

The project consortium of four established cultural operators has recognized shared European challenges, such as decline of mental health among children and youth and continuous social division. The project conceptualizes these shared issues as gaps (gaps in the realization of all children's right to culture, gaps in cross-sectoral cooperation of education and culture and gaps in the wider society). By recognizing these issues and counteracting to them, the project answers to the priority of social inclusion. The shared challenges manifest themselves differently in different national contexts.

For that reason, all partners develop different art education laboratories. The added European value comes from sharing these methods, peer-reviewing other's laboratories and getting feedback, all the while equipping the children and youth participating in the project with tools for enhancing their well-being and self-expression. In Norway, the laboratory will be developed by Arts for young audiences Norway in collaboration with Dansit Choreographic Center in Trondheim and The Department for Teacher Education at NTNU.

Mind the GAP offers opportunities for networking and capacity building for a variety of professionals working in the fields of education and culture with the help of national and international events and publications of easily adaptable method guides in five European languages.

Mind the GAP also answers to the priority on audience development. All partners are known for their long-winded work for and with young audiences. By enabling all children to participate in artistic activities in a school environment, the project offers them a personal connection to arts.
 

Project webpage: Tilgjengelige kunstnerskap? (only in norwegian)

Project webpage: An Architecture of Chronic Illness

• Paviljongsamtale: Å være i vann
• PhD fellow in Artistic Research (deadline 10 November 2024)

Project web page: Aesthetics of Access and Politics of Memory

Anna Ulrikke Andersen is an architectural historian and filmmaker, holding the positions as Associate Professor of Art History at the Institute of Art and Media Studies, NTNU . Her research project “An Architecture of Chronic Illness” explores how people living with rheumatism experience, think and talk about spaces where treatment takes place, focused on theraphy pools in Norway and a rehabilitation programme abroad, in Igalo, Montenegro. She is the author of Following Norberg-Schulz: An Architectural History through the Essay Film (2022), and curated the exhibition Chronic Conditions: Body and Building coordinated by the Lisbon Archtecture Triennale and the Future Architecture Platform in 2021. She was the initiator of Norway’s first summer school in art and architecture for young people with disabilities with ROM for kunst og arkitektur, running annualle since 2023, also responsible for the school’s educational programme.

Dr. Libe García Zarranz (she/her) is Associate Professor in cultural theory and literatures in English in the Department of Teacher Education at NTNU. Her teaching and research sit at the intersection of literary studies, visual cultures, and affect theory, with a focus on feminist, crip, and trans approaches. She is the author of  the monograph TransCanadian Feminist Fictions: New Cross-Border Ethics and the co-editor of Living and Learning with Feminist Ethics, Literature and Art, a collection of critical essays which attends particularly to Indigenous and Black knowledges, queer, trans and disabled artistic interventions, and antiracist methodologies. She has published on neurodivergence in animation and on visual activist Syrus Marcus Ware who works with disability arts performance. She has also supervised BA and MA theses analyzing the representation of disability in textbooks, literature and film for young learners.

Vibeke Glørstad is a senior lecturer at VID Specialized University, Faculty of Health Science, Stavanger, Norway, with a Licentiate Degree (hovedfag) in Sociology and Cultural studies from the University of Oslo. Her teaching expertise includes social work at BA level and at the Master’s degree in citizenship and co-operation within the health, social, cultural and educational field. Her research interest is related to how vulnerable groups as people with disabilities (including cognitive and mental health) access and practice their citizenship rights, based in critical disability perspectives.  She publishes on political and cultural inclusive citizenship practices by people with disabilities and marginalized groups. Glørstad is a member of the Performance and disability working group in IFTR (International Federation of Theatre Research), with a rich international network.

Dr. Polina Golovátina-Mora is Associate Professor in Film and Media in Education at Faculty of Teacher Education at Norwegian University of Science and Technology – NTNU.  Polina`s research is informed by posthumanist feminism and critical pedagogy and focuses on qualitative, art-based and sensorial research methodology and pedagogy. Polina´s research at different moments has covered an intersection between narratives, language, and power, the monstrous as a reflection of current societal issues, theoretical alternatives to traditional views of nation-state, urban artistic practices, nature and elements in folklore and their social and environmental meanings as well as questions of memory and creativity. Polina positions her artistic work as reflective and distributed visual practice. In her artistic practice, Polina focuses on the meanings and ethics of relationality with the world, mixed senses and the attentive care they produce, elemental forces.

france rose hartline (he/him) is an artist and activist for queer, gender diverse and disability rights. Originally from the US, he moved to Norway in 2013, where he completed an MFA in Fine Art (2015) and PhD in Gender Studies (2020) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim Norway. He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Gender Studies (2024) at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo, Japan. Since 2022, france has been involved in disability rights activism by leading NTNU’s INCLUDE, a network for disabled university staff, which is the first of its kind in Norway. Currently, france resides in Trondheim, Norway, and is working with Arts-Based Research as an advocate for gender diverse joy-making through paper crafting.

Tony McCaffrey is Senior Lecturer in Creative Industries at the National Academy of Singing and Dramatic Art, Ara Institute, Christchurch, New Zealand. He has been an actor, director, and writer for many years and is artistic director of Different Light Theatre, an ensemble of learning-disabled artists founded in 2004 that has performed in New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. McCaffrey is co-convenor of the Performance and Disability Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. He is the author of Incapacity and Theatricality: Politics and Aesthetics in Theatre Involving Actors with Intellectual Disabilities (2019), Giving and Taking Voice in Learning Disabled Theatre (2023), both with Routledge. He has contributed articles to Theatre Research International, Global Performance Studies, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and Performance Philosophy. He has recently contributed chapters to Out of Time? Temporality in Disability Performance (2023, Routledge), How Does Disability Performance Travel? Access Arts and Internationalization (2024, Routledge), and The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research in Theatre and Performance Studies (2024, Cambridge University Press). Different Light are currently engaged in a collaboration on Ancient Greek Theatre and Learning Disability with companies in Australia, Belgium, Greece, UK, Switzerland, and Poland.

Dr. Terje Olsen holds a PhD in Sociology and is Research Director at Fafo Institute for Labour and Social Research, Oslo. He has been working with research related to disability, inclusion and rights for over 20 years. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on employment for persons with severe disabilities. He has authored and edited books on the legal protection of persons with disabilities against abuse and encounters with criminal justice systems, and the significance of the CRPD (Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities). He has led the work on two national surveys on the exposure of persons with disabilities to hate speech, harassment, and bullying. The first was conducted in 2016 and the second in 2024. Terje is a board member of the Norwegian Network for Disability Research.

Arnhild Staal Pettersen is Artistic and Managing Director at DansiT Choreographic Center. She is a dancer in Inclusive Dance Company and Artistic Director for The Dance Theatre. Her 20 years of experience as creative and performing dance artist in choreographic processes, influence her leadership, curation, and facilitation in her daily work at DansiT. She is dedicated to challenge the prevailing view of whose stories are told and what bodies are seen on stage and in the art field. As freelancer she has been dancing with companies like Cirka Teater, RAA Productions and Heine Avdal & Yukiko Shinozaki / fieldworks.

Andreas Schille is educated in visual arts from the Art academy in Trondheim. Schille currently works as advisor and educational video producer producing film and videos at NTNU. Schille has an interest in creating high quality media for learning and in supporting educators making accessible learning content. When working with documentary he tries to use an investigative approach, to get close and develop a personal contact with the subjects in his films. His film “Tell me what I see” (2023) about a student with visual and hearing impairment has been screen across various seminars, conferences and filmfestivals the last year, including nominations to MEDEA Awards, Nordic/Docs, Norwegian documentary film festival and TREFF. In addition, Schille in collaboration with Robin Støckert published the short paper “Tell Me What I See: Universal design and educational video for inclusive digital education” at HCI International 2023 – Late Breaking Posters.

Saša Asentić  is a choreographer and cultural worker. He was born in a working-class family in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. During the war against the SFR Yugoslavia, as an antimilitarist, he illegally escaped in 1995 from Bosnia and found refuge in Serbia, where he became active within the independent cultural scene in the late 1990s. Since 2007, his artistic work has been presented internationally in major venues and festivals of contemporary performing arts across Germany, as well as in New York, Paris, Tokyo, Vienna, Athens, Moscow, and other cities. Asentić is a founder of Per.Art organization, which gathers since 1999 a group of disabled and non-disabled artists, that challenge and counter ableism in dance and culture. Asentić works in the intersection of contemporary dance, performance, and disability arts. His artistic practice is based on the principle of solidarity, and resistance against cultural oppression and indoctrination. After being a victim of homophobic and xenophobic violence, and fundamentally disagreeing with the corruption in the public sector in Serbia and the right-wing renaissance, he moved to Germany in 2011. He lives and works between Oslo, Novi Sad, and Berlin.

Bentine works with theatre, dance and music full time. She started with theatre and dance at the age of seven and has experience from several theatre groups, theatre and dance schools. She also has experience as an actor in front of the camera. Bentine has taken piano lessons at the culture school since she was 11 and has given a number of lectures over the past 10 years.

Monika is a qualified lawyer specialising in EU law. She has further training in management and combating financial crime.

She has more than 20 years of management experience from public administration and the cultural industry and has board experience from a number of board positions in NGOs/cultural organisations.

Fafo Institute for Labour and Social Research is an independent social science research foundation that develops knowledge on the conditions for participation in working life, organisational life, society, and politics. Research on disability, welfare policy and living condition is a central part of the institute’s area of interest.

VID  Specialized  University  has a strong research profile within practice-related research, diversity, social inequality and vulnerable groups. VID is disability focused both through their education programs as Social Educator (Vernepleie), Social work and  Nursing, and related further education programs, master programs and PhD programs.  VID’s motto is ‘Committed to humanity – locally and globally’. VID’s Strategic Plan 2022-2024 describes the first phase of VID’s efforts to become a value-based university by 2028.