Reimagining Disabled Futures

A Podcast by DAWN Canada

Reimagining Disabled Futures is a podcast by DAWN Canada that explores how gender, disability, and economic inequality intersect to shape the lived experiences of women, girls, and gender-diverse people with disabilities.

Through deep and reflective conversations, the series highlights stories, community wisdom, and strengths-based approaches to advancing justice, care, and equity. Each episode brings together activists, researchers, and community leaders to examine how systems impact marginalized communities—and how we reimagine a better future.

This podcast is a key part of DAWN Canada’s ten-year vision for change: Root Resilience, Root Change, and Root Justice. Across each conversation, the podcast explores what it means to live well, challenge systems of oppression, and move collectively toward inclusive, intersectional, and feminist futures.

Listen to new episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other major platforms.

This project has been funded by Women and Gender Equality Canada

Episode 1

In this episode, we talk about the Sustainable Livelihoods framework and how it helps people living on low incomes. Our guests explain how this approach is different from other poverty programs because it focuses on people’s strengths instead of their problems. We hear stories about the barriers people face when trying to get housing, food, money, and healthcare. We also learn what “living well” means to different people and how personal and systemic issues affect their well-being.

Episode 2

This episode explores incarceration, ableism, systemic violence, and the lived experiences of disablement within the criminal legal system through a disability justice lens. It examines why the Disability Justice Network of Ontario (DJNO) identifies as an abolitionist organization, how prisons reproduce disablement, racial violence, and colonial harm, and how punitive systems extend beyond prisons into schools, long-term care, and housing.

Episode 3

In this episode of Reimagining Disabled Futures, we explore feminist recovery through the lived experiences of women and gender-diverse people with disabilities participating in the Feminist Economic Recovery Project, part of Mapping Our Future: A 10-Year Vision for Change for Women with Disabilities. 

Click here to download the transcript.

Episode 4

In this episode, Reimagining Disabled Futures explores what feminist recovery looks like through a disability justice lens, with a particular focus on peer support, housing, and collective care. Hosts Nashwa Lina Khan and Erin Dekker are joined by Dr. Jihan Abbas, a sociologist and disability studies scholar, to examine how capitalism, neoliberalism, and ableist systems shape disabled people’s ability to live well.

Click here to download the transcript.