Danielle Peers (pronouns they/them) is a Canada Research Chair in Disability and Movement Cultures (Tier II, SSHRC), and an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation at the University of Alberta, Canada. Dr. Peers studies how movement cultures (including art, recreation, and sport) can be used to transmit and transform a community’s values, politics, and (in)equities. Mobilizing embodied disability justice approaches, Peers prioritizes deeply interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary collaborations in order to co-create knowledges and practices that reduce harm and create more accessible, affirming, and transformative movement cultures and worlds.

Dr. Peers completed their PhD at the University of Alberta, where they were funded by both the Vanier Canada Scholarship, and the Trudeau Foundation Scholarship. Their doctoral research analyzed the ways that disability-related policies and technologies have been used in Canada towards eugenic, white supremacist, and colonial ends. They sought to excavate how such policies and technologies continue to form the bedrock of many “inclusive” disability programs, often naturalized and unnoticed by contemporary decision makers. They then completed a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at Concordia University, Montreal, specializing in participatory, arts-based methods of disability research. They spent a semester as an Invited Visiting Professor at New York University in Tisch School of the Arts, where they taught and researched crip and disability justice theory, and disability performance.

Dr. Peers’ current research includes community-based co-creation of robust, context-sensitive, equity-related polies with sport and recreation organizations across Canada. They are co-leading a five-year project with a group of emerging Black, Indigenous, people of colour, newcomer, and disabled scholars, co-creating intersectional methodologies for working across and within structures of oppression. Further, they are collaborating with Indigenous scholars and community leaders in learning about community-specific understandings of disability, as well as the barriers, desires, and generative insights that are most important to disabled Indigenous people in those communities. This research is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Killam Accelerator Award. In this current Einstein Foundation application on disability-affirming research ethics, Dr. Peers is joined by three of the Canada’s most compelling deaf, disability, and neurodivergent scholars: Dr. Kristin Snoddon, Dr. Katie Albrecht, and Dr. Lindsay Eales.

Dr. Peers’ research builds on their experiences as a Paralympic athlete, parasport coach, as well as a co-creator and leader of four disability-inclusive organizations around sport, recreation, filmmaking, and dance. As a queer, non-binary, disabled dance and film artist, Peers has created and toured nine films internationally, and co-choreographed and performed dance works that have been performed across North America. Their most recent, award-winning film was a research-creation dance on film, entitled inclinations, with Dr. Alice Sheppard. Peers has demonstrated a strong commitment to mobilizing their research learnings through equity policy consultations, workshops, and public and professional presentations. Recent invited presentation venues include: the Canadian Paralympic Committee; Employment and Social Development Canada, and The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Their outreach work earned Dr. Peers the University of Alberta’s Equity Diversity and Inclusion award in 2017.