Margot R. Challborn

Margot is thrilled to join the School of Disability Studies as the Ethel Louise Armstrong Post-Doctoral Fellow. Her doctoral research, in the Department of Political Science (University of Alberta), examined the governance of intimate life in Canada via expansions to legal parentage for polyconjugal families. In her dissertation, Complicated Love: Parentage, Conjugality, and Family Diversity in Canada, she argued that current reforms to legal parentage, and judicial decisions surrounding poly-conjugal multi-parentage recognition, still adhere to the hetero/homo-normative, monogamous (or “monogamish”), nuclear family form. Moreover, the expansion of multi-parentage in some contexts is made possible by the ongoing criminalization of the deviant, racialized, polygamous “other”.

At the School of Disability Studies, Margot is eager to begin her next project, titled Madness, bodily autonomy, and citizenship: the “choice” of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada. While her doctoral research focuses on the governance of intimate life via parentage and spousal relationships, her postdoctoral research shifts the focus of relationships with others to one’s relationship with death (and thus also, to life). In this way, she extends her current focus on queer, critical race, and feminist approaches to intimacy and governance, to the intersections of intimacy, race, and ability. Margot’s work emerges from her lived experience as a queer, mad-identified, woman of colour.