Who We Are
It is through our focus on sharing space with others and with creativity in mind that our collaboration has come to be.
The Creative Entanglement Collaboratory aims to engender rich relationships with those who work across creative activity and critical scholarship. Much of our own work shares a focus on health, illness, and disability, and we understand that all three reside in human bodies and minds, systems and structures, ecologies and the more-than-human world.
We are interested in projects that take an expansive approach to narrative and storytelling, be they in the form of public scholarship, community-based art or archiving, or individual acts in an artistic practice. Many of our collaborators explore visual art, creative writing, performance, and audio in their practices. Many are led by experiential knowledge, understanding it as the root of artistic creation, while also working actively to make broader connections, forge solidarity, and bolster resistance.
It is through our focus on sharing space with others and with creativity in mind that our collaboration has come to be. This is why entanglement, to be deeply and richly involved, shares space with the creative and the many ways we all might interweave an imaginative approach to life, art, and scholarship. It is our collective aim to work with and across diverse ways of knowing and being, trusting that our work and public offerings will grow, take shape accordingly, and do so at a sustainable pace .
What We Stand For
The Creative Entanglement Collaboratory is collectively organized on crip time and led by people with a lived experience of chronic illness and / or disability. We share a desire to platform and amplify the voices, stories, and artistic productions of those too often silenced in Western systems of academic knowledge and arts production. We also aim to work together in a way that is relationally driven so that our relationships with each other and those we collaborate with lead our means of engagement. The relational mode is just as important as what gets produced and shared publicly by the collaboratory. Although we individually occupy different places of privilege within the university system, and by extension society, we are committed to learning and enacting non-hierarchical modes of collaboration.
As a collective, we focus on the generative feelings brought about by choosing to work together in resistance to normative modes of productivity and accomplishment. We actively embrace experimentation and process-based approaches to art, craft, and scholarship as we elect to highlight the work of those who embrace research-creation, arts-based scholarship, and community-based art. We aim to create a digital platform and collaborative opportunities to support and amplify critical engagement. In addition, we aim to provide a space to gather and exchange ideas with aspirations to meet both on- and offline through future workshops for creative and scholarly exchange.
Meet the Founding Members of the Creative Entanglement Collaboratory
The Creative Entanglement Collaboratory team first came together to conceptualize and produce the On Being Ill podcast. After nearly five years of generating conversations and stories at the entangled intersection of disability, chronic illness, identity, and creativity, we decided to expand our love for this work into something more collaborative and experimental.
Coco Nielsen
Coco Nielsen (they/them) is a queer non-binary white settler who recently moved to the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. They are a visual artist and co-producer of the podcast On Being Ill. Coco’s introduction to the world of audio production was through campus and community radio–which still holds a meaningful place in their heart. Coco finds hope in DIY or DIT (do-it-together) culture and is passionate about cultivating containers where low-barrier skillbuilding and education can flourish. Coco is grateful to anyone who makes them laugh, places that help bring them into mindful presence, and experiences that crack open the purposeful isolation of our urban environments in order to let our humanity show through.
Emilia Nielsen is the Inaugural Director of Creative Entanglement Collaboratory. She is author of the award-winning book, Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives: Stories of Rage and Repair (University of Toronto Press, 2019) recipient of The American Folklore Society’s Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize as well as two collections of poetry. Body Work (Signature Editions, 2018) was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Memorial Award and took third place in the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Her first book of poetry, Surge Narrows (Leaf Press, 2013), was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She is a professor in the Department of Social Science at York University and teaches in the Health & Society Program. Currently, she divides her time between Tkaronto and Amiskwacîwâskahikan the current and ancestral home of many Indigenous peoples and brought into treaty relationship by Treaties 13 and 6.
Emily R. Blyth
Emily Blyth (she/her) is a White settler who moved to the unceded traditional xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territories in 2021 where she is grateful to continue working to grow connections with community and current and future Elders as she researches the public health impacts of police violence at Simon Fraser University. Her community-based research is oriented at promoting well-being for those impacted by media exposure to oppressive policing practices, and has been awarded SSHRC-Canada Graduate Scholarship and the 2023 Mahmoud Eid Graduate prize which recognizes the most promising graduate-level research investigating media and diversity in Canada.
Get in Touch
We would love to hear your thoughts, ideas, and reflections.
In particular, we invite you to reach out if:
- You have critical-creative work that feels related to our mission that you would like to have featured on our website.
- You would like to get in touch with the Director, current Artist in Residence or Podcaster in Residence.
- You have suggestions to improve accessibility on our website.
- You have suggestions for our resources page on ableism and colonialism.
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Creative Entanglement Collaboratory 