Dr. Jeff Preston is Definitely Controversial, Possibly Immortal

Video

Audio

In a GrowAbility first, Joe and Holly speak with Dr. Jeff Preston, a disability studies professor, advocate, and self-proclaimed immortal who refuses to let ableism win. From his early days as a three-year-old fundraising speaker to his current role challenging systemic barriers, Jeff shares candid insights about disability rights, accessibility legislation, and why spite makes an excellent motivator. He unpacks why Ontario won't meet its 2025 accessibility goals, explores the connection between disability and poverty, and explains why inaccessible spaces are a form of censorship. Through thoughtful analogies—from farmers as natural innovators to disabled people as "ghosts in the cornfield"—Jeff illustrates how accessibility benefits everyone. Whether discussing urban agriculture, media representation, or the importance of inter-ability relationships, his message is clear: disability is everywhere, and it's time our world reflected that reality.

Links Mentioned

• Dr. Jeff Preston's Website
• The Invalid Culture Podcast
• Find Jeff on LinkedIn
• Find Jeff on Facebook
• Disability Studies at King's University College

Transcript

JOE
Hey Holly, who's your favorite superhero?

HOLLY
Poison Ivy, of course.

JOE
Isn't Poison Ivy a villain?

HOLLY
Hey, one person's villain is another person's hero.

JOE
Fair enough.

HOLLY
Who's your favorite superhero?

JOE
Oh, Sprocket Man, of course.

HOLLY
That sounds made up.

JOE
Sprocket Man is totally not a made up thing and his superpower is exactly what you think it is.

HOLLY
He's a cyclist who wears a cape, isn't he?

JOE
Well, no cape but plenty of safety tips.

HOLLY
Whatever rings your bell, Joe.

JOE
From webisodes, this is GrowAbility, a digital documentary at the intersection of urban agriculture, food security and community.

HOLLY
On this episode, we speak with professor, motivational speaker, podcaster and staunch advocate for individuals with disabilities.

JOE
Including himself.

HOLLY
Including himself, Dr. Jeff Preston.

JOE
Holly, we've spent a lot of time on the show talking about the grow part of our name, but not the ability part.

HOLLY
It's true. We both work with people with disabilities at The PATCH, blending urban agriculture with skills, training, volunteering and connecting to the community. But we haven't really brought out those themes into this show yet.

JOE
And that's where Dr. Preston comes in. One of the many things I love about Jeff's work is he looks at a whole bunch of parts of our community through an equity driven lens.

HOLLY
I want him to talk about how social policy negatively impacts both the disabled community and the way that they impact those experiencing poverty. What about you?

JOE
I'm just looking forward to having another person with fantastic taste in clothes on the pod.

HOLLY
Of course you are.

JOE
Before we meet Jeff, if you like this podcast, please rate and review us.

HOLLY
Or if you're watching us on YouTube, please like and subscribe.

JOE
Plus, when you sign up for our free fresh and nutritious newsletter, you'll get all the latest exclusive goodies delivered right into your inbox.

HOLLY
And we want to hear from you. Send emails to hosts at growabilitypod .com.

JOE
We want your ideas, questions or suggestions for guests in future episodes.

HOLLY
And a special thanks to TechAlliance of Southwestern Ontario for inviting us to use their weirdly perfect space for this series of interviews.

JOE
And now let's get this party started with Dr. Jeff Preston.

JOE
Jeff, thank you so much for being here today.

JEFF
 Yeah, absolutely. I'm so happy to be here.

HOLLY
And do I have this right? Did you start fundraising by doing a public speaking gig for Muscular Dystrophy?

JEFF
 Dystrophy, yes.

HOLLY
Dystrophy, okay. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

JEFF
 Yeah, so many moons ago, I was just a little child, maybe. I was about three years old. And there was this volleyball tournament in my hometown run by the firefighters to raise money for muscular dystrophy research. And so I was there and they asked me, they said, oh, you should come up and say something. It was my birthday around then, right around my birthday. So up I went, I got a happy birthday, and I thanked people for coming out. And that was sort of the beginning of the end for me as a fundraiser. From there, I started going to that tournament every year. That grew into an even bigger event and then eventually into working as a poster child for MDC and running on golf tournaments. And kind of never stopped asking people for money for the rest of my life.

JOE
There's nothing wrong with that.

JEFF
 No.

JOE
Let's start with some common ground.

JEFF
 Sure.

JOE
What is a disability?

JEFF
 That is a fun question. So I think there's the definition, there's the dictionary definition of what we understand to be disability. I actually take a very different perspective on disabled because I think that we focus a lot on bodily impairment, right? We talk a lot about disease and injury and those sorts of things, and we understand disability in that sense. I actually add another layer to it. I actually think that we are disabled not just by what is within our bodies, but also what we find outside in the world beyond us, because we have constructed this entire world for a certain kind of person, which results in those who don't fit that category or don't fit that ability grouping to now be disabled. So I would argue that I'm just as disabled by muscular dystrophy as I am by stairs at the front of every building we build or very narrow aisles in the stores that we construct or in the classrooms that we design that have steps to get up to the tiered seating. I think that these factors are just as disabling as the physical impairment that a doctor says is the disability.

JOE
Well, to build off of that, if I may, this podcast will drop in 2025.

JEFF
 Yeah.

JOE
And we as a community made a vow to have something ready by 2025.

JEFF
 Yeah, yeah.

JOE
Are we there?

JEFF
 Nope. Spoiler alert. No.

JOE
We are not.

JEFF
 Not even close. I would say that we've made progress. I think it's important for us to remember that disability rights and the disability rights movement as a semi-organized asynchronous grouping really has only been operating since like the 60s, maybe the 70s, really the 80s, which means that we're also one of the youngest civil rights movements in North America. Having said that, if you look at what the world looked like when I was born in 1983, and you compare that to the world that we're entering into in 2025, fundamentally it's a different world for disabled people. We've made incredible gains in terms of access to programs and services, into access to educational opportunities, access to employment opportunities. There's a really good, happy story. At the same time, there's the fundamental reality that disabled people do not experience the same life as a non-disabled person right now in London, in Ontario, in Canada, in planet Earth.

JOE
Right. And maybe for our listeners and our viewers, we should talk about what that community vow was.

JEFF
 Yeah, of course. So, again, if we look back, flashback, 2005, that was actually 2003, 2004, I couldn't take when this happened, but I remember waking up as a university student and I flipped on the news in the morning and, you know, in my breakfast, and I see this big announcement, Ontario government promises by 2025, Ontario will be fully accessible. This was the vow. And we would do it through this piece of legislation called the AODA, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. I remember hearing that news and I had this sort of two simultaneous thoughts. So, on the one thought, I was like, wow, that's amazing. It's not every day you hear about disability news, on the news. Often not less stories about people like me on the news. So, that was interesting. Number two, I never imagined that I would see a fully accessible province in my lifetime.

JOE
Right.

JEFF
 So, I had sort of assumed that what I lived in at that point would be what I would live in basically forever, that new buildings would be kind of accessible, people would do their best, but much of this world would remain inaccessible and much of the accessibility I would have to build for myself, but I'd have to bring access wherever I went. And I suddenly had this moment of realization that I wasn't experiencing the province in the same way that everyone else was. And that might seem obvious or simplistic, but it has never occurred to me that another world was possible. And so, this promise that we made in 2005 was a remarkable future-looking promise that said we can, and not just can, but should, not just should, must do better for disabled people in this province. That was extremely exciting.  And so, I said, I want to get involved.

JOE
Can I ask you a sage question?

JEFF
 Sure.

JOE
Why haven't we made the progress we promised in the last 20 years?

JEFF
 Man, how much time do we have? We have about eight hours, I think, right? The podcasts are usually about eight hours long, I think, usually. You know, for when you're driving from London to Montreal. So, okay, there's a few things. So, thing number one, I think the AODA got bogged down in politics. As everything does.

JOE
Of course.

JEFF
 And so, there ends up with a lot of negotiations that are happening to try to get the legislation passed. And often, in my opinion, humblest of opinions as it is, we often lost many of those negotiations. You have to understand that the AODA is a group of legislative pieces, standards, that were all created by a bunch of people together, put them in a room, and have them hash out what the standard looks like. What that meant was that many of the standards, all of the standards, were created with 50% industry, which essentially means 50% predominantly non-disabled people, and 50% disabled people, allies, service providers, et cetera. What that meant was that for the last 20 years, disabled people have been expected to negotiate the definition of accessibility with people who stand to benefit from reducing the requirements of accessibility legislation and standards. So, quite literally, you're going in front of, say, a mega corporation who does not want to spend any more money on accessibility that are trying to keep costs down, and you now have to argue with that person what is or isn't accessible. So, I think that was a not right way to move forward in building these pieces of legislation. That slowed us down. I think, number two, we were dramatically slowed down by a lack of funding. I don't think the Ontario government realized how much it was going to cost to become fully accessible, quote, unquote. It was going to take an enormous amount of money, not just for physical changes, but also for education, also for developing new standards. This is something that the world had never really done before, that Ontario was trying to not just invent the wheel, but invent an entire vehicle where all they really had were stones and a couple chisels and axes, right? And so, I think that was another issue. And I think really the final real problem with the AODA is that we never were able to come to terms with a compliance measure. So, the AODA was supposed to have teeth. It was supposed to have the ability to provide fines and to compel people to become accessible. The idea being if it's more expensive to remain inaccessible, people will then choose to become accessible. That's the philosophy. The compliance measure didn't really get off the ground until years after the legislation was passed. And to this day, we actually don't even necessarily know how many organizations have been fined under the compliance measure. But my sense is, you could probably count on one or two hands the number of organizations that have faced any sort of financial penalty, despite the fact that barriers remain everywhere, that many organizations are non-compliant, whether they know it or not. And so, that inability to compel people to even follow the rules that do exist has meant that we've been extremely slow out of the gate to try to build an accessible province.

JOE
I feel there's a huge value proposition in meeting the standards. Am I wrong on that?

JEFF
 Absolutely. Absolutely. I don't think that people realize how big the disabled population is, right? So, Statistics Canada tells us somewhere around 20% to 25% of Canadians identify with a disability. Most researchers, myself included, believe that number is actually probably too low, that it actually is probably much higher. Now, it depended, again, as you say, how you define what a disability is. But the reality is there are disabled people everywhere. There are disabled people that want to participate in our society, who wish to get jobs, who wish to spend the money that they earn at those jobs, that want to live a life just as any other Ontarian. And so, if you are a business, for instance, and you go the extra step to become accessible, you've now opened yourself up to not just new consumers, but new consumers who have very few options in terms of where they may want to go to shop. So, I think that there's this economic benefit to it. There's also the downstream benefit of accessibility when we don't necessarily know what the future is going to hold. And so, what if you or one of your employees encounters a disability? What if they get an injury or something happens? And now you have an employee who may not be able to work in your space because your space isn't accessible. And if they leave that job, they're taken with them all of that institutional knowledge, all of that training, all of that quality skill that has been built up during their employment. So, for me, I look at accessibility not just as opening up new markets, not just opening up new opportunities for new customers, but I see it also as future-proofing yourself from the magic reality that is the human body is fragile, it is vulnerable, and it is subject to change throughout all of our lives.

JOE
Is this exclusive to Ontario or is this everywhere? Or is there a sliding scale?

JEFF
 This is a real fun question. So, in Canada, we have a patchwork of accessibility law. So, every province does it different, and everyone is kind of approaching this from a similar, but not similar at all sort of perspective. And you've got a bunch of other interconnecting industries, organizations, sectors, that are very different from province to province, right? So, the way that they do medicine in Alberta is different than the way they do medicine in Ontario, which is different than how it's done in Quebec and different how it's done in BC. And so, all of those programs and services, whether it comes down to therapy, access to adaptive devices, occupational therapists, physical therapists, speech language pathology, all these different sort of factors, that is done differently in many of our provinces. And so, too, is accessibility legislation. For a lot of provinces are looking on Ontario. A lot of Canada looks at Ontario and says, what did you do for the AODA? We want to do something similar, but we also don't want to make the mistakes we made. And so, we are sort of trailblazing in Ontario in that sense. But the problem then means that if I were to pick up shop and move somewhere else in Canada, I would actually have a radically different experience from one province to another, which begs the question, do disabled Canadians enjoy the human right, the enshrined right in Canada of free movement? We are supposed to be able to move anywhere in our country as Canadians. I would argue we don't have that as disabled people.

HOLLY
So much great insight. You're currently a professor of disability studies at King's University in London, but you have a Master's and a Doctorate in media studies. What's the connection there?

JEFF
 Yeah, absolutely. So, growing up, I was doing a lot of media work as I was doing my fundraising. I was doing some TV stuff, doing lots of radio stuff, doing lots of public speeches, and I became really interested in media. So, I actually thought that I wanted to be a journalist. That was my dream originally. I loved the guys that I was meeting in the radio world, loved the women that was meeting in journalism, and I thought- in print journalism, I thought maybe this is for me. Maybe I should do this. So, I go to school for media studies. I do an internship at a local newspaper- two months, and I was like, nope, I do not want to be a journalist. Not for me. Way too much hate mail. Not interested.

JEFF
 So, I was like, no, that isn't for me. But as I started university here in London, I fell in love with school. I was not a school kid growing up. I did not like school. I was the kid who, like, every morning it was, mom, I think I'm sick. She's like, I'm sure you are. Off you go. Go to school. When I got to university, though, I actually fell in love with education. I fell in love with the pursuit of knowledge. And I remember being in the first year of class, I'm looking at a professor, the sage on the stage, and I'm thinking, I want to do this. I want to be a teacher. I want to teach people. I want to research. I want to learn new things and share that information with the world. And that's when I began to start this pursuit. And so, my original research was really focused on understanding how disability is represented in popular culture. I was fascinated in the disconnect between the stories we tell in the media versus the lived reality of disability, which often were, paradoxically, completely incongruent. And so, that was really sort of the early days of my research. I was trying to understand that question. And it's from there that I then got sucked into this world, this new field of study called disability studies, or now, critical disability studies. I don't know who you talk to. And so, I started bringing that work into the world of media studies, trying to mash together this cultural theory with disability studies and critical disability theory, bringing them together to try to have a new way of thinking about how we tell stories about disability, how we imagine disability, and how that cultural construction of disability actually really matters because the way we talk about disability influences what we do about it. And that includes things like legislation, like the AODA.

JOE
Absolutely. We need knowledgeable teachers. We need, I use this word and you used this word, sages.

JEFF
 Right.

JOE
There's also a component of representation.

JEFF
 Yeah.

JOE
How important is representation?

JEFF
 Unbelievably important, I would say. I think it's critical. I'm biased, of course. I'm a media studies scholar. So, of course, I'm going to say it's the most important thing. But I think that representation genuinely really matters because I think that representation not just allows us to tell our own story, to give legitimacy to lives with disabilities, to say that this is a real experience and it matters, that there's meaning in it. And it's meaning that we, the disabled, should be creating, that we should be the ones telling that story. But I think that stories also provide us that opportunity to invite people in to our lives, to invite people into our experience, not in the sense of like walk a mile in our shoes, but at least to get insight, to develop empathy for a different way of living, right?

JEFF
 Right.

JEFF
 And so, I think that media has this powerful ability to actually invite people to our worlds, to form mutual relationships into different worlds, different ways of being. And I think more than anything, media is fantasy, right?

JOE
Yes.

JEFF
 We often tell stories about the world that we live in, but we often tell stories about the world that we wish we lived in, about a world that we aspire to live in. Because in media, movie magic says that anything is possible. And so, something I think that's really fascinating is how as we build and tell stories about disability, how can we also be telling and showing a universally accessible world in a way that's not possible in the real world? And how can that then be something that we aspire to? In the same way that you look at something like Star Trek, which has inspired countless technical innovations.

JEFF
 Absolutely.

JEFF
 Because it said, this is what the future could look like. And an engineer says, I'm going to figure out how to make that happen.

HOLLY
Right.

JEFF
 I'm going to make that iPad, essentially, that I saw on Star Trek. I think that the same could be done with accessibility and inclusion.

HOLLY
I really like that perspective a lot, actually. Yeah, it's beautiful. Groups like the Disability Screen Office and companies like Accessible Media Inc. have taken a nothing-about-us-without-us approach to disabled representation in the media. Is this the right path forward, would you think?

JEFF
 Absolutely. Yeah, we need to get more disabled people involved. I actually wonder how many flubs, when it comes to telling stories about disability, how many of those flubs are generated by the fact that no one involved in this production actually had a disability. And so, there are all these things that you see. For instance, I see a lot of people in wheelchairs that do not make sense in the real world, right? So, I have a character, and they'll be in this rickety hospital chair. And I'm like, no, a guy with a spinal cord injury like that, they are not going to be rolling around in this heavy, clunky hospital chair. They're going to be in a light, titanium, ergodynamic thing, right?

JOE
Right.

JEFF
 Absolutely. Of course they would be. Why would they be in this unaesthetic chair? And so, I think that there is this sort of reality that you can be brought in by having people actually there to say, actually, that's not what that's like. 

HOLLY
Right.

JEFF
 So, to give you an example, I have a buddy named Josh Cassidy. He and I grew up together. We went in very different paths. I went to be an academic. He became a Paralympian. And so, he is a Paralympic wheelchair racer. And in his spare time, he does media. And so, he was in a Hallmark movie. He was hired as a- He's a secondary, he wasn't the main character. He was buddies of the main character. So, this is a Christmas movie, rom-com, you know, Hallmark. What was fascinating for him in this process, as he shares with me, is that throughout the process, the director was asking him constantly, is this right? Do we have this right? And so, there was one scene in particular where he goes to a cafe and he has to enter the cafe, order a coffee, go and sit down, and then he has a conversation. And so, while they were doing it, Josh was saying, he's like, oh, no, like, I wouldn't order this way. This isn't how I order. They had it all set up where they had a whole thing. It wasn't right. It didn't feel natural to what he would do as a wheelchair user. And so, they said, great, well, show us. Show us what you would do. And so, they walked through the steps. They adapted the scene. They changed the format of it. And as a result, they got something that was actually authentic to what a wheelchair user would experience as they're moving in and out of a coffee shop, right? And so, I think having that on the ground insight is actually really important, and it cannot be replicated. You can't just hire an expert. You've got to have lots of different voices, lots of different experiences to be able to make better choices.

JOE
Now, I feel this director may be a unicorn.

JEFF
 Hah! Yes, yes.

JOE
I think there may be a misjudgment of abilities. You know, when we look at abilities-first. I shouldn't say when we look at abilities-first. People should look at abilities-first.

JEFF
 Yeah.

JOE
How do you feel? Do you feel that there is a misjudgment of ability based on maybe people that, you know, physical, for instance?

JEFF
 Oh, big time, yeah. I think that one of the things we hear a lot when it comes to sort of bigger media productions, we're looking at Hollywood, Toronto, British Columbia, the sort of the major producers. There is this belief that not only will it be more expensive to have a disabled actor or a disabled cast member, they believe that they will be slower to change. I've heard people not getting roles because they thought it would take them too long to change costumes. And they're like, you know, time is money, we can't wait. I mean, not necessarily. For some, maybe not necessarily. A really fun example, I think, of this is Jared Leto, which literally no one has ever said, fun example, and Jared Leto in the same sentence.

JOE
No, this is the first, not just on this podcast, but universally.

JEFF
 Generationally, this has never happened together. So Jared Leto was in this movie, Morpheus, which is historically one of the worst movies ever made.

JEFF
 I've heard that.

JEFF
 Not great. But in this, he is a character who uses a wheelchair, and Jared Leto was famously a method actor. And what's fascinating is if you hear some of the stories from the set, it was a nightmare because Jared Leto was taking like two hours to go pee. He was taking an inordinate amount of time. He was driving himself and limping his way and really exaggerated all these physical abilities. There was a negotiation. And they finally got him to agree to use a wheelchair to go from point to point to try to speed up the transit or whatever. And what I find fun about this, and I mean, you're going to be like, Jeff, that isn't fun at all, you're the worst, what is wrong with you? But what I find fun about it is that I've been.

JOE
We'll sign a a petition.

JEFF
 Yeah, exactly. Cancel Jeff Preston. But I think that Jared Leto is pantomiming all of the negative understandings of what we think disability is, right? That it's slow, that it's agony. He was pretty mean on set, apparently. There's a bitterness involved. And so I think this is such a perfect example because I think Jared Leto unintentionally was reflecting exactly how we understand- or think we understand disability, which is not at all the reality for most people with disabilities. In fact, I would argue barely any.

JOE
When people talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion, they often hold race, gender, and other forms of ethnographic equity in mind. Is ableism and disability part of the DEI conversation?

JEFF
 It needs to be. It absolutely needs to be, 100%. I think that often it falls a little bit off the radar. But it needs to be there, and it especially needs to be there because of the intersectional nature of disability, that disability is a factor that could apply to anybody. Every race, every age, every religious background, every gender, anyone can have a disability. And with that comes very different experiences. So my experience as a white man, middle-aged, educated with a physical disability is going to be radically different than somebody with a different set of intersecting identity factors. That to me means that ableism and accessibility actually needs to sit at the base of our EDI work. Rather than being something that we tack on after the fact, accessibility and ableism and anti-ableism in general should actually be sitting at the base of our EDI work, upon which we build everything else. Because disability is everywhere. Whether we want to believe it or not, we are everywhere, and we always have been. I mean, find me a historical figure, and I will find you a disabled person.

JOE
Absolutely. When it comes to inclusion, I've heard you talk about a lack of accessibility being a form of censorship.

JEFF
 Right.

JOE
Can you unpack what that means?

JEFF
 Yeah, absolutely. So I think that something that is fascinating is how we assume that disabled people don't exist. And we assume that they don't exist because we don't see them. I've often joked that if I were to ever write a memoir, and I shouldn't, my life has been fairly boring, but if ever did, the title of my memoir would be The Only Guy in a Wheelchair in the Room. Because very often when I'm in rooms, I am the only person in a wheelchair, which seems statistically impossible. It seems very unlikely that every time I go to the movie theater, I would be the only wheelchair user rolling up to Cineplex. The only, when I roll up to the Grand Theater, that there's no one else in that wheelchair section. It seems very strange. But I think of it a little bit differently. So the metaphor that I use is that movie Field of Dreams. I don't know if you know that old movie.

JOE
I know that one.

JEFF
 It's a baseball movie.

JOE
It's a good one.

JEFF
 Right? One of the things in the movie is that there's all these ghosts. They're in the cornfield. And no one knows the ghosts are in the cornfield, but they're there. And the sort of saying in the movie is, if you build it, they will come. And this is how I think about accessibility, is that disabled people, we are the ghosts in the cornfield. You don't know us, but we're out there. We are haunting these spaces outside of your sight. But when you build accessible, when you add accessibility features to your spaces, suddenly they show up. Suddenly there are disabled people kind of everywhere. And so what I ask us to think about always is who is in the room and who is not, and why? But if they're not in the room, they're not a part of the conversation.

HOLLY
Right.

JEFF
 So there was a study recently done of people working in the Ontario government. And that study found, this is self-disclosure, but it found that there's less than 5% of disabled people that are operating within our government structure right now, which means that 20% of the population is not really getting a fair representation in our government. And so when you think about censorship, who is not in the room? Who is not voicing their opinion at Queen's Park? Disabled people.

JOE
That's right.

JEFF
 Predominantly. And if we are not there to speak, perhaps that explains why there wasn't urgency to pass compliance measures for the AODA. Maybe that explains why there wasn't urgency to pass the post-secondary standard or the hospital education, sorry, healthcare standard of the AODA. Maybe that's why there isn't any real concern that we're not going to meet our standard, our fully accessible Ontario by 2025. If we're not there, we cannot speak. And if we're not speaking, we cannot be heard. And if we're not heard, nothing will change.

JOE
Can I ask you a naive question?

JEFF
 Please, I'd love that. Those are actually great questions.

JOE
You've done really good. Why can't people just follow your blueprint?

JEFF
 Well, it would be bad. It would be a bad choice. My life is littered with mistakes. I am here because of the mistakes I've made, which is a good thing, I think, actually, in many ways. You know, I enrolled at Western. I believed I had been enrolled into a web design program, and I arrived and learned that it was not a web design program, but I fell in love with it and got a PhD. I was like, I'm going to be a university professor. This is what I want to do. I graduate with a PhD, and I got not a lot of tenure-track jobs in this world of university anymore. And I got hired at Fanshawe College, and I'm like, this is the best. I love it. This college stuff is amazing. I love this classroom. I love the students that are here. This is sweet. I never want to leave. And then two years later, I see a job posted for disability studies at King's, and I did leave college. And so, I don't know that people want to follow my blueprint, necessarily. But I do think that we have to remember that I, myself, have an enormous amount of privilege. I've been extremely lucky to be where I am today. I would not have been here without an enormous amount of luck, without an enormous amount of public support, and without some really key advantages that I received when I was born. Namely, I was born with a physical disability. I've had my disability my entire life, so there was no adaptation for me. This has always been normal. There hasn't been anything different than using a wheelchair. It's who I am. It's part of me. I was very lucky to start talking young and to be doing public speeches when I was five, six years old, developing that skill, that ability to articulate myself, being kind of smart, being able to navigate school well, having two gainfully employed parents with good insurance that were well-known and well-respected in the community, that had a ton of community members that rallied behind our family to help us when we couldn't afford the things I needed to live independently, get it into the good school. Having London similarly accept me and wrap around me in the way that Port Elgin did. I've been uniquely extremely lucky, and I'm absolutely so grateful and thankful for everyone that's made my life possible. What horrifies me is the number of people that don't have that, that do not have the access that I've had, that haven't had the privileges that I've had in my life. And so people will look at me and say, well, Jeff Preston, he's a PhD. He's living independently. He's doing great. He's got a van. That was not without an enormous amount of work and predominantly not by me and by people around me that cared about me, that wanted to see me do better. And unfortunately, not everyone has that. And so for me, I think a better way of looking at it is not how can people follow in my footsteps, but rather how can my footsteps provide a pathway for more people to follow behind me, so that they don't need to be lucky. They can just be themselves, and they can thrive in this world like anybody else.

JOE
Not everybody's lucky.

JEFF
 Not everybody's lucky.

JOE
I've been working in skills development and job development a long time. For, one would say, for the disabled community or abilities-first. And I've been working in assisting with food security. A lot of people that I work with are housing insecure. These are at the top of my concerns.

JEFF
 Absolutely.

JOE
How do you see these things? Lack of employment. And we've touched on it a little bit. Lack of employment. Lack of access to housing. These are things that, through my work in support employment, I encounter these conversations almost on a daily basis.

JEFF
 Yeah.

JOE
It's disproportionate.

JEFF
 Absolutely. Absolutely.

JOE
How do you see-

JEFF
 I think it's all interconnected in a lot of ways. I think that one of the big gifts, I think, of having a disability is you're born into a very complicated life. And as a result, I think I have come to embrace and understand complication as the basis of everything. Everything is complicated all the time. And that we need to be aware of that. We need to be ready to address complication. We can't assume simplicity. And so, I think that when we look at the experiences of disability right now, I think things like housing and food security are intimately connected to access to employment, to access to education. All of these things are important, and we have to manage them in different ways. So, it's not enough to say, okay, we're going to ensure that education is accessible. People get educated. They'll get jobs. They'll get housing. It'll be great. Everything's fine. Actually, no. Because there aren't a whole lot of accessible houses in London, Ontario. And so, even if you have a job, you may not even be able to afford still an accessible house, and if you can, you might not even be able to find one. So, there's another issue here. We need to do a better job of building accessible housing. When it comes to those who cannot work, there are a lot of people with disabilities who just can't. Either work at a full-time pace, or maybe they work part-time, possibly occasional. Depends on the disability. We don't have very good structures to allow for that kind of flexibility, right? So, things like the Ontario Disability Support Program, it's very on-off. You're on it or you're not. And there isn't really any in-between there. Not a lot. I think that if we had better flexibility in some of these programs that allowed people to work when they can, not work when they can't, but still be able to enjoy quality of life, that I think is really important. That's an important part of the safety net that we should be building around people. But access to employment is another issue, right? I think that we need to do a better job of supporting businesses to not just get accessible, but also to understand the benefits of hiring disabled people. Because there are enormous benefits to hiring disabled people, right? Disabled people are far more reliable, generally speaking. We work our jobs longer, we're more loyal, often. We don't retire or quit jobs at the rate that other groups do. We often take less sick days. And not only that, but you're going to get someone who's a jack of all trades, right? Because to be disabled, to survive, you've got to do a little bit of everything, and you've got to be able to do it all at the same time. So, you're getting a multitasker, you're getting a problem solver, and you're getting someone who has a deep understanding that sometimes life is hard, and you just need a bit of help to get by. To me, that's a model employee. I would hire five of those any day.

JOE
Do you feel that that's reflected in current government policy, taking the AODA outside of that food insecurity, lack of flexible employment, lack of accessible employment?

JEFF
 No, not at all.

JOE
We don't have that locked away.

JEFF
 Not in any way. I don't know that we've even started to be totally honest. I would say, you know, it goes all the way down to education all the way up, right? So, if we look at the ways that we're trying to do education right now for people with disabilities, we're seeing a real push toward mainstreaming, which on its face is not a bad thing. I'm supportive of disabled people being in the mainstream classrooms. However, a lot of our mainstreaming efforts have been take the person out of special ed, place them in a mainstream classroom, don't provide any supports, right? Give them an iPad, put them in the back of the room, it's integrated. That's not integrated.

JOE
No.

JEFF
 That's not good education.

JOE
That's just a full classroom.

JEFF
 We're letting people down.

HOLLY
Right.

JEFF
 So, we're setting people up to fail at the education right off the bat, primary school, secondary school, if they could even get into university. They get into university, and what do you find when you arrive at the university gates? Well, you find articles like the one in the Walrus or a recent one in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, which basically states that people are lying about their disabilities, that children today are too fragile, that they're making up ADHD, that they don't know how to focus, they don't know how to control, they're taking advantage of services, they're just trying to get an easy way through the system. And so, you have a culture of doubt that you're entering into as a disabled student when you get into college or university right off the bat.

JOE
Scary.

JEFF
 It's brutal. It's brutal. And so, I think when we look at this problem, when you say, well, what can we do about housing? Well, unfortunately, it's not just a question of what do we do about housing. It's also a question of what do we do about education? What do we do about employment? What do we do about safety nets? What do we do about equipment funding? What do we do about tenant care funding? What do we do about medication and the way that we fund that type of stuff? And also, you know, why don't we throw mental health on the pile too? What do we do about counseling, psychotherapy, CBT, DBT, and the other types of tools that could really be helpful for people to live better quality lives. All of these conversations are actually connected. They're interlinked and then can't be done in silos. In the same way that for me, I entered into a hospital, it is not just one conversation with my pulmonary, one conversation with my neuromuscular, one conversation with my surgeon, one conversation with, you know, my occupational therapist. We do healthcare in teams because different people have different expertise, but they need to be talking, sharing information, and planning together. That's something that we really need to do better when it comes to disabled people.

JOE
Communities.

JEFF
 Absolutely. Integrated solutions.

HOLLY
And in addition to advocating publicly for the disabled community, you've consulted with the government on both accessibility and poverty mitigation policy. Is there a link between these two topics, would you say?

JEFF
 Absolutely. Definitely. Yeah, disabled people, by and large, there are many, many, many disabled people who are living under what we would call the low-income cutoff line. People in our ODSP, if you're a single individual living in London right now on your own, you're only getting about $1,200, $1,300 a month, give or take. When you take into consideration that rent right now in London, I mean, good luck, finding a place for under 700 bucks, that's not a lot of money left over for, you know, simple things like food, clothing, heat, internet.

HOLLY
Just basic supplies.

JEFF
 Just basic things. If you don't have an internet-connected device, how are you going to apply for a job?

HOLLY
& Joe Right.

JEFF
 For instance most employers now are using online employment platforms.

HOLLY
Services, yeah.

JEFF
 So, yeah, so it all becomes very interconnected. So, one of those answers, I think, is about increasing access to employment. It's about supporting disabled people to get the skills and training that they need to get jobs. It's also about working with employers to break down stigma around disability that leads to them passing over disabled applicants. It's also about supporting them to become accessible within their spaces, to help them to ensure that if you hire someone, you actually have the facilities, the technology, the adaptations that you need for them to be able to function within your workspace. So, I think that all of these things are part of the conversation. But there also is, you know, the premier famously has said, you know, when you need to get these people with ODSP jobs, if you want a job, we're going to get you a job. That's good. But there are a lot of people that work is simply not possible, not in the way that we understand it in the current sort of neoliberal capitalism that we live in. There are folks who just can't because of disability. My question then is, so what then? Because at the moment, our answer is we will provide you enough to subsist, but we will not give you enough to actually survive. We won't give you enough to live a quality life. And I believe that most of us agree in our society that here in Ontario, that shouldn't be the case, that we should take care of people. That was what I was raised to believe as an Ontarian. I was raised to believe that those who can, give for those who can't. And that we take care of those people, that they should live a good life. Just because they're disabled shouldn't be a mandated poverty. It shouldn't be a mandate that they live an isolated life. I think there's a better way, but it means we all need to work together.

JOE
It's good economics.

JEFF
 Yeah. Yeah, in a lot of ways. I would argue the current system is wildly inefficient financially.

JOE
It doesn't make good business sense.

JEFF
 It doesn't. Not really. I mean, we spend a lot of money on a lot of things. I wonder how we're focusing our funding, how we're focusing where we put money. This is always a big question. I mean, a mentor of mine once famously said, if you want to understand what a society truly shares about, what they truly want and believe in, look where they put their money. Look where they spend their money. And I think that if we look at the Ontario government over the last 30 years, 40 years, give or take, I do not believe that the finances continue to reflect what we believe as a society. I don't believe that. I think that we have shifted these funding models to a point where our schools are underfunded, our hospitals are underfunded. I don't actually really seem to know where we're spending all of our money because it seems like the people in the most need are not the ones that are receiving it.

HOLLY
And on this topic, why do you think some of these programs tend to be underfunded when they represent our society's most vulnerable individuals?

JEFF
 Yeah, I mean, that's a really tough question. It's a really tough question. I would say in my experience, it becomes really easy to get trapped in the spreadsheets. I think that government officials often end up trapped in these spreadsheets where they're looking at numbers and they're trying to balance the books, right? And so to them, they say, well, geez, if we were to increase ODSP by $100 a month for every person at ODSP, that would be billions of dollars, right? And that would kill our finances. How would we survive that? I think that unfortunately there's another number here that plays, which is I don't believe that politicians see disabled people as a voting block. I don't think they see us as active political participants. And as a result, we are not a part of the political agenda. I can almost guarantee you there will not be a political party in the next provincial election that has a disability-related, accessibility-related platform front and center in their campaign. You might have health care in there. You'll probably get education in there. But I don't think you'll get a disability-specific platform. And so I think the other question, why is it underfunded? I think it's underfunded in part because it's not perceived as a place where votes come from.

JOE
Can I ask you a farming question?

JEFF
 Yeah.

JOE
Part of the work that I've been involved in with is urban agriculture. Accessible urban agriculture. For me, farming is independence. It's not readily accessible.

JEFF
 No. No, it's not.

JOE
But there are pillars of independence and accessibility. I don't know if it's something that you've studied or you have thoughts on.

JEFF
 Yeah.

JOE
But I would love to hear them.

JEFF
 I will say- so I like to play this game where I imagine what if I was born without a disability. And I try to follow it through and see sort of where my life would end up. And so I grew up in a small town, a rural town, a lot of farmers in the area. And one of those pathways that I imagine if I wasn't disabled, I actually think I may have been a farmer. Because there's a lot of stuff about the farm life that I do find very appealing. Right? Like the working with your hands, being out in the field, being outside. The hard work with the really obvious return on that sweat equity. Right? You know, you go out, you do your work in the field, and boom, you've got some great food that's coming back the other direction. A lot of those things I think are really good for my mind and the way that I kind of function. But farming was never an option for me as I was growing up. I looked at this and I said, this is a highly physical job. This is not something I'll be able to do. And so I've never really been involved really in farm work beyond, you know, I have some friends who have farms, been to farms. But I've never really been involved in farm work or even really necessarily growing things. Two summers ago, we did receive, we bought some raised planters. Not with the idea that maybe I could get my hands in there. I also learned that I don't like my hands being dirty. So I would have been a bad farmer.

Everyone [Laughter]

JEFF
 I think. Probably good that I didn't go that way. So there's a bit of a contradiction there. But I think that farming is such an interesting one where it's a very different way of thinking about accessibility and inclusion, right? So what does accessibility mean? Well, part of it is about, you know, I've raised planters, right? But that's the things that are able to go up and give people the ability to actually work with their hands in those spaces. But it also is about tool use, right? And so you look at, you know, urban agriculture, for instance, and all the varieties of tools and things that we've developed to be able to do a little farming in our backyards, to grow plants, edible or otherwise, whether it be, you know, small shovels. And there's a different tool for every different need when it comes to gardening. And so to me, I feel like that's a population who actually understands what disability is like in some ways, because it's people who see a physical problem and they invent a tool to try to resolve that issue, right? So it makes it easier for you to do the things you need to do in order to grow the plants. I would love to get some of those people on this question, right, and say, all right, so if you weren't able to use your hands, how would you maybe develop a tool that would allow you to pull weeds or, you know, make your little lines to put your seed in and that sort of thing. I would love to get those minds on this question, because I bet you they would develop some fascinating things to make it easier, right?

JOE
Right.

JEFF
 They're innovators.

JOE
Farmers are thoughtful.

JEFF
 Absolutely. Problem solvers. Just like disabled people, right?

JOE
Yep.

HOLLY
Oh, I love that a lot. What do you think about indoor farming? Have you had any experience in that? I'm curious.

JEFF
 I have killed every plant I've ever owned. In fact, these plants will likely die within several hours of me leaving today. So I'm sorry.

HOLLY
It's just your energy?.

JEFF
 It's just a vibe that I bring with me, I guess. So I've been very unsuccessful. Having said that, I think that there's something actually really beautiful about the people that are able to grow and cultivate plants within our home. I think there's a bit of a Zen kind of vibe to it in some ways, right? There's a routine to it. You see a product of your labor, which is something we don't get often in this world anymore, right? When you're like, oh, I did 18 spreadsheets today. I have no idea what that means. There's a tangibleness to it, which I think could be really healthy. It could really help us, grounds us in some ways. And so I think it would be phenomenal if we were able to help people to get better, but they got for running. And again, if you're living on ODSP, having the ability to actually supplement some of your own food, that's not a bad thing. Very helpful, in fact. 

HOLLY
Incredible skill set to be learning to grow indoors. Like it's kind of incredible. You can also, it's cool having other plants indoors that are not edible too. Cause it's like, wow, interesting.

JEFF
 It's color, right?

HOLLY
Yes.

JEFF
 I mean, when I was growing up, I grew up in a small town, and whenever I was stressed, we had a giant forest beside our house. And I spent most of my childhood in that forest. I mean, we were there all weekend. We were there all summer, building forts, fishing in the pond, playing hide and seek, playing tag, ripping around, exploring, right? And so, the forest really is a happy place for me, which is part of the reason why I love London, to be honest, because we're in a city. But you know, where I live, I'm steps away from the Thames River or Deshkan Ziibi, and it's a beautiful place to roll down, walk along the side of the river, and just have calm for a moment, right? I think that being surrounded by nature really is an amazing, calming influence in our life. It's hard to be upset when you're in nature. 

HOLLY
Hat is true. That is true. So much therapy.

JEFF
 Yeah.

HOLLY
Natural.

JEFF
 It's just good for us. It's just good for us, right?

HOLLY
It's so good, yeah. I have a couple other questions too. So, what policies or actions would you like to see to help the housing security to all of us who live in Canada?

JEFF
 Yeah, sure. Well, that's a good question. So, number one, I'm a huge supporter of the Age In Place Movement. And so, this is a philosophy that as we're building houses, we should be building houses that are, if not already, accessible. They've been designed in such a way that it's very easy to modify them to become accessible so that people don't have to leave their houses because they've become old and are no longer able to live there, right? A lot of people end up having to leave their homes when they get older because it's no longer accessible to their needs. So, what if we actually started designing houses that people didn't have to leave because they were able to modify them easily or they were already made that way? So, what if we just started standard, make it wider doorways? What if we ensured that every home had one grade entry into it? Just one. Just one that people could get into. So, I would love to see updates on the building code to require that at least the main floor of the buildings that we're building, of houses that we're building, are accessible. So, we're starting to add to the amount of houses that are either already accessible or easily convertible, right? I think that would be a huge step forward. I would love to see the city, they're doing this a little bit now, I'd love to see more of it where they're working with developers to increase the number of accessible units within builds. So, when they're building condos, when they're building apartments, let's get more accessible units in there. And if that means we need to wheel and deal with the developer a little bit, so, you know, you're going to add a few more actually accessible units, we'll let you go up an extra floor for your zone and area. I think that there's an opportunity there to actually work with the developers to make it worth their while to build more accessible units into these buildings as they're starting to come online. I would also love to see some funding for retrofit to allow people to renovate their homes so that they themselves are either able to stay in place or once they leave, they're going to leave behind them an accessible spot, right? And so, you know, every place that I've lived in London, I've left behind me an accessible unit, right? Because I've had to go in, I've had to modify, and I've left those modifications as I move on to the next. But unfortunately, disabled people are not crabs, and we can't just keep trade in our shells for that shell up, right? We need to actually start building real sustainable volume of accessible homes. And we can only really do that through funding and through building code.

JOE
A kind of a thought and a question mixed together, as most of my family are in construction. Accessible design is beautiful, but the word, the term accessible unit is less in vogue than an inaccessible unit.

JEFF
 Right.

JOE
You know, for somebody, for a developer or builder, to shake the tree and to give them a new thought ideology, how, in your opinion, is accessible design beautiful?

JEFF
 Oh, man. So to me, I think we often think of accessibility as checklists, right? And so we think of accessibility as a list of things. You've got to have a ramp. You've got to have a door that's wide. You've got to have this much turn space, like yada, yada, yada. And I'm not saying it's not. But I actually think that we need to update our philosophy of accessibility. That I think instead of thinking of accessible as a set of rigid standards, a one-size-fits-all, that rather we need to be thinking about module and flexible design instead. And I think that's actually something that designers can wrap their heads around, right? To say instead of building a space that's for one kind of person, what if we build a space that's for lots of different kinds of people? How can we imagine different levels of function entering in and moving through a space? Because for a designer, that's actually their work, right? That's what they're actually trained to do. What we haven't taught them to do, or rather what we haven't required them to do, is to change where the line is for a general use case, right? And so designers right now, when they think of a general use case, they're thinking of, quote, an average person, the 70 percent-ish of us that don't have a disability. I think that we actually need to flip it around and say that actual good design is design that is designed for those who are the most limited, because it will then ensure accessibility for those who are not. So rather than trying to design spaces that fit most people, let's design spaces that fit those with the most need, because everyone benefits. This is what we call a disability case, right? Which is when you do things for disabled people, it often actually leads to better experiences for the non-disabled. That's the paradigm shift we need to happen in the world of design, the world of construction, the world of development.

JOE
Can I ask you a math question?

JEFF
 Maybe. I'm terrible at math. I'm awful at math.

JOE
Can 100 percent of people use accessible design?

JEFF
 No.

JEFF
 Okay.

JEFF
 That's an easy math question, I would say. Because I also think that 100%, I don't want to get too philosophical, but I mean, it's snowy out, so let's talk philosophy.

JOE
Yeah, we can do that. We've talked math, we've talked farming, now we're on to philosophy.

JEFF
 Yeah, on to philosophy. So, you know, when we think about accessibility and get it to become 100% accessible, philosophical debate or, you know, thought experiment is 100% accessible, conceptually ableist in its nature, because it presumes a perfection, right? It presumes this top of the mountain that we should reach, that we should strive for, that perhaps instead of thinking about 100% accessible, instead perhaps we should be asking not what already exists, but rather how is the space able to change as different needs come in and go out? Because ultimately, paradoxically, these are accessibility paradoxes, which I love, which is when you make a space accessible for some, you inadvertently may have just made it inaccessible for someone else.

JOE
Right.

JEFF
 It's a paradox, right?

JOE
It's a paradox.

JEFF
 So curb cuts are a great example of this. So we need curb cuts for wheelchairs to get off sidewalks, right? Guess who needs curbs? People with low vision who are using the curb with their stick to know where the sidewalk ends and the road begins. So by making it accessible for wheelchairs, you've actually now reduced accessibility for some people with vision loss.

HOLLY
Interesting.

JEFF
 So now what do you do? Well, the engineers get at it, right? Let me try and find a new solution. So when you ask about this question of 100 percent accessibility, I would argue maybe that's actually fallen into this old trap of supremacy, which I think disability tries to push against, which is it's not about being perfect. It is about leaning on the skills that we have. It's about listening and it is about working together to try to find solutions. To me that's the truth of disability, and it's a story that gets lost in things like able-bodied supremacy, ablism, a lot of other supremacies which seek to optimize, to perfect the human body. I don't want a perfected body; my body is better because it's not perfect.

JOE
Thank you. We've covered a lot of things today.

JEFF
 Yeah! I've been all over the place!

JOE
Is there anything we missed?

JEFF
 Oh, man, well we haven't talked about sports, and that's always a thing. So we haven't talked about sports, I don't think, and we haven't talked really about relationships.

JOE
That's- OK.

JEFF
 And so maybe that would be a great place for us to end off.

HOLLY
Those are two- Those are two that we forgot.

JEFF
 Is to think about relationships.

JOE
Relationships.

JEFF
 I've been thinking a lot about relationships, but I think that they're important. And I feel like in this current cultural, socioeconomic, political moment that we're in right now, 2025, I think that relationships actually matter more than they have in a very, very long time. Because I think in the last five years, we have seen an erosion of our relationships, our relationships with each other, our relationships with the other, our relationships with neighbors, our relationships with the community. Our city relationships, our provincial relationships, even necessarily, I think our relationships with ourselves, understanding who we are, where we fit, what we want to be. And I worry that disabled people are sitting on the outside of many of these relationships, that it is a struggle at times to form and maintain relationships when you have a disability for lots of reasons. I mean, it's hard to maintain relationships when you don't have transit to go out and see your friends, for instance. Hard to maintain relationships when as soon as it snows, the sidewalks are no longer accessible for you, for months, potentially. But there's also this other issue, which is that ableism says that there are two kinds of people in the world. There are the disabled and there are the non-disabled. And often these two groups are not seen as being ones that should mix or intercede or intervene, right? We presume disabled people are happiest to best off with each other and that the non-disabled are happiest to best off on their own. And so what I actually think we really need to be talking about is inter-ability relationships and about how we actually bring these groups together and start to break down that division between the non-disabled and the disabled. How we don't have just disabled spaces and non-disabled spaces, disabled sports, non-disabled sports, right? How are we able to actually start to evade people in and break down some of those distinctions? And how do we start to open up the imagination of what relationships might be, right? So not just about befriending people with disabilities, but talk about dating people with disabilities. Talk about weddings and marriage and relationships and kids with disabilities, right? Talk about all of the ways that we interact with each other as people and asking ourselves, how many friends in your friend group have a disability? Is it a problem if there are none? What does that mean? And what does it mean if you yourself are afraid to have a friend with a disability? What if you've never met someone with a disability? You know, I'll share with you when I was an undergrad, I hired a person to work as a PSW for me. First-year student, she was 19 years old, and she disclosed after I hired her, I was the first person in a wheelchair she'd ever spoken to. 19 years old, right? And so I said, oh, you're about to be from a small town, a village? She said, oh, I'm from Toronto. I was like, oh yeah, that's a small town. I think there are no disabled people in Toronto.

JOE
Zero.

HOLLY
That's crazy.

JEFF
 I don't think there are any wheelchairs there. But it happens. It absolutely happens for a variety of reasons. But it's something that's happening less, and I'll tell you why. So in my first-year class, my first day of class at King's, I always ask the same question, which is, how many of you had a disabled student in your class? And when I started asking this question back in 2014, I would get three or four hands, maybe five, give or take. Now, one half of the class put their hand up and say that at some point in school, elementary or secondary, they had a disabled student that was in the class with them. And I think that helps, right? Meeting disabled people, getting involved in disability culture and community, I think helps to break down some of that stigma. But often it's a choice. It's a choice you have to make. And so why should you make that choice? Well, because frankly, disabled people are amazing.

HOLLY
They really are.

JEFF
 Very cool, very interesting, with a billion different backgrounds, a billion different interests, a billion different stories, a billion different experiences that you can not just learn from, but also find mutuality in. Because ultimately the disabled story is the story of humanity. It's the story that we all experience, which is not really knowing where we fit in the world, not really knowing what's coming next, but knowing that we want to do something, we want to be something, we want to be a part of this world that we live in. And to me, that's human. That's the human experience.

HOLLY
100%. 100%. Thank you so much. I've loved this conversation so much, but it's time for our final question. What keeps you growing?

JEFF
 Oh, spite, I would say.

HOLLY
That's my favorite answer so far.

JEFF
 Spite. Spite.

JOE
Let's hear it for spite?

JEFF
 Yeah, yeah, spite, I think is one of them. There have been numerous times where doctors have said, you're dead, you're going to die. Several times this has happened, and I'm still here, which I think means that I'm immortal. I don't know that I'm ever going to die. Which is great. I'm actually very happy about that.

JOE
Congratulations on immortality. That's very good.

JEFF
 It seems that's what the science is telling me at the moment. And anyway, I've long sort of joked. They say, you know, how do you do it? How do you keep on making it through these near misses? And I'm like, well, I'm really stubborn and I'm too spiteful, I think, to die. And so I think that spite has been a prime motivator in my life, in some sort of silly ways that, you know, people having lowered expectations for me has just meant that I want to far exceed those expectations. I'm totally the like, just watch me kind of person, right? And so, you know, having a teacher told me when I was younger, you know, you're not going to amount to much as a disabled person. It was just watch me. I'm going to send you a copy my dissertation when I'm done. You know, it was, you know, you're not going to get employed, you have a disability, just watch me. It's, oh, you're going to lose your friends when you get puberty because you have a disability, just watch me. And so, I think one of the things that really has sort of driven me forward is that I refuse to let ableism win. I will not do that. I cannot do that. And so, I'm going to spend my life beating down on ableism until I wrestle it into submission. And I might not win that fight and that's okay, but at least I'm going to tucker it out for the next pro wrestler that's coming behind me that's going to fly in from me afterwards. And hopefully they too will be driven by spite and then just absolute refusal to be all the things that people say that we are when we aren't.

JOE
You've changed my mind on spite.

HOLLY
Yeah, me too. I'm like positive about it.

JEFF
 There you go. There you go.

JOE
Where can people find out about the work that you're doing?

JEFF
 Oh, man. I'm terrifyingly easy to find on the internet. So, that's not great. So, find me really easily if you look for me online.

JOE
We'll put it in the footnotes.

JEFF
 But you'll find me at jeffpreston.ca. It's the blog that I've written for decades. Most recently, I have a podcast of my own called Invalid Culture. It's a podcast that's based on weird, strange, bad movies about disability that I find. I've been gathering during COVID. So, these are not the movies you've ever heard of before. These are weird things I've found.

HOLLY
Cool! I love that!

JEFF
 So, I bring people on, I torture them.

JOE
If you need an unqualified guest to talk about movies, sign me up.

JEFF
 I would love, I will find you a horrendous film. 

HOLLY
I would love that.

JOE
Crossover? I'm serious.

JEFF
 So, yeah, it's Invalid Culture. You can find us at invalidculture.com...

HOLLY
Amazing.

JEFF
 ...or wherever you cast your pods. And you'll find me in Kings University College in the Disability Studies program, teaching in the first year but also across the spectrum. And always out throwing stones at various organizations and government officials. Wherever I can cause trouble.

JOE
Yes. Wonderful.

HOLLY
Lovely!

JOE
Thank you so much.

HOLLY
So, so nice chatting with you.

JEFF
 Yeah, thanks for having me.

HOLLY
Thank you.

JEFF
 Thank you.

ADAM
If you like this show, please like and subscribe on YouTube and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're preparing a bunch of special extras for our fresh and nutritious newsletter subscribers. Sign up for free at growabilitypod.com. GrowAbility is hosted by Joe Gansevles and Holly Pugsley. Special thanks to this week's guest, Jeff Preston. Our show is produced by Adam Caplan, Joe Gansevles, and Holly Pugsley. Production support from Oliver Gansevles, Evan Gansevles, Scott Hohn, Kevin Labonte, Paul Rogers, Dorantina Uka, and Allan Williamson. Holly Pugsley of Just Keep Growing art directed this episode and made sure the plants looked great. Audience strategy by Dorantina Uka and Tess Alcock. Our theme music is Wandering William by Adrian Walther and can be found on Soundstripe. Adam Caplan, that's me, is web.isod.es Executive Producer, and Sammy Orlowski is our senior creator. Thanks to TechAlliance of Southwestern Ontario, including Farida Abdelnabi and Sarah Edmondson, for letting us shoot at their beautiful offices. Special thanks to Leanne Gansevles for the support and yummy food, Hubert Orlowski for helping our podcast sound great, and Gabor Sass for making some great introductions. GrowAbility is a web.isod.es Production and is produced with the support and participation of the team at The Patch and Hutton House.