Congratulations to Stefan Sunandan Honisch on being awarded a SSHRC RGDI grant!



Photo by Will Francis on Unsplash

UBC Theatre and Film is proud to announce that Honorary Research Associate and Sessional Lecturer Stefan Sunandan Honisch is Co-Director for the project “Facilitating Anti-Ableist Remote Music Making”, which has recently been awarded a SSHRC Race, Gender and Diversity Initiative grant!

The SSHRC Race, Gender and Diversity Initiative supports community-led and community-based research partnerships and activities that work towards removing barriers for underrepresented and disadvantaged groups. 

“Facilitating Anti-Ableist Remote Music Making” is led by Adam Bell (University of Calgary) and seeks to address the ways that the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the inequalities experienced by disabled people. Using digital ethnography and multisensory storytelling approaches, the project aims to produce accessible remote music making activities and examine how they express intersectional disability experiences. 

The project is a partnership between Blurring the Boundaries, Kickstart Disability Arts and Culture, National accessArts Centre, the University of British Columbia, the University of Calgary and Toronto Metropolitan University, with support from St. John’s College and the UBC Department of Theatre and Film.

A full list of project collaborators can be found on the SSHRC Race, Gender and Diversity Initiative Award Recipients page.


Stefan Sunandan Honisch is an Honorary Research Associate and Sessional Lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Film. He previously held a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship within the same department. He is Co-Director of the SSHRC Race, Gender and Diversity Initiative grant, “Facilitating Anti-Ableist Remote Music Making” (Director: Adam Bell), and Co-Applicant for the SSHRC Partnership Development Grant, “Canadian Accessible Musical Instruments Network” (Applicant: Adam Bell).

Honisch has published in such journals as Music Theory Online, Journal of Inclusive Education, Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies and Journal of Teaching Disability Studies, with a forthcoming co-authored article in Theory & Event. Honisch has also contributed book and recording reviews to Journal of Musicological Research and Nineteenth-Century Music Review, chapters to The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body, Transnational Horror Cinema, and Defining the Boundaries of Disability. In addition to his research, Honisch remains active as a freelance musician and serves on various boards and committees.