Rodney Michalko

Dr. Rod Michalko

Rod Michalko, an early scholar of Disability Studies in Canada, writer, teacher, provocateur, and generous builder of an intellectual and caring community, died on August 14, 2026.

For more than five decades, Rod brought to his scholarly and creative work an unusual combination of theoretical sophistication, humour, curiosity, and attention to ordinary life. Blindness was a throughline in much of his work – – Rod made low vision, then legal blindness, and then complete blindness places of to live in, explore, and create from.

Since the 1970s, Rod writing was guided by the need to explore the meaning people made of blindness and the body of which he was particularly aware through his love of athletics. His MA thesis, Accomplishing the Sighted World (1976), and his PhD dissertation, The Ethnographic Possibility (1980), both completed at the University of British Columbia, mark the beginning of Rod’s life-long sociological and philosophical foray into the meaning made of blindness and sight as they are culturally produced. Some of this work includes The Mystery of the Eye and the Shadow of Blindness (1998), The Two-in-One: Walking with Smokie, Walking with Blindness (1999), and The Difference That Disability Makes (2002). His first collection of short stories, Things Are Different Here, appeared in 2017. Letters with Smokie: Blindness and More-than-Human Relations (2023) is a creative engagement with disability studies from the imagined perspective of Rod’s late guide dog, Smokie (1990-2001) talking with UK scholar and friend Dan Goodley.

Together with his partner of 38 years, Professor Tanya Titchkosky, writing, editing, teaching, arguing, pursuing pub-pedagogy and traveling with many disability studies students, Rod created spaces in which students could flourish and so too could Disability Studies. It was at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia where Rod and Tanya began to further their interests in disability studies through reading groups and course development. They edited one of the first disability studies readers in Canada, Rethinking Normalcy (2009). Rod wrote the Preface to a more recent reader, DisAppearing: Encounters in Disability Studies (2022). In January 2026, he and Tanya contributed a foreword to the second edition of Disability and the University: A Disabled Students’ Manifesto.

Rod wrote on his dictaphone, speaking his artful sentences with a flowing grace and deep gravelly voice; he wrote sometimes with others, mostly alone, but always he wrote, every morning, until the final weeks of his life. He leaves behind thousands of pages of unpublished work including a book length disability studies manuscript Double Trouble; three novels My Thick Persian Rug, as well as Hang on to your Hat and UK bound; a memoir The Life of THE and more than 30 essays and short stories. Since being diagnosed with lung cancer in September 2023, Rod wrote a long-essay about hospitalization and the life of illness, “Come Back to Us,” and a reflective essay, “To Disability Studies and Back Again” which was almost finished at the time of his passing. All this work draws out the creative potential that is found through exploring how we interpret our lives, with blindness leading the way.

Prior to his death, Rod learned that he had been nominated for the Society for Disability Studies life-time achievement award by colleagues and former students who understood his importance to the field. As Rod moved into his final days of life, Tanya read him the many letters written about his influence as a mentor and scholar. To be enveloped by the written words of others was a fitting living shroud of comfort right to the end. The lives and careers of former students were profoundly nurtured by Rod’s engagement. Borrowing from the words of those who nominated him for this award, Rod focused on relations and showed how they worked, how meaning was made “between people, between bodies and environments, between humans and animals, and between those marked as disabled and a sighted culture that often imagines itself as neutral and unmarked.” His work repeatedly asked us to notice the assumptions hidden inside ordinary relations. Writing about navigating streets, bars, classrooms, sidewalks, conversations, friendships, his work was theoretically demanding yet inviting and witty. Storytelling accomplished with humour is a defining characteristic of Rod’s scholarship and teaching.

This capacity to attend to the ordinary through humor and a theoretical search for meaning was all the more exercised as he knowingly approached his passing. And it was this same capacity that was nurtured by bluegrass and Celtic music – which Rod always sought out in small venues, such as with Houndstooth, then Strangetooth, at Tranzac in Toronto and, previously, in his home in Antigonish with Tanya where musicians often gathered and played.

He fought fiercely against the bureaucratization of life and this included the bureaucracies of  education and health care. It is unusual today to meet anyone who resists bureaucracy so thoroughly as did Rod. His writing and teaching — at the University of Calgary, at Camrose Alberta, at St. Francis Xavier in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and at York University and University of Toronto — showed that engagement with both ordinary and extraordinary experiences can lead to ways of  knowing, new ways of being and moving with others through the world, while also being a source of humour and creativity inviting us to imagine relations differently.

Rod Michalko’s body of scholarship will continue to challenge and provoke communities who wish to learn how to think differently, to question generously, and make intellectual life a form of friendship. He is survived by his partner Tanya Titchkosky; his brother Terry Michalkow and partner Tom; his nephew Kenny and niece Tammy and their children; as well as by his chosen families including nieces Ruby and Rosa Goodley.

Please use this link to share memories of Rod:
https://rodmichalko.ca/ 

1980: Rod Michalko, the first [known] blind student to receive a PhD from UBC, is hooded (UBC Archives Photograph Collection, UBC 41.1/793-1).  His MA Accomplishing the Sighted World (1976) was followed by The Ethnographic Possibility in 1980.

U of T Magazine — “Champion of Accessibility”

December 4, 2009, Rod Michalko, (Photograph Daniel Ehrenworth).