Disability/Accessibility 101

Guest speakers: Dr. Marjorie Aunos and Tea Gerbeza

Marjorie Aunos, PhD,  is a psychologist, researcher, professional speaker, and consultant on accessibility and inclusion. She teaches organizations to solution-find and build environments that are accessible, inclusive, and welcoming to families with disabilities. As a Disability Advocate, she speaks to educators and professionals about embracing change, social justice and our need to support our communities to enhance everyone’s resilience. As a psychologist, she applies a solution-focused mindset and concepts from Positive Psychology into the workforce, to enhance team cohesion and psychological safety. Marjorie is author of Mom on Wheels: The Power of Purpose as a Parent with Paraplegia, a contributing author to We Got This: Essays By Disabled Parents and an author and curator of Our Yellow Brick Road: An Anthology of Humans who believe in the power of storytelling. Her TEDx talk “What we can learn from parents with disabilities” has over 500 000 views.

Tea Gerbeza (she/her) is a queer disabled neurodivergent writer and multimedia artist. She has an MFA in Writing from the University of Saskatchewan and an MA in English & Creative Writing from the University of Regina. Most recently, her poem “Body of the Day” was a People’s Choice Award finalist in Contemporary Verse 2’s 2024 2-Day Poem Contest. She also made the longlist for Room magazine’s 2022 Short Forms contest. Tea won the Ex-Puritan’s 2022 Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence for poetry. New work appears in ARC magazine, Action, Spectacle, The Poetry Foundation, Wordgathering, and Contemporary Verse 2. Tea’s debut poetry book, How I Bend Into More, is forthcoming in 2025 with Palimpsest Press. Her writing and artwork typically combine poetry and paper quilling, focusing on themes of reclaiming disabled identity, disability justice, queer platonic friendships, and the complexities of pain. Tea is one of four Pain Poets. Find out more on teagerbeza.com

Moderated by Dr. Bridget Klest, PhD, a Clinical Associate Professor and Director of Clinical Training in the School of Psychological Science at Oregon State University. She serves as a mentor in the American Psychological Association Disability Mentorship Program, conducts research and advocacy work related to disability within institutions, and teaches an undergraduate psychology of disability course.