Megan Linton

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Megan Linton is a disabled writer, researcher, PhD student and creator of Invisible Institutions, a documentary podcast and research project exploring the past and present of institutions for people labelled with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Canada. Find her on Twitter at @PinkCaneRedLip.

  • Magazine

    “Health is capitalism’s vulnerability”

    by Megan Linton   Mar 1, 2023   10 min read

    An interview with Beatrice Adler-Bolton on her new book “Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto”

  • A photograph of gravestones on the grounds of Huronia. The gavestones are long, thin gray stones with only a number at the top. They are set into a concrete pad close together, nestled next to each other on the ground.
    Magazine

    Class inaction

    by Megan Linton   Nov 1, 2022   15 min read

    Survivors are speaking up about the abuse they endured in Canada’s government-run institutions for disabled people. Class-action lawsuits promise them justice – but can they deliver?

  • Three photos of unappetizing-looking food: a cheese sandwich made from untoasted bread and unmelted cheese; petrified scrambled eggs and a pale hash brown; and unidentifiable green and brown gruel.
    Magazine

    “We are fed the same way caged animals are”

    by Megan Linton   Sep 7, 2022   9 min read

    To understand what life is like along the “continuum of confinement,” three people living in prisons and long-term care homes share the food they have eaten and eat every day.

  • Digital illustration of a hospital room with the focus on a pornographic scene playing on a wall-mounted television, from the perspective of a viewer next to the hospital bed. Also shown is the lower half of a person's body covered in blankets on the bed, a window with lowered curtain, a closed door, and a vital signs monitor.
    Magazine

    Fighting for the right to fuck

    by Vicky Levack and Megan Linton   Sep 7, 2022   10 min read

    For more than a century, eugenicists have tried to eliminate disabled people through sexual sterilization. Today, disabled people’s sex lives are still surveilled, suppressed, and punished in institutions.

  • A group of disabled queer Black folks talk and laugh at a sleepover, relaxing across two large beds. Everyone is dressed in colorful t-shirts and wearing a variety of sleep scarves, bonnets, and durags. On the left, two friends sit on one bed and paint each other’s nails. On the right, four people lounge on a bed: one person braids another’s hair while the third friend wearing a C-PAP mask laughs, and the fourth person looks up from their book. In the center, a bedside lamp illuminates the room in warm light while pill bottles adorn an end table.
    Online-only

    Abolish long-term care

    by Sophie Jin and Megan Linton   Jan 25, 2022   7 min read

    We don’t need to confine elderly and disabled people to deadly and dehumanizing institutions. What if they lived in the community and received at-home care from a support worker?

  • Magazine

    A penny a poppy

    by Megan Linton   Nov 4, 2021   11 min read

    Millions of Canada’s plastic Remembrance Day poppies have been made by prisoners and people labelled with intellectual/developmental disabilities, who are paid pennies on the hour. It’s part of a long history of prisons and institutions using poverty to control disabled and criminalized workers.

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