SDS 2015 “getting it-right/s” (Atlanta, GA)
The program committee of the 28th annual meeting of the Society for Disability Studies invites you to consider the multiple and significant possibilities at the intersections of disability and (getting it) right/s.
Disability as/is a civil right, a human right, a social right, an economic right, an educational right, a medical right, a sexual right, an employment right, a voting right, a representational right. All of these, and more. Communities and advocates – locally, nationally, transnationally – have been making efforts to get/gain rights, including recognition, legal and/or cultural; and trying, also, toget it right–to address, analyze, reclaim, revise, redress, recover disability representations in literature, culture, politics, and history. The diversity of global articulations of rights; the emergence of critiques of rights frameworks; and transnational developments such as the recent use of language from the American Disabilities Act in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities — UNCRPD, present the field of Disability Studies, whose growth has paralleled these trends, with an opportunity to consider disability rights in all of its complexities:
When has disability, or its likeness, been considered within grassroots advocacy movements in political geographies around the globe, including nation-states and indigenous governmentalities, and in regional, local, comparative perspectives? When does disability, or its likeness, enter state law, and under what conditions? How have recent or former projects, languages, questions, policies, issues, movements, and events about disability emerged, traveled, and been contested? What conditions allow national laws to migrate transnationally? Are there shifts in the popular emergence and circulation of disability values, and are these shifts expressed with specific forms of representation? How and where has disability politics allied with, or against, “human rights” and/or decolonial frameworks? How have activists and artists crippled state-sanctioned uses of disability?
As you plan your proposal for participation in the 2015 conference, we offer these broad intersectional and interdisciplinary questions that emerge from a critical engagement with disability and getting (it) right/s:
We welcome proposals in all areas of disability studies, but especially those submissions premised on this year’s theme.
Proposals for sds atlanta 2015 are due: monday, december 8, 2014
For more details on the conference see: http://disstudies.org/conferences/atlanta-2015/cfp
Please direct CFP related inquiries to SDSCONF15@GMAIL.COM
Canadian Disability Studies Association – Association Canadienne des Études sur l’Incapacité
2015 Conference “Capital Ideas”
2015 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Tuesday, June 2 – Thursday, June 4, 2015
See the website for conference information: http://www.cdsa-acei.ca/conference.html
DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACT SUBMISSIONS: December 15, 2014
“There is no longer, there never was, a single capital, nor a single capitalism, only capitalisms—state or private, real or symbolic, always linked to spectral forces—capitalizations whose antagonisms are irreducible.”[1]
Capital has many different meanings. The meanings of capital range from the most important place in a region, to a place associated with an activity or product, to wealth and the people who possess wealth, or a valuable resource of a particular kind, to characteristics of significance, excellence, and expanse. Capital can also be understood as an adjective that expresses approval, satisfaction or delight.
This year’s conference explores capital, capitalisms, capitalizations and the “spectral forces”— the social, cultural, political, historical and economic conditions—that have informed the development of “capital ideas” regarding disability and disability studies. The Canadian Disability Studies Association-Association Canadienne des Études sur l’Incapacité (CDSA-ACEI) invites abstracts that explicate the many meanings of capital as made to appear in relation with disability; that consider what is and is not capitalized (or treated as important) within disability studies and fields that study disability; and that trace the institutions and processes involved in the materialization of privileged ways of knowing, communicating, doing, being and feeling. CDSA-ACEI calls for works that examine the following question:
WHAT IDEAS, PRACTICES AND APPROACHES HAVE SHAPED HOW DISABILITY IS UNDERSTOOD?
Prospective presenters may want to consider the following questions: What disability ideas, approaches and paradigms are centred and celebrated as innovative? What breaks, disruptions and antagonisms have shaped what is treated as important within the field of disability studies? What ideas get circulated, and how are they circulated? How do academic disciplines get capitalized (and marginalized) within the university? Which bodies, minds, senses, emotions and names are capitalized as timely and worthy of attention? What role do diagnostic and bureaucratic forms of expertise play in their capitalization? What spaces and places take priority in work within disability studies research, education, art and activism? What (and whose) futures are imagined as capital futures, and what values and assumptions are capitalized in their pursuit?
CDSA-ACEI invites abstract submissions for papers to be presented at the 12th annual conference to be held at University of Ottawa. Our CDSA-ACEI meeting is part of the Congress 2015 of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Works and works in progress may take the form of reflections, empirical studies, statistical analyses, theorizing, cultural critique, methodological developments, professional or pedagogical interventions, and artistic, activist and performance pieces.
CDSA-ACEI’s 2015 conference theme “Capital Ideas” reflects the overall Congress theme. All abstracts that reflect disability studies, Deaf studies and mad studies perspectives are welcomed, and abstracts that demonstrate a connection to the theme “Capital Ideas” will be given special consideration. This year’s conference will directly address the development of disability studies as a scholarly field, an assemblage of artistic and activist interventions, and professional pursuits as well as a space that supports disabled people in realizing aspirations outside of the field itself. Questions of knowledge, education, training, professional development and employment will be addressed in featured panels in the conference program.
This call for abstracts also extends a special invitation to community members and undergraduate students to submit abstracts for works and works in progress. Instructors, professors and community leaders are encouraged to share the call with their students, colleagues and comrades, and co-submit where appropriate. Submissions are peer-reviewed by panels composed of university and college faculty and students and community members.
CDSA-ACEI is pleased to announce that as part of the conference program, Dr. Jay Dolmage, University of Waterloo, will deliver a keynote presentation titled, “Capital Ideas: Disabling Studies, Disability Studied, Disability Studies.”
All submissions must identify which of the following thematic streams their abstract falls into:
1. OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
- Abstracts that share explorations within the fields of disability studies, Deaf studies and mad studies or that adopt these perspectives but may not directly relate to the overarching conference theme of “Capital Ideas.”
This subtheme broadly explores the ideas and institutions that shape how disability is understood. We welcome submissions exploring:
- Disability and the law
- Disability and the family
- Disability and education
- Disability at work (e.g., employment, workplace accommodations, educational, skills and professional development programs for disabled workers)
- Disability and religion/spirituality
- Disability and institutionalization/incarceration and deinstitutionalization/decarceration (e.g., custodial, residential and community-based long term care)
This subtheme broadly explores currencies of belonging and becoming. We welcome submissions exploring:
- Cultural currencies and counterfeits (e.g., passing)
- Disability and social capital/cultural capital
- Disability and affect
- Disability and language
- Disability, race and ethnicity
- Disability, gender and sexuality
- Disability and age/ing/ism
- Disability and fashion/fitness/style
- Disability and sport
4. Capital Centres, Peripheries and Flows
This subtheme broadly explores how disability is located and dis/dys/re-located. We welcome submissions exploring disability as made to appear within the context of:
- Capital technologies and flows of communication
- Processes of knowledge integration/exchange/translation/mobilization
- (Trans)nationalism/cosmopolitanism
- Diasporas, colonial continuums and post-/anti-colonial critiques
- Transportation/travel/tourism
- Environmental sustainability/sustainable development
- Futurity, Utopias and/or dis/dystopias
5. Capital Regimes
This subtheme broadly explores how disability is both capitalized and resisted in and by various structures, systems and knowledge regimes. We welcome submissions exploring:
- Disability and social and/or health policy and recommended practices
- Disability as it relates to processes of securitization and/or militarization
- Disability, imperialism, financialization and privatization
- Disability and neoliberalism
- Disability and humanitarianism/social activism
- Disability research and/or (bio)ethics
Submission Guidelines Available on the Conference Website
[1] Derrida, J. (1993). Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning & the new international (pp. 101-102).Paris: Éditions Galileé.
Canadian Sociological Association, May 30th – June 5th
Pleasures, Sexualities and Disabilities Session at Congress 2015 in Ottawa
Deadline for abstract submissions: February 2nd 2015
We would truly appreciate if you could please share with your students our call for papers for a session on disability and sexuality that will take place at the next Canadian Sociological Association meeting during Congress. We would love to have students from Disability Studies.
Pleasures, Sexualities, and Disabilities: Challenging Perceptions, Igniting Desires.
Session Description: This session aims to contribute to current sociological discussions on the sexual rights and experiences of disabled people by challenging persistent misconceptions. We invite papers that address the actual sexual and romantic lived experiences of disabled people, and interrogate the structural inequalities that shape those experiences. We are particularly interested in papers that make space for disabled people’s perspectives on sexualities, pleasures and desires, and challenge, subvert, and celebrate sex, sexuality, and romance.
Submissions that engage with intersectionality (e.g. race, gender, social class) in order to provide a richer picture, and that use inter- and cross-disciplinary perspectives and theoretical frameworks are welcomed.
Some possible avenues of inquiry are:
representations of disabilities and sexualities in social media, visual images, music, narratives; eroticism, language, and body image; genders, queerness, transness, marginalized sexualities; research and policy; constructions of disabilities and sexualities; alternative ways to engage with sexualities; experiences of caregivers: facilitating or preventing sexual expression; and information, supports, and barriers to sexual education and participation, including romantic relationships.
For more information:
May 19-22, 2015
Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology, The University of Texas at Dallas
Keynote Speaker:
Author of *Beyond Epistemology: A Pragmatist Approach to Feminist Science Studies*
Science, technology, and medicine have a major impact on our lives. We live with constant technological innovation and scientific discovery, and this changes the conditions that we live in, as well as the way we understand ourselves and the world around us. Science, technology, and medicine are thus entangled with our values, our culture, and our politics, and they have an important impact on policymaking and action. Making value judgments is important to the way that we fund, conduct, evaluate, and apply scientific research.
We invite proposals for papers that engage with these issues from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical approaches, including philosophy of science, technology, & medicine, epistemology, ethics and political philosophy, history, science and technology studies, policy studies, and natural and social sciences.
This year’s conference will have three target themes:
1. Gender, sex, and sexuality in science, technology, and medicine
2. Science and values in the work of Paul K. Feyerabend, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of *Against Method*
3. Distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate roles for values in science
We welcome any paper and panel proposals in the broad area of values in medicine, science, and technology, but we will give priority to proposals on these target themes.
Suggested topics for papers and panels include:
* The value of diversity in epistemic communities
* Sexism, heterosexism, or transphobia in technology culture
* Sex and gender in medical research or practice
* Feminist critique of gender differences research
* Feyerbend’s relationship to feminist philosophy of science
* Feyerabend on science, values, and democracy
* The indirect/direct role distinction
* The ideal of well-ordered science
* The cognitive status of values and value judgments
We will consider proposals for individual papers, but also thematic panel sessions and more informal formats. Please feel free to contact us early to discuss potential panel formats at values@utdallas.edu.
For contributed papers, please submit a 250-500 word abstract. For symposia and other multi-participant panels, submit an abstract up to 250 words describing the topic of the panel and descriptions of up to 100 words describing each participant’s contribution.
Submit your proposals here: http://tinyurl.com/ScienceValues2015
Please do not submit more than once for each presentation format (so you can submit as part of a group symposium as well as an individual paper, but not two papers). Participants will generally only be able to appear on the program once in any capacity. Papers that are not accepted for presentation will be automatically considered in our open roundtables session.
**Deadline is 1st of February 2015**
The Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology works to foster diversity and inclusiveness in our programming, events, and outreach efforts. Proposal authors and panel organizers will be asked to submit an optional 50-100 word diversity statement to explain their commitment and contributions to diversity in their proposal and in general. Conference proposals will be reviewed for quality, but final programming decisions will be made with diversity and inclusiveness in mind. Contributed paper proposals will be anonymously reviewed at all stages, whereas final decisions on organized panel proposals may consider identity of the panelists.
Conference facilities will be wheelchair accessible, and interpreters for the deaf and hard of hearing can be provided upon request. For any questions about the conference, please contact values@utdallas.edu.
The Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology is an institutional member of the Consortium for Socially Relevant Philosophy of/in Science and/or Engineering (SRPoiSE).
Disability Studies In Education: What It Is, Who Decides, and Why It Matters
Fourteenth Annual Second City DSE Conference
National Louis University in Chicago
April 14-15, 2015
CFP: Abstract proposals due February 16, 2015, a Monday….special education is not a solution to the “problem” of disability, it is the problem. (Linton, 2006, p. 161)Theme:
What is disability studies in education? Who makes decisions about what it is, what it involves, what kind of research and scholarship it entails? And why does it matter?
It could be argued that there have been two waves of scholarship and research in the still nascent field we’ve come to call disability studies in education. The first wave came before disability studies was a thing (Taylor, 2006), and was undertaken by a variety of people critical of special education. The second, most recent wave, began in 1999, with a meeting at TASH, the formation of an AERA Special Interest Group, and the creation of an international conference on the topic held each year since then. This second wave is old enough to have had some histories written about it – and as with all histories, they establish a dominant discourse, boundaries of the field, and scope of questions to be asked.
It could be argued that a third wave of disability studies in education is in the offing, or has already begun. What will this third wave look like? What will its dominant discourse be? To whom will it be accountable? What research and scholarship interests will it explore? What questions will it ask? Will it (and if so, how) problematize the work of first and second wave disability studies in education projects? And what activist projects will it undertake?
Please join us to talk about these and other revolutionary and subversive topics of disability studies in education as the Second City DSE Conference comes back to its Chicago roots. Preference is given to items relating to the theme, but your work likely relates to it at least loosely, or can be located in one of the waves.
Details:
To THIS EMAIL ACCOUNT (click here), please send your one-page abstract with separate cover page including: title, list of presenters, institutional affiliations (if any), and email contact info. Deadline is Monday, February 16th, 2015.
Authors will be notified of acceptance status before the end of February. Successful proposals will be reprinted in the program as submitted. Thank you very much for your participation!
We look forward to seeing you in Chicago, and making history together.
The Fifteenth Annual Multiple Perspectives on Access, Inclusion & Disability:
April 13 – 14, 2015
The Multiple Perspectives conference is an ongoing exploration of disability as a reflection of the human condition seen through multiple lenses (theory, discipline, social constructs, personal experience, shared experience…). Presentations should encourage conversations across the typical divisions, boundaries and disciplines. Proposers are encouraged to consider parallels, distinctions and intersections with race, gender and ethnicity. This year’s conference will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the ADA -out progress and the journey ahead. What have we learned? Where are we going? What are the important questions for the next 25 years?
The Multiple Perspectives Conference is hosted by Ohio State University’s ADA Coordinator’s Office is made possible thanks to the generosity of the Ethel Louise Armstrong Foundation Endowment Fund and ongoing support from The Ohio State University’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion and the Center for Disability Empowerment.
Proposals are due January 5th, 2015
Visit http://ada.osu.edu/confe…/2015Conf/callforproposals2015.html for submission details.
Everything Is Not Going to Be Okay: Optimism in the Age of Catastrophe
Graduate Conference at the Comparative Literature Department at UB
Conference Date: April 10th
Deadline for submission of abstracts: January 27th 2015
Please send your abstracts (300 words) to not.okay2015@gmail.com
https://notokay2015.wordpress.com/about/
“Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good… so far so good… so far so good.”
– Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine (1995)
Everyone – politicians, Disney films, pop songs, our therapists, friends and professors – keep telling us things will turn out alright, while almost every scientific report and every other news article we read counters that notion. Political activists are encouraged to affect change with smiles on their faces and cancer patients are asked to “fight” their disease with positive thinking. Obama’s promises of hope and change spoke to the fears and desires of many, even though his campaign poster showed him looking in no specific direction at all. Everywhere we encounter the elusive message that we all share some common goal and that we’re all in the same boat. However, as Lauren Berlant discusses in her book, Cruel Optimism, people live in a state of “crisis ordinariness”, where crisis “is not exceptional to history or consciousness but a process embedded in the ordinary[.]” What does the promise that everything is going to be okay refer to? What is its temporal dimension? Have things ever been okay? How does hope operate? What makes us cling to it? Is there any way of surviving without it? Or is there enjoyment in giving in to the death drive? Is there perverse pleasure in resignation?
We think of catastrophe as a new mode of producing or gaining knowledge. It seems to us that catastrophe might not be accompanied solely by negative effects – and affects – but that it can change the ways in which we conceive binaries: ability/disability, human/nonhuman relations, trauma/non trauma, culture/nature. The question “what comes after hope?” (posed by Jack Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure) opens up new possibilities in thinking about catastrophe. How can we define the relation between hope and revolution? How can we conceive of the space between overbearing optimism and disabling alarmism? Is there room for radical change at times of catastrophe?
Conference Keynote Speaker: Elisabeth Anker, assistant professor of American Studies and Political Science at the George Washington University, author of Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Duke, 2014)
We welcome papers from the following areas, but not limited to those:
disability studies
critical race theory
queer theory
gender studies
ecocriticism and environmental studies
postcolonial studies
psychoanalysis
literary theory
film and media studies
6th international METABODY Conference
March 5-6, 2015
Bauhaus University
Weimar, Germany
Affordances of Symbiosis – Rethinking interaction and the immeasurable
potential of the body in the age of ubiquitous computing
The Mouse has been in use for the last 50 years as the main interaction
device of the computer. Although HCI has been well-established as a branch
of study starting from 80’s, only lately did our relation to computers
start changing with mobile devices’ touch screens. Meanwhile, computing
has become ubiquitous and, while still imprecise, increasingly we are
interacting with them based on bodily control, from public doors to TV
control to interactive art works.
The teapot has a handle, the mouse has a shape that fits in the palm, books
have pages to turn, while computer interaction is becoming increasingly
based not only on physical objects that reduce movement to very discrete
traceable parameters, but on bodily gestures captured by cameras and
sensors.
How can we reinvent affordances of the body in its continuous motion while
challenging the reductive approach of ubiquitous computing?
Software is re-shaping the 21st century’s concept of the body. It is
converting it into an object of measurement and calculation, reducing it to
numbers. At the same time, machine perception of the body may blur the
boundary between “normal” and “abnormal”. Reflecting on disability, we
question the premise of software. From this perspective, what is commonly
referred to as disability, with all of its “negative” implications, becomes
a positive quality of difference and plurality. It is an appreciation of
the body for its yet unknown qualities; for what it can do, instead of what
it is.
We are asking if a new definition of body — one which removes the
boundaries between normal and abnormal, able and disabled, measurable and
immeasurable — can be based on a redefinition of affordances. Affordance
as the indeterminate potential of the body to move in yet unthinkable ways.
Affordance as an open-ended potential of relation.
How can we facilitate such affordances in our deterministic and
probabilistic world of ubiquitous control? “What can a body do?” becomes,
“What can the affordances of the body become”, understood as motion and
relation, as openended potential, as relational ecologies, in our symbiotic
life.
Topics:
– rethinking digital/physical affordances in the posthuman/cybernetic era
– digital affordances, ubiquitous surveillance and control – affordances
of capture and prediction
– digital affordances and movement capture/reduction – the interface
– digital affordances and affective production – emoticon culture and
ubiquitous commercial music
– Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, AI, robotics, videogaming –
affordances of simulation
– screens, keyboards, mouses, cameras – expanding the renaissance
paradigm & control affordances
– visual affordances and the fixation of perception
– manual affordances and subjective control
– ubiquitous computing and mobile devices – invisible affordances of
control
– perceptual history of digital affordances, from Greek theatre
architecture and Euclidean geometry, to Renaissance perspective, cameras,
mechanism and information.
– wearables, internet of things, smart homes and the new landscape of
digital affordances – the new revolution of control and ubiquitous
surveillance
– genetics and epigenetics as evolutionary potentials for interaction
– nanoaffordances
– embodiment in the digital era – software and hardware as embodied
affordances
– perceptual affordances and sensory hierarchies: vision, hearing,
touch, crossmodal and multimodal approaches
– enactive cognition and affordance theories
– affordances and embodied knowledge
– interaction and intra-action in affordance-design
– towards a new ecology of affordances – ethics of perception beyond
visual domination
– diffuse/indeterminate affordances and openended relational ecologies
– towards an architecture of indeterminate affordances
– non-functional design, indeterminate architecture and diffuse
affordances
– interaction, palpability and synaesthesia
– affordances of crossmodal sensing
– interactive environments and inclusion
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and a
widely recognized author. She is a professor at the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she teaches performance studies and disability
studies, and she is on the faculty of Washington State’s Goddard College
MFA program in Interdisciplinary Arts. She is the Artistic Director of The
Olimpias, an artists’ collective that creates collaborative,
research-focused environments open to people with physical, emotional,
sensory and cognitive differences and their allies. Her book about The
Olimpias arts-based research practices, “Disability Culture and Community
Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape,” won the biennial Sally
Banes Award from the American Association for Theatre Research.
Susan Kozel is a dancer, choreographer and philosopher working at the convergence of
performance and digital technologies. She is Professor of New Media with
the MEDEA Collaborative Media Initiative and K3 at the University of Malmö,
Sweden, and is the director of Mesh Performance Practices. She has
published and performed widely. Her writing includes Closer: performance,
technologies, phenomenology (MIT Press 2007) and recent pieces on artistic
research, ubiquitous computing, mobile media, and bodily expression in
electronic music.
SUBMISSIONS:
Please send an abstract of your submission, along with a short biography,
to: conference@metabody.eu.
Submission Deadline: February 10, 2015
COMICS AND MEDICINE 6THINTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE: SPACES OF CARE
16th – 18th July 2015
Culver Arts Center
University of California, Riverside
http://www.graphicmedicine.org/comics-and-medicine-conferences/2015-riverside-conference/
Theme
The theme of this year’s conference, Spaces of Care, invites us to think about space as a critical element in health care and comics. Receiving medical treatment can affect how we relate to and interact with each other and our environments. Medical care is often thought of as taking place primarily in clinical spaces. A strength of comics is their ability to visualize care beyond these settings to include geographic, physical, ideological, imaginative, temporal, and social spaces.
Call for Papers
We invite the submission of a wide variety of abstracts focusing on medicine and comics in any form (e.g. graphic novels, comic strips, manga, web comics) that examine topics including, but not limited to:
- Comics depictions of architecture and design and their impact on illness and disability
- Comics representations of physical spaces that impact the delivery of medical care
- Use of comics to imagine new spaces for well-being and care
- The use of comics in creating internal bodily spaces in medical education and illustration
- The materiality of comics as a space for expressing or demonstrating care
- The use of space in comics to evoke intersubjective understandings of health and illness narratives
- The use of comics to visualize geographical, ideological, and/or political boundaries and access to medical therapies
- Ethical implications of creating comics for patients, physicians, or institutions
- Trends in, histories of, or the use of comics in healthcare
- The interface of graphic medicine and popular culture
Formats
- Lightning talks: 5-minute presentations with up to 15 slides. This format is meant to encourage submission of short presentations to share your work (e.g. comics, new research projects, new ideas) in a concise format.
- Oral presentations: 15- to 20-minute presentations.
- Panel discussions: 90-minute interviews or presentations by a panel of speakers
- Workshops: 90-minute sessions intended to be “hands-on” interactive workshops for participants who wish to obtain particular skills with regard to comics and medicine. Suggested subjects for workshops are:
- creating comics
- understanding, reviewing and critiquing comics
- getting comics published
- teaching and learning with comics
Submission Process
Proposals may be in Word, PDF, or RTF formats with the following information in this order:
- author(s)
- affiliation
- email address
- phone number
- title of abstract
- body of abstract
- sample images or weblinks to work being discussed
- presentation preference (see choice above)
- equipment needed (e.g. AV projection, whiteboard, easel, etc.)
300-word proposals should be submitted online by Friday, January 30, 2015 to: graphic.medicine.conference@gmail.com
Abstracts will be peer-reviewed by an interdisciplinary selection committee. Notification of acceptance or rejection will be completed by the week of March 30th, 2015. While we cannot guarantee that presenters will receive their first choice of presentation format, we will attempt to honor preferences, and we will acknowledge the receipt of all proposals.
Please note: Presenters are responsible for session expenses (e.g. handouts and supplies) and personal expenses (travel, hotel, and registration fees). All presenters must register for the conference.
Disability and Disciplines: The International Conference on Educational, Cultural, and Disability Studies
1-2 July, 2015
Centre for Culture and Disability Studies, Faculty of Education, Liverpool Hope University
Keynote Speakers:
Julie Allan (University of Birmingham, UK)
Peter Beresford (Brunel University London, UK)
David Mitchell (George Washington University, USA)
Sharon Snyder (George Washington University, USA)
When we think of disability in Higher Education we are likely to think in terms of access, Learning Support Plans, and so on. These and other such things are of great importance but only represent part of the approach proposed at the biennial CCDS conference. What we explore is a more complex understanding of disability that challenges assumptions and prejudicial actions but also recognises qualities and positivity. While inclusive education is generally an improvement on integration and segregation, it often constitutes little more than what, in The Biopolitics of Disability (2015), David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder call a weakened strain of inclusionism. Until disability is recognised in the context of alternative lives and values that neither enforce nor reify normalcy we cannot truly encounter the material and ethical alternatives disabled lives engage. Inclusion may well be a legal requirement in some parts of the world, and perhaps a moral imperative everywhere, but it is also an educational opportunity. Not only students but also staff who identify as disabled should, as Mitchell and Snyder assert, recognize this peripheral embodiment as something to be cultivated as a form of alternative expertise, meaning that disability can become an active, unabashed, and less stigmatising part of classroom discourse. The aim of this biennial conference, then, is to encourage the transformation of academic disciplines by appreciating rather than avoiding disability.
The keynote presentations have now been confirmed:
• ‘The Arts and Inclusive Imagination: Spaces for Civic Engagement’, Julie Allan
• ‘From Psychiatry to Disability Studies and Mad Studies: Exploring Uncharted Relationships’, Peter Beresford
• ‘The Crip Art of Failure in Education’, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder
We welcome proposals from professors, lecturers, students, and other interested parties for papers that explore the benefits of interdisciplinarity between Disability Studies and subjects such as Aesthetics, Art, Business Studies, Creative Writing, Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Holocaust Studies, International Studies, Literary Studies, Literacy Studies, Management Studies, Media Studies, Medical Humanities, Museum Studies, Philosophy, Professional Studies, Special Educational Needs, and Technology. This list is meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive.
Some anticipated panels include:
• The Art of Disability: Disability Studies and the Arts
• Medical Matters: Disability Studies and Medical Humanities
• Learning to Read People: Disability Studies and Children’s Fiction
• Beyond the Rhetoric of Inclusion: Disability Studies and Special Educational Needs
• Telling Stories: Disability Studies and Creative Writing
Paper proposals of 150-200 words should be sent to disciplines@hope.ac.uk on or before 1 February, 2015.
Paper presentations are allocated 20 minute slots and themed panels of 3 papers are also encouraged.
For booking information, please visit:
http://store.hope.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&deptid=25&catid=127&prodid=170
International Journal on Christianity and Education (IJCE)
Call for Articles: Special issue on Disability
Disability and the experience of impairment is a significant theme in the Bible. Jesus’ healing of people with disabilities is seen as a miraculous act, many figures in the Bible had disabilities, and sometimes impairment is used as a punishment for immoral acts. In addition, disabilities such as blindness, deafness, mental illness and impaired limbs are seen as an important moral and practical issue by many Christians today and a number of churches see the curing of people who are ill or experience disability as part of their worship life. Therefore, it could be argued that the study of disability is a fundamental component of Christian ethics.
Furthermore, given Christianity’s status as a world religion, Christians are born with disabilities, raised and experience disabilities later in life in a number of different cultural and educational settings. In accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Disabled Person, people with disabilities have as much right to educational and cultural inclusion as their able-bodied peers. This can present a number of challenges to the pedagogy of teachers of students with identified disabilities, and the support and educational experiences of Christian students and teachers with disabilities.
In scholarly literature, the perception of disability in Christianity is also a significant topic of discussion, and a number of authors have raised theological questions about the received wisdom on disability. For example, a number of traditional disability theorists, such as Colin Barnes and Geoff Mercer, have claimed that the Bible discriminates against disability and people with disabilities, and argued that Christianity represents impairment, difference and diversity negatively. Authors such as the theologian and religious educator John Hull, who is blind, have also argued that from the point of view of a person who is visually impaired the Bible can seem prejudicial towards people who are blind and treat blindness negatively. Yet images of disability such as the broken body of Jesus on the cross have also helped people to understand the imperfections of humanity from a positive Christian standpoint. Historically, Simon Hayhoe observes that Christians founded the modern separate education of children who are blind and deaf, and provided moral management of adults with mental illness, in a belief that teaching could provide a spiritual treatment for their impairments. Furthermore, he observes that experimentations with blindness and mental illness were used to empirically test passages in the Bible in the 17th and 18th centuries, and were subsequently crucial to the philosophies of the enlightenment.
Authors are invited to submit articles for consideration for publication in a themed issue of the IJCE on disability, which is scheduled for publication in November 2015. Articles are welcome from, but not restricted to, teachers, graduate students, researchers, theologians, ministers, pedagogues and those who work with people who have disabilities. Invited themes include, but are again not by any means restricted to, the following:
• Pedagogies of teaching Christianity to students with disabilities
• The teaching of disability through Christianity
• Teaching Christianity in relation to disability in different cultural, ethnic or national settings
• Case studies of students with disabilities in Christian education
• Scholarly, reflective autobiographies of Christian teachers and students with disabilities
• Christian ethics in relation to disability in the teaching of subjects such as citizenship or history
• Experiences and/or models of exclusion or inclusion in Christian education
• Theologies or Christian-themed philosophies of disability
• Christianity in the education of people who are newly experiencing disabilities
• Christianity, disability and adult and continuing education
• Assistive technologies and Christian education
The deadline for submissions is 15th March 2015
To submit your work, please email a copy of the manuscript to the guest editor, Simon Hayhoe, at simon.hayhoe@canterbury.ac.uk.
Call For Proposals: Disability and Francophone Cultures
http://cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjds/announcement/view/6
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Activists for the civil rights of people with disabilities and experts in disability studies have argued for years that disability is in part a social construction. Understanding disability as a cultural, architectural, interactive, political, economic and also embodied phenomena means we absolutely must consider the specificity of cultures with respect to disability. This special issue aims to examine the relationships between people with disabilities and francophone cultural environments. We also call for articles that focus on the following topics, but are not necessarily limited to: How has Disability Studies developed in the Francophone world? Proposals (250-300 words) including name and e-mails of the authors, should be sent no later than March 15, 2015 to both of the following addresses: Jay Dolmage: Dolmage@uwaterloo.ca and Maria Fernanda Arentsen: marentsen@ustboniface.ca. This issue will be published in French. English submissions can be considered if the authors are willing to collaborate in the process of translation. Key dates: Colleagues wishing to participate in this publication are requested to send an abstract in English or French, with a bio, no later than 15 march 2015. |
Hysterical Bodies: Disabling Normative Behavior in Contemporary Art
UC-San Diego Department of Visual Arts – 8th Annual PhD Symposium
Saturday, March 7, 2015
with a Keynote Presentation by AMELIA JONES, Professor and Robert A. Day Chair of Fine Art and Professor of Critical Studies at USC Roski School of Art and Design, Los Angeles,
Friday, March 6, 2015 at 6:30pm
CALL FOR PAPERS & PRESENTATIONS
What is the current state of hysteria within contemporary art praxis? This symposium will focus on how might we begin to expand our definitions of hysteria, so that it is utilized as a critical tool for disabling normative behaviors. Conventionally, hysteria has always been associated with
“inappropriate” conduct, where it has been bound up in medical and cultural associations that mark diverse bodies as deviant, pathological and diseased, particularly as it pertains to “freakish” female bodies. But how can hysteria become a fleshed out, reclaimed term, which moves in and between diverse bodies as an empowering and generative framework, especially as it relates to feminist, queer, anti-racist and disabled subject positions?
The Visual Arts Department is pleased to welcome scholar Amelia Jones as the Keynote speaker for the PhD Symposium, and the theme of the 2015 iteration pivots around Jones’ scholarship. Jones will be giving a paper based on the work of renowned international performance artist Nao Bustamante, who deliberately engages in “inappropriate” performances in order to explore the ways in which she activates the hysterical (in the sense of hilarious but also as identified with female hysteria). Through excessive self-presentational strategies, Bustamante embarrasses viewers of all kinds and provokes our considered response to questions of “appropriate” or normative social behavior.
Papers and artist project presentations are welcome relating to a broad theme of hysterical bodies and ancillary behaviors in contemporary-based art practices with a special emphasis on performance, film, video, and installation.
Suggested topics may include, but are not limited to the following:
• Feminist, queer, anti-racist and disabled notions of hysteria
• Hysteria as a humorous or hilarious device
• Complex social behaviors intersecting with complex embodiment
• The re-imagined maternal body as hysterical body
• Revised medical and cultural representations of the hysteric
• Deviant female sexuality and reproduction
• Alternative articulations of the body and hysterical aesthetics
• Defective bodies and defective behaviors
The symposium is organized by PhD students in Art History, Theory & Criticism in the Department of Visual Arts, UCSD.
Organizers: Vanessa Bateman & Amanda Cachia
Applicants should submit a CV and 300 word abstract by Monday, December 29, 2014 to: UCSDphdsymposium2015@gmail.com. Selected participants will be notified by Monday, January 9, 2015.
http://visarts.ucsd.edu/…/fil…/Hysterical%20Bodies%20CFP.pdf
SDS Student Caucus 