CFP: Special issue of Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies on ‘Disability and the American Counterculture’

Proposals are requested for a special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies on ‘Disability and the American Counterculture’.

Guest edited by Stella Bolaki and Chris Gair

The American Counterculture has a complex relationship with disability. At its heart is the reinvention of the term freak that serves as an early example of empowering, though not unproblematic, appropriation of what had previously been a derogatory term. Freak Out!, the debut album by The Mothers of Invention—labelled a “monstrosity” by Frank Zappa—is a prime example of the association of freakery with the forms of avant-garde experimentation representative of one form of countercultural practice. In addition, representations of disability and illness occur repeatedly in countercultural work: the asylum and hospital become central tropes for examinations of the relationship between sanity and madness in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, while canonical Beat/countercultural novels such as Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels and Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America and movies such as Richard Rush’s Psych-Out feature disabled characters not only to derive rhetorical force in their critique of hegemonic culture, but also to question core countercultural ideologies. In terms of aesthetics, William Burroughs’ experimental “cut-up technique” has been discussed in the context of his interest in virology and Andy Warhol’s work of trauma, injury and violence alongside what Tobin Siebers has called “disability aesthetics”. More recent work, such as E.L. Doctorow’s novel Homer and Langley, the Hollywood film Forrest Gump and Simi Linton’s memoir My Body Politic, examines the connection between disability and the counterculture through different lenses and with various aims.

What do perspectives informed by disability studies have to offer to typical readings of the American counterculture and its fundamental ideals of movement (both geographical and ideological), youth and vitality? In what ways did the American counterculture and the disability movement approach notions of the “normal” and the “abnormal” body? Beat and countercultural writers and artists have been criticised for their romanticised view of other cultures and for appropriating and shedding roles and personas from various marginalised groups at a dizzying pace. How different was the appropriation of disability to the American counterculture’s interest in other cultures (Eastern, African American, Native American) and their potential for constructing a subversive identity? What are the legacies of the American counterculture and its various discourses and styles of liberation for contemporary disability life writing, arts and activism? With such questions in mind, the co-editors invite proposals on an array of topics which include (but are not limited to) the following:

• perspectives from disability studies/theory on iconic as well as understudied Beat texts and countercultural ideals more broadly
• challenges to “normalcy” from disability movements and the American counterculture (comparative perspectives/debates)
• disability as theme and/or aesthetic in countercultural writing, art, film and music or in more recent works that reference the American counterculture
• appropriation and reinvention of the term “freak” by the counterculture
• approaches to spectacle, the stare, the performative, and fashion in American counterculture and disability cultures/arts
• disability in the sixties-era communes and communal living groups
• feminist disability studies and the counterculture
• crip perspectives on the American counterculture
• legacies of the American counterculture and countercultural ideals, practices and styles for disability writing, arts, and activism

Discussions of specific literary and cultural texts are invited, but preference will be given to projects that use individual texts as vehicles to address broader cultural debates and theoretical inquiries related to disability studies and the American counterculture.

A one-page proposal and a one-page curriculum vitae should be emailed to S.Bolaki@kent.ac.uk and Chris.Gair@glasgow.ac.uk by the end of July 2013.

Finalists will be selected by 1st October 2013, and full drafts of articles will be due on 1st March 2014.

CFP: Gothic Studies special issue on ‘Gothic and Medical Humanities’

Proposals are invited for a special issue of Gothic Studies exploring intersections between the Gothic and medical humanities.

Gothic Studies has long grappled with suffering bodies, and the fragility of human flesh in the grip of medical and legal discourse continues to be manifest in chilling literature and film. The direction of influence goes both ways: Gothic literary elements have arguably influenced medical writing, such as the nineteenth-century clinical case study. In this second decade of the twenty-first century, it seems apt to freshly examine intersections between the two fields.

The closing years of the twentieth century saw the emergence of medical humanities, an interdisciplinary blend of humanities and social science approaches under the dual goals of using arts to enhance medical education and interrogating medical practice and discourse. Analysis of period medical discourse, legal categories and medical technologies can enrich literary criticism in richly contextualising fictional works within medical practices. Such criticism can be seen as extending the drive towards historicised and localised criticism that has characterised much in Gothic studies in recent decades.

Our field offers textual strategies for analysing the processes by which medical discourse, medical processes and globalised biotechnological networks can, at times, do violence to human bodies and minds – both of patient and practitioner. Cultural studies of medicine analyse and unmask this violence. This special issue will explore Gothic representations of the way medical practice controls, classifies and torments the body in the service of healing.

Essays could address any of the following in any period, eighteenth-century to the present:

• Medical discourse as itself Gothic (e.g., metaphors in medical writing; links between case histories and the Gothic tradition), and/or reflections on how specific medical discourses have shaped Gothic literary forms
• Illness narratives and the Gothic (e.g., using Arthur Frank’s ‘chaos narratives’ of helplessness in The Wounded Storyteller).
• Literary texts about medical processes as torture/torment in specific historical and geographic contexts (including contemporary contexts)
• Doctors or nurses represented in literature as themselves Gothic ‘victims’, constrained by their medical environment
• Genetic testing; organ harvest; genetic engineering; reproductive technologies; limb prostheses; human cloning, and more.

 To date the links between Gothic and psychiatric medical discourse have been the most thoroughly explored, so preference will be given to articles exploring other, non-psychiatric medical contexts in the interests of opening up new connections.

Please email 500-word abstract and curriculum vitae to Dr Sara Wasson, s.wasson@napier.ac.uk.

Deadline for proposals: 1 October 2013.

The official journal of the International Gothic Studies Association considers the field of Gothic studies from the eighteenth century to the present day. The aim of Gothic Studies is not merely to open a forum for dialogue and cultural criticism, but to provide a specialist journal for scholars working in a field which is today taught or researched in almost all academic establishments. Gothic Studies invites contributions from scholars working within any period of the Gothic; interdisciplinary scholarship is especially welcome, as are readings in the media and beyond the written word.

For more information on Gothic Studies, including submission guidelines and subscription recommendations, please see the journals website.

To view Gothic Studies online, see here.  To sign up to alerts for Gothic Studies, see here.

Call for Papers: ‘Disability and the Gothic’ Edited Volume

The relationship between disability and the Gothic, as Martha Stoddard Holmes rightly observes, has been undertheorized by scholars of the genre. This is surprising, given the intensity with which the Gothic has historically explored and exploited the prejudices associated with human difference as manifested in physiological and mental deviations from a perceived norm.

The proposed volume, which will be presented within the established International Gothic Series, published by Manchester University Press, will explore the uses and abuses of disability in Gothic fiction from the eighteenth century to the present, and will advance a genuinely international and multicultural analysis of this neglected aspect of Gothic stylistics. We particularly welcome papers that discuss Gothic textuality beyond the established European and American canon.

Issues which might be explored by contributors could include (but are not limited to):

• Abject bodies                                           
• Human vivisection
• Amputation                                            
• Leprosy
• Birth defects
• Mental illness
• Body Integrity
• Phantom limbs
• Body modification                                  
• Pigmentation variations
• Branding and scarification                    
• Post-apocalyptic bodies
• Conjoined siblings                                  
• Prostheses
• Corrective surgery                                  
• Queer bodies
• Degeneration                                          
• Ritual disfigurement
• Hermaphroditism                                  
• Supernumerary limbs
• Hospital culture                                      
• Zoomorphism

Proposals of approximately 500 words should be sent to the editors by 30 September 2013.  The editors are: William Hughes (Department of English, Bath Spa University, UK) email w.hughes@bathspa.ac.uk and Andrew Smith (School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, University of Sheffield, UK) email andrew.smith1@sheffield.ac.uk.

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If you are interested in this, you might also be interested in…

Call For Papers for Precarious Positions ~ Encounters with Normalcy – 4th Annual International Conference ***Theorising Normalcy and the Mundane*** 3^rd + 4^th September 2013 at Sheffield Hallam University can be found here.

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Announcing ***Theorising Normalcy and the Mundane*** Sept, 2013: Sheffield, UK

As some of you may already know, at yesterday’s DRF seminar we had the privilege of announcing the date and details of the next ***Theorising Normalcy and the Mundane*** Conference.  See below for further details.

Event: 4th Annual International Conference ***Theorising Normalcy and the Mundane***

Date/Place: Tues. 3^rd – Wed. 4^th September 2013 – Sheffield Hallam University, UK

Hosted by: Dept. of Education, Childhood and Inclusion + Disability Research Forum, Sheffield Hallam University in association with University of Chester, Manchester Metropolitan University + the University of Sheffield.

Conference organising committee: Dan Goodley (UoS); Nick Hodge (SHU); Rebecca Mallett (SHU); Cassie Ogden (Univ of Chester); Katherine Runswick-Cole (MMU); Jenny Slater (SHU).

Title: Precarious Positions: Encounters with Normalcy

Call For Papers: disabilityresearchforum.wordpress.com/events/normalcy-2013

Conference Enquiries: normalcy2013@gmail.com

Conference Registration: to book a place please visit normalcy2013.eventbrite.co.uk

Printable Poster: Normlacy 2013 Poster

Keep up to date and join the debate on twitter #normalcy2013

Job Opportunites at OISE, Univ of Toronto, Canada

The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE) is advertising a number of tenure stream jobs we thought you might be interested in.  Of particular interest might be:

• Assistant/Associate Professor – School Psychology (Applied Psychology and Human Development)  Closing Date: December 31, 2012 (Open until Filled)
• Assistant/Associate Professor – Social and Cultural Theory and Philosophy of Education (Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice Education) Closing Date: December 31, 2012 (Open until Filled)
• Assistant/Associate Professor – Diversity Studies in Education (Curriculum, Teaching and Learning)  Closing Date: December 31, 2012 (Open until Filled)

Click on the links to find out more.

CFP: Society for Disability Studies – 26th Annual Conference (June 2013, USA)

Event: Society for Disability Studies – 26th annual meeting
Date: Wednesday, June 19th – Saturday, June 22nd, 2013
Place: Double-by-Hilton at the Entrance to Universal Studios, Orlando, Florida, USA
Deadline for submissions: 21st November 2012 at http://www.disstudies.org

(Re)creating Our Lived Realities

In honor of its 26th annual meeting convening in Orlando, Florida – the land of make-believe, the home of Disney World and Universal Studios – the program committee of the Society for Disability Studies would like to encourage you to think about the ways in which we create and re-create our lived realities. We would like you to think not only about disabled people as complexly embodied historical actors, but also about the many social, economic, physiological, and political forces that shape, and often constrain, our lived realities. As people situated at the intersection of local and global histories, systems, and structures, we are constantly shaping and molding our social, cultural, and built environment(s). And they in turn affect us in innumerable ways. Nothing we do or say, or have done, can be divorced from its social and historical context, nor can it be isolated from the many human relations through which it emerges. While all proposals that explore these themes are welcome, the program committee especially seeks to solicit work that explores the interesting interactions among larger systems or structures, such as global capitalism, neoliberalism, militarism, and our immediate corporeal experiences – pleasure, pain, sex, illness, debility, a ride at Disney World or a walk through Epcot Center.

We offer the following broad questions to foster interdisciplinary perspectives and encourage interdisciplinary collaboration:

• What are the many ways in which disabled people have conceptualized and enacted changes to the built environment and to the many things with which we interact on a daily basis? What barriers do people who experience disability face? How have these things changed over time?
• What happens when local understandings, strategies, and ways of being meet up with more globalizing ones?
• What new possibilities for change do such intersections produce, and, alternatively, where do we find disconnects that thwart cooperation?
• How have various technologies–and access to them–shaped the formation of disabled identities and cultures, as well as interpersonal and group relationships?
• In what ways are the realities we create bounded or shaped by geographic location, institutional formation, identity politics, and other factors?
• What do collisions between the local and the global reveal about our experiences? What do they obscure?
• How have disability politics and activism shaped not only the built environment, but human relations as well?
• How does enduring poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, and the persistence of the medical and charity model shape / limit access to the many realities we create in our lives? How do these factors also open possibilities? How have these factors enhanced disability rights?
• How have the various disciplines within disability studies explored and analyzed the built environment? What are the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches?
• How have/might the various disciplines and fields within disability studies work across disciplinary boundaries to enhance the quality of our lives?
• How have/might disability studies reach out to local and national organizations and institutions to influence families, religious communities, service providers, political institutions, employers, etc.?
• How does a focus on Lived Realities influence research methods, theory, and the underpinnings of disability scholarship and practice?
• How have prevailing (contemporary) paradigms (or narratives) succeeded or failed in capturing “our lived realities”? 

We welcome proposals in all areas of disability studies, especially those submissions premised on this year’s theme.

This year’s program committee is continuing the idea of specific “strands” that relate to the larger more general theme of the SDS conference. Each strand may have 3 or 4 related events (e.g. panels, workshops), organized to occur throughout the conference and in a way that will eliminate any overlap of sessions in an effort to facilitate a more sustained discussion of specific issues that have arisen as areas of interest within the organization.  Planned strands this year can be found here (scroll down).  If you would like your proposal to be considered as part of one of these thematic strands, mark this in your submission.

More information on session formats, terms of participation, delegate responsibilities for ensuring accessibility, audio/visual information, awards and submission agreement can be found here (scroll down).  

For further information contact the Program Committee of the SDS 2013 program committee at SDSprogram@disstudies.org

CFP: Annual Pacific Rim Conference ‘Disability Studies as a Performative Act’ (April 2013; USA)

Event: Annual Pacific Rim Conference: www.pacrim.hawaii.edu
Date: 29th – 30th April 2013
Place: Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

Disability Studies as a Performative Act

Disability Studies and Culture can be approached from a plethora of angles. As Sandahl and Auslander write, “How do performance events contribute to disability “cultures,” disability identities, and communication between disabled and nondisabled people? What do these performances reveal about who is on the inside of disability culture and who is on the outside? What collaborative strategies have disabled and nondisabled artists used to bridge the gap between their experiences? Are these collaborations equal exchanges between mutually consenting partners, especially when the disabled artists include those with cognitive impairments or the institutionalized.”

The 2013 Disability Studies and Culture topic area will focus on the complexity of identities and how such identities are performed, represented and negotiated. Particular avenues to explore are disability identities in performance art, performing everyday acts, performing political acts and performing Disability Studies. Questions and topics to be submitted for consideration as presentations, posters, or papers might include any of topics in the preceding paragraph. Other topic ideas include:

• What might it mean to call disability a performance? Who’s performing? Who are they performing for?
• How have disability studies changed in the twenty-first century?
• How has disability culture changed in the twenty-first century?
• How has expansion of disability studies curriculum into traditional fields changed disability studies? traditional fields?
• How might online classes have changed the way disability studies is presented (performed)?

We would also like to invite abstract submissions for performances related to Disability Studies and Culture.

We welcome proposals in any presentation format. Please see presentation formats on our Web page at: http://www.pacrim.hawaii.edu/submissions/presenters/formats/.

Please check the criteria for each format and ensure that you have the appropriate number of presenters for your chosen format. You may submit proposals online at: http://www.pacrim.hawaii.edu/submissions or send your proposals via email to prcall@hawaii.edu.

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For more information about this topic area, contact: Steve Brown, sebrown@hawaii.edu, 808-956-0996, Holly Manaseri, hmanser@hawaii.edu, 808-956-9218, Norma Jean Stodden, nstodden@hawaii.edu, 808-956-4454, or Megan Conway, mconway@hawaii.edu, 808-956-6166. For general information on the conference, please contact Charmaine Crockett at cccrocke@hawaii.edu, (808) 956-7539.

CCDS Event: The Bhopal Disaster, Literature, and Charity Advertising (November 2012, UK)

Event: Centre for Culture & Disability Studies (CCDS) Research Seminar 

Date: Wednesday 7th November 2012: 2.15pm-3.45pm ~ Venue: Eden, 109, Liverpool Hope University, UK. 

Brief Description:

The Bhopal Disaster, Literature, and Charity Advertising ~ Dr. Clare Barker (University of Leeds, UK)

The 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy was the world’s worst industrial disaster. It has killed 25,000 people to date, injured many thousands more, and is still causing sickness and disabilities nearly 30 years later due to toxic chemicals in the city’s groundwater supply. Dr. Clare Barker considers representations of the disabled inhabitants of Bhopal in both charity advertising and literary works relating to the disaster, in particular Indra Sinha’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Animal’s People (2007). As a former advertising copywriter, Sinha was instrumental in setting up the Bhopal Medical Appeal in the UK and is still involved in its activities. Dr. Barker contends that there is a productive synergy between literature and advertising in the BMA’s campaigns: while disability charities frequently rely on tropes of helplessness and pity, often supported by sensational or sentimental images of disabled children, Dr. Barker argues that the BMA engages with fictional narrative techniques and consequently achieves more empowering representations in its publicity. As a complement to this, Animal’s People contributes to the BMA’s agenda by promoting awareness of Bhopal’s unresolved medical crises while also interrogating the politics of “western” medical aid interventions and problematizing the representational strategies of charity discourse. Dr. Barker considers literature’s role within health activism and points to ways in which literary texts such as Animal’s People might be used to inform the representations of disability and medical aid within charities’ campaign strategies.

Clare Barker is Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds. She is author of Postcolonial Fiction and Disability: Exceptional Children, Metaphor and Materiality (2012) and guest editor, with Stuart Murray, of a special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, namely, Disabling Postcolonialism: Global Disability Cultures and Democratic Criticism (2010).

For further information from the organisers, please contact: Dr. David Bolt: boltd@hope.ac.uk

CFP One Day Interdisciplinary Symposium on Non-Reproduction: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics (London, UK: Feb 2013)

Event: Non-Reproduction: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics: One Day Interdisciplinary Symposium

Date: Friday, 1st February 2013 ~ Venue: Birkbeck College, University of London
 
Cultural anxieties concerning biological reproduction often pivot around the notion of the non-reproductive body, in which intersecting fears about class, race, sexuality, gender and disability are encoded. Media discussions of abortion rates, teenage use of contraception, and gay marriage all register the perceived threat of sex without procreation. In a broader sense, the imperative to safeguard the future by ‘thinking of the children’ is powerful ideological currency, animating activists on both the left and the right.
 
A number of writers have responded to this tendency by considering the aesthetics and ethics of the non-reproductive. Recent work in cultural studies has emphasised the radical potential of the subject that refuses reproduction. In Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993), Peggy Phelan locates the radicalism of feminist performance art in its status as ‘representation without reproduction’. More recently, Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) argues that resisting heternormativity entails refusing to participate in ‘the cult of the child’. According to Judith Halberstam (2008), Edelman’s work is part of an ‘anti-social turn’ in queer studies which ‘always lines up against women, domesticity and reproduction’.
 
Inspired by Halberstam’s intervention, this one-day interdisciplinary humanities symposium invites critical perspectives on the idea of non-reproduction. How is the assumption that the non-reproductive necessarily resists the dominant order undermined by right-wing strategies that seek to limit reproduction, such as forced sterilisation, ‘population bomb’ rhetoric, discriminatory welfare policies or the stigmatisation of single parents? Is it helpful to draw a conceptual opposition between the reproductive and the non-reproductive? Are there alternatives to this framework? What are the implications of ‘non-reproduction’ and anti-futurity for approaches to the archive and the preservation of cultural and social documents?
 
Contributions are welcome from graduate students and early career researchers across the arts and humanities, as well as thinkers, activists, writers and artists working outside academia.
 
Topics could include, but are not limited to:
 
• pro-choice politics versus reproductive justice
• global warming and population discourse
• Refusing parenthood in art and literature
• Infertility and IVF
• Contraception and abortion politics
• Queer theory and the family
• Gay marriage in the media
• Feminism and maternity
• Museums and heritage
• Textual repetition and reproduction
• Discourses about the child (e.g. the child as commodity)
• The disabled child and controversial sterilization procedures (eg. The Ashley  Treatment)
• The politics of non-reproduction in an age of accumulation
• Copyright law
• Gustav Metzger and destruction in art
• Derrida on the archive
• Performance theory
 
Abstracts of 250-300 words for 20-minute papers should be sent to non.reproduction@gmail.com by Monday 1 October 2012.
 
Organizing Committee:
 
Fran Bigman, PhD Researcher , Faculty of English, University of Cambridge
 
Harriet Cooper, PhD Researcher, Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London
 
Sophie Jones, PhD Researcher, Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London

CCDS Event: ‘Mad in Court: Mentally Disabled Pro Se Litigants and the Complex Embodiment of Mind’ (October 2012, UK)

Event: Centre for Culture & Disability Studies (CCDS) Research Seminar 

Date: Weds. 3^rd October 2012: 2.15pm-3.45pm ~ Venue: Eden, 109, Liverpool Hope University, UK. 

Brief Description:

Mad in Court: Mentally Disabled Pro Se Litigants and the Complex Embodiment of Mind

~ Prof. Catherine Prendergast (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)

Despite the recent increase in self-advocacy by people who are mentally impaired, the legal realm is still considered a risky area for self-representation, as though “nothing about us without us” should stop at the courthouse door. To complicate this notion, Catherine Prendergast presents two cases that demonstrate both the persuasive force and jurisprudential significance of mentally impaired pro se litigation. The contention is that these litigants offer something akin to Tobin Siebers’s notion of “complex embodiment” in the sense that they lend concrete form to the oppressive and flattening abstraction of mental illness. They also provide first-hand accounts of the barriers that hamper inmate efforts to engage in self-expression and advocacy. These accounts question the mind-body dualism implied in the very notion of embodiment.

Catherine Prendergast is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches courses in disability studies, rhetoric, and writing. Her articles on the subject of mental impairment have appeared in SAQ: South Atlantic Quarterly, College English, and The Disability Studies Reader (3rd edition). She has co-edited (with Elizabeth Donaldson) a special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies on the topic of Representing Disability and Emotion.

For further information from the organisers, please contact: Dr. David Bolt: boltd@hope.ac.uk