CFP: ‘This is my Body’ Conference: Nov, 2013 – Cambridge, UK

 

Conference Title:  This is my Body

Dates: Monday, 18 November 2013 - Tuesday, 19 November 2013
Location: William Harvey Lecture Theatre, Addenbrooke’s Clinical School, University of Cambridge, UK

Conveners: Dr Olivia Will (Department of Surgery, Addenbrooke’s Hospital, UK) and Dr Lucy Razzall (Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, UK)

Summary: The relationship between the mind and the body raises innumerable challenging questions across the arts, humanities, and social science disciplines. For those who come into professional contact with the human body every day in the National Health Service, the mind and the body are usually considered distinct from each other. This is even reflected in the organisational structure of the NHS, where mental health trusts are separate from other healthcare services. Any medical interpretation of the human body, even while it is grounded in empirical evidence, is also inevitably shaped by the intricacies of cultural context, but this is often overlooked in contemporary medicine.

Keynote speaker:Ludmilla Jordanova (King’s College London, UK)

Call for Papers: This two-day conference aims to return human experience to the centre of medical discussion by bringing scholars of the body from across the arts, humanities, and social sciences together with medical and surgical practitioners from the National Health Service. In engaging with the human body from a wide range of perspectives, this conference will explore the ways in which understandings, experiences, and representations of the body beyond the traditional medical sphere might inform healing and healthcare. This interdisciplinary conference will be the first of its kind ever held at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, and will establish an important new interface between the academy and the National Health Service.

We invite proposals (250 words) for 20-minute papers from graduate students and senior scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, and from medical students and medical/surgical professionals, which will offer disciplinary perspectives on the human body and experiences of embodiment. Papers could address, but are not restricted to, any aspect of the following:

• physical and mental illness: treatment and recovery
• roles, identities, and relationships of patients, carers, and doctors
• injury, wounds, and healing
• trauma and disfigurement
• pain and suffering
• gender and sexuality
• life-cycles: birth, childhood, puberty, reproduction, ageing, frailty, death 

Please email your proposal to conferences@crassh.cam.ac.uk. Any informal enquiries may be addressed to the conveners, Olivia Will and Lucy Razzall.

The deadline for submission is 31 July 2013.

Introducing… Jaime R. Brenes Reyes

From the very beginning, the DRF blog has include a space for brief biographical and contact details to be listed. The People section has been open to everyone and anyone interested in disability research.

Our most recent addition is:

Jaime R. Brenes Reyes: jbrenesr@uwo.ca - PhD student in Hispanic Studies, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, The University of Western Ontario, Canada. Jaime explores Latin American literature, with special focus on Julio Cortázar, from the perspective of disability studies. He is interested in the act of reading as a process through which the reader’s understanding of reality is challenged. For more information, please visit his blog.

Jaime’s current research explores the aura that arises when reading good literature. He argues that an analysis of literature as an epileptic episode may give us some clues. Based on his research on Latin American literature and literary theory (as well as his own experience of living with seizures), Jaime aims to explore whether the act of reading Argentine writer and essayist Julio Cortázar’s fiction can be understood as epileptical, taking as a framework Deleuze and Guattari’s schizo-analysis. His research may have important implications for the understanding of Cortázar’s oeuvre and the contextualization of neurological malfunctions from the viewpoint of literature.

If you are working on similar topics, or are interested in disability research and live/work near Jamie, please feel free to contact him on: jbrenesr@uwo.ca. He’s up for sharing ideas and having chats. 

If you’d like to have your biographical/contact details listed in the People section all it takes is an email to Rebecca Mallett (r.mallett@shu.ac.uk)

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.

New Publication: Corporeality: The Body and Society, Edited by Cassandra A. Ogden and Stephen Wakeman

Please click on the link to find the flyer for a new book entitled Corporeality: The Body and Society. This volume, edited by (DRF member) Cassie Ogden and Stephen Wakeman, brings together work by established experts alongside new voices to provide an accessible and stimulating snap-shot of the role of the body in society in the early-twenty first century. The new essays collected in Corporeality: The Body and Society demonstrate some of the unique advantages attainable through studying the body theoretically. Focusing in on a series of embodied fields related to lifestyle media, war, disability, drugs and mental health, the book re-states the fundamental importance of a body-centred approach in the social sciences. Available now for purchase from:

• Foyles Bookstore:
  http://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/philosophy-psychology-social-sciences/corporeality-the-body-and-society,cassandra-a-ogden-stephen-wakeman-9781905929979
  

• University of Chester Press:
  http://www.chester.ac.uk/university-press
  

• Amazon:

  

  Corporeality: The Body and Society (Issues in the Social Sciences)

  

Reminder of the next DRF themed seminar: Youth and Disability, Wednesday 9th Jan, 12-2

A reminder that the next DRF seminar will be on Wednesday 9^th January 2013 12pm-2pm in Arundel 10111.The theme of this seminar is ‘Youth and Disability’.

Slot 1: Jenny Slater (Department of Education, Childhood and Inclusion, Sheffield Hallam University, UK): “You’re not, I mean… I know you’re not, but I have to ask, you’re not… sexually active, are you?” Youth, disability, sexuality.

Abstract:

The quote I use to frame this paper comes out of my PhD research with young disabled people. It captures the troubled and troubling response that Molly, a young disabled woman, received from a doctor when requesting the contraceptive pill on sporting grounds. Furthermore, it illustrates the dangerous tying of disability to a discourse of asexuality; a discourse which works to sustain the positioning of disabled people’s bodies as a) childlike (Hall, 2011), b) asexual (Garland-Thomson, 2002; Liddiard, 2012), and c) the property of others, to be subject to intervention (Barton, 1993; McCarthy, 1998). For young disabled people, particularly young women, this is dangerous. In this paper I share more stories from my fieldwork in order to work through messy discourses of youth, disability and sexuality.  I use these stories to question Disability Studies and, to a lesser extent, popular media normalisation of issues concerning disability, disabled youth, gender and sexuality, stressing the importance of transdisciplinary conversation.

Slot 2: Ezekiel Isanda Oweya: (Centre for Rehabilitation Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa): Experiences of African disabled youth living in rural Rift Valley to find and sustain livelihoods

 

Venue: The seminar will be held in the Arundel Building, 122 Charles Street, City Campus, Sheffield Hallam University, S1 1WB.  For a map of City Campus click here.

If you, or anybody you know, would like to present at a DRF seminar please do get in touch.  Alternatively, let us know if there is an issue/article/book you’d like to facilitate a round table discussion on.

Even if you do not intend to present, feel free to come along, listen and share your thoughts.   For lunchtime slots, please feel free to bring your own food and drink.

We aim to be accessible and have produced some guidelines of which we would like presenters to be mindful – these can be accessed here: Accessible Presenting

To offer to present, facilitate a discussion or for more detailed access information please contact: Rebecca Mallett: r.mallett@shu.ac.uk or 0114 225 4669 or Jenny Slater: j.slater@shu.ac.uk or 0114 225 6691.

CFP: Annual Pacific Rim Conference on Disability and Diversity: April 29th-30th 2013 (Honolulu. Hawaii, USA)

Don’t miss out on the 29^th Annual Pacific Rim Conference on Disability and Diversity, 2013: Being in Community, April 29^th - 30^th, 2013 at the Hawaii Convention Center in Honolulu.

Formally called the Pacific Rim International Conference on Disabilities, Pacrim is one of the world’s top rated international educational offerings. The 2013 Call for Proposals has been extended until 7^th January 2013.

They are looking for your creative ideas to build the just, sustainable and inclusive future we all want! They have many topic areas relevant to educators and researchers including Teach to Reach, Indigenous and Native Hawaiian Education, Post-Secondary Education and much more.

To learn more visit: www.pacrim.hawaii.edu, email prinfo@hawaii.edu or call us at (808)956-7539

CFA: Child Welfare and Disabilities for Journal of Public Child Welfare

Call for Abstracts on Child Welfare and Disabilities for Journal of Public Child Welfare

Download a PDF of this Call for Abstracts – Child Welfare and Disabilities.

This is a call for abstracts from which authors may be invited to submit an article to be included in a special issue of the Journal of Public Child Welfare.  This special issue will focus on studies that contribute to our knowledge of child welfare practice with parents and/or children with disabilities. Children with disabilities are over represented within the child welfare system, with nearly double the rate of substantiated maltreatment than their non-disabled peers.  Less is known about the prevalence of parents with disabilities in child welfare caseloads, although recent studies also indicate an over-representation.

The editors are particularly interested in the following:

• Original applied or other empirical research studies on child welfare practice with parents and/or children with disabilities, including studies on prevalence, needs, experiences, evidence based practice, and outcomes.
• Evaluations of new practice models in working with parents and/or children; or innovative training or workforce initiatives to improve disability competence.
• Analyses of system approaches to working with parents and/or children with disabilities in child welfare.
• Analysis of local, state, and/or federal policies impacting service delivery to parents and/or children with disabilities.
• Literature reviews, meta-analyses, and commentaries on the intersection of child welfare with disability.
• Theoretical or critical papers regarding this theme.

Abstract Deadline:  December 1, 2012
Manuscript Deadline: May 10, 2013

Journal of Public Child Welfare now receives all manuscript submissions electronically via the ScholarOne Manuscripts website: Manuscript Submissions – Now on ScholarOne!

Interested authors should consult the Instructions for Authors for the Journal of Public Child Welfare.  Click here to review complete Instructions for Authors.

Please feel free to contact the guest editors with questions. references. 

Guest Editor: Traci LaLiberte, PhD
Executive Director
Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare
School of Social Work
University of Minnesota
Email: lali0017@umn.edu

Guest Editor: Elizabeth Lightfoot, PhD
Associate Professor
School of Social Work
University of Minnesota
Email: elightfo@umn.edu

Rod Michalko and Tanya Titchkosky Come to Town

On one autumnal October evening, in a room full to capacity, over 45 interested individuals – including academics from various faculties and Disabled Student Support staff, Sheffield Hallam University; academics from the University of Sheffield, members of autism and disability communities – came together, in wisdom and wonder, to explore ‘disability’ with Tanya Titchkosky and Rod Michalko (University of Toronto, Canada).  

Below is an account of the day written by Helen Gibbons, a third year student on our BA (Hons) Education and Disability Studies. She recounts the evening seminar (part of the Education Research Seminar Series) as well as the afternoon class Rod and Tanya attended.

Rod Michalko and Tanya Titchkosky Come to Town ~ by Helen Gibbons

On Tuesday 16th October we (the third year BA (Hons) Education and Disability Studies students at Sheffield Hallam University) were extremely lucky to be given the opportunity to meet Rod Michalko and Tanya Titchkosky. Since starting the course three years ago we have read different journal articles, books and reviews written by Rod and Tanya so to meet them in person was a real treat.

During the day, Rod and Tanya attended our Critical Disability Studies module session where we were given the opportunity to chat, discuss and ask questions regarding their professional and, in some cases, personal experiences of living with an impairment and how they are “accepted” in society. During this session I became inspired at how amazing and influential these two individuals are by expressing and sharing their views of impairment and disability within society. During the session, I know I am not alone in saying, I learnt, understood and viewed a number of different ideas and theories through a fresh approach thanks to their brilliant explanations and examples. The highlights include…

• “Different words have different meanings” Rod Michalko
• “The one thing that interests me more than blindness is sight and eyes are used for a lot more than just seeing” Rod Michalko
• Disability is the assumption that everyone knows what it means, in many cases broken/abnormal. “We’ve been protected against the term disability” as “Disability is seen as a problem” Tanya Titchkosky
• “What we see isn’t necessarily correct” Tanya Titchkosky

In the evening Rod offered an examination of the ‘expert’ while Tanya offered suggestions on what a disability studies perspective could offer a critical study of education.  In her newest piece of work, “Towards a Politics of Wonder”, Tanya described an experience where a group of people weren’t considered during a fire evacuation and how a number of obstacles caused many of the individuals involved to be put at unnecessary danger. This lead to many interesting and eye opening views and theories including…

• by not recognising and supporting people with disabilities we are adding and increasing dangers
• it isn’t a lack of awareness, the fire fighters involved had been trained and given procedures and ways of supporting people in such situations but this is often interpreted as “it’s such a problem, it is easier to stay away” Tanya Titchkosky

To conclude I feel that the opportunity has been extremely useful and many of the theories, views and experiences shared and discussed will stay with me for many years to come. The messages I received from Rod and Tanya have not only been extremely useful and assisted with my academic work but they have also assisted and made me view disability and the “problems” differently. This has been evident through the practical aspect of things. When working in a Special Needs school, when being out in the general public and while spending time planning and developing my career I have been able to view things differently by some of the extremely useful discussions with Rod and Tanya.

I found Rod and Tanya’s seminar so influential that I have since set my heart on becoming a Disability Studies lecturer within a University just like them. It has enabled me to see just how much is possible and how disability is still seen as a “problem” when it really doesn’t have to be.

Thank You.

Event: CDS Seminar: Mediated Communication and the Metaphysics of Presence ~ Russell Shuttleworth (Nov. 2012: Manchester, UK)

Event: CDS Seminar: Mediated Communication and the Metaphysics of Presence

Date: Tuesday, 6^th November 2012: 4.00-5.30pm

Place: Room T208, Elizabeth Gaskell Campus, Manchester Metropolitan University, Hathersage Road, Manchester M13 0JA

Mediated Communication and the Metaphysics of Presence ~ Russell Shuttleworth (Deakin University, Australia)

Free Seminar organised by Critical Disability Studies @MMU

The conceptual impetus for this still developing paper is Derrida’s critique of logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence, in which he claims that speech over writing is uncritically perceived as a more immediate presence to one’s self and by extension others and that this assumption pervades not only Western philosophy texts but also interaction and communication in everyday life. Although the significance of Derrida’s post-structural ideas about speech and language have been developed within Deaf Studies as related to sign language communication, their significance has not been drawn out for those who are significantly ‘speech impaired’ and thus require communication assistance. In this paper, I employ some of Derrida’s notions as a starting point to interrogate the issue of mediated communication for people who require some form of communication assistance such as a speech facilitator, speech revoicer, alphabet board or computerized speech device. Also drawing on debates and insights within critical disability studies, feminist phenomenology, the anthropology of the knowing subject, Deaf studies and speech pathology, among other fields, I am concerned to highlight the issue of “communication disablement” (Patterson 2012) within the lives of people who require the above kinds of communication assistance be that in the form of a technology or a person. To illustrate certain points, I draw on my involvement in a number of research projects that have included as participants people who require assistance to communicate, as well as my many years of experience as a personal assistant for and friend and colleague of several such persons.

Dr Russell Shuttleworth is a Senior Lecturer and Co-ordinator of the MSW Program in the School of Health and Social Development, at Deakin University, Australia. His teaching responsibilities currently include several classes in research methodology and another on care and risk. Russell recently co-edited a book with Teela Sanders (Leeds University) entitled, Sex and Disability: Politics, Identity and Access. He has published numerous articles in peer reviewed journals as well as book chapters on subjects including sexuality and disability, aged care and disability studies theory.

For further information from the organisers, please contact: Dr. Shaun Grech shaungrech@gmail.com