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)

Reminder: next DRF seminar 14th March starring Mitzi Waltz and Jonathan Harvey

A quick reminder that the next DRF will be on Thursday 14th March, 2pm-4pm in Arundel 10111. After the seminar many of us will be making our way up to the University of Sheffield for Dan Goodley’s inaugural lecture at The University of Sheffield (more details here - please note the separate locations of these two events). Presenting this month will be:

Slot 1: Mitzi Waltz (Sheffield Hallam University, UK): Autism and Economic Disempowerment

Slot 2: Jonathan Harvey (The Open University, UK) Insider/outsider status: negotiating the complexity of life

See here for more details (and scroll down to March).

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.

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: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Corporeality-Society-Issues-Social-Sciences/dp/1905929978/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1361282657&sr=8-1

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

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

Fourth Keynote Title and Abstract Announced for Theorising Normalcy and the Mundane: 3rd International Conference (Chester, UK: June 2012)

Last but certainly not least, we are pleased to announce the details of our fourth keynote for Theorising Normalcy and the Mundane: 3rd International Conference at the University of Chester (June 26th-27th 2012).

Cassie Ogden (University of Chester, UK) will be discussing….

Title: Gases, Liquids and Solids: Reclaiming Fluidity in a Liquid Modern World

Abstract: Much academic focus has led to the understanding of the commodification of the body, which has resulted amongst other things in the devotion of time, money and effort, to pursue the ‘perfect’ body.  This commitment to an idealised/normalised asceticism is often manifested in the actual or appeared alteration of the size and shape of the body with the ‘help’ of various diets, clothing, surgery, drugs and exercise. One’s corporeality therefore partially shapes social reality and statuses according to the degree to which bodies are accepted into society.  Despite the importance placed on the body in terms of appearance and productivity in the contemporary world, mundane functions of the body are often deemed shameful in this fallacious imaginary of the body resulting in the denial and/or veiling of regular bodily functions.  Repulsion and exclusion can be felt by those possessing ‘leaky’ bodies or more accurately bodies that leak without control. This paper utilises a Baumanesque analysis of modernity to highlight the convenience of a controlled body to a consumerist society.  Also reflective of Shildrick’s (2009) plea for troubling dominant discourses and instead envisaging all bodies as non-stable, Bauman’s work creates the potential to imagine an emancipated society where static, constricting notions of the body are obsolete. Through the location of society as liquid modern (Bauman, 2000), the common sense notion of ‘bodily control’ will be interrogated and highlighted as a dangerous benchmark that people are best to resist.

Our three other confirmed keynotes are:

• China Mills (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) – for details click here   
• James Overboe (Wilfrid Lauier University, Canada) – for details click here
• Margrit Shildrick (Linkoping University, Sweden) – for details click here

For Further Details on the conference, including registration – please click here

Third Keynote Title and Abstract Announced for Theorising Normalcy and the Mundane: 3rd International Conference (Chester, UK: June 2012)

Proving that good things come in threes… we are pleased to announce the details of our third keynote for Theorising Normalcy and the Mundane: 3rd International Conference at the University of Chester (June 26th-27th 2012).

Margrit Shildrick (Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production, Linkoping University, Sweden) will be discussing….

Title: Celebrating Crip Pleasure: The Somatechnics of Disability and Desire

Abstract: In this presentation, I intend to address pleasure and desire in the disabled body in relation to somatechnics in which embodiment is always technologised. The focus will primarily be on sexuality, but also on other bodily engagements.

As one aspect of biotechnology, prostheses have long been in term use as compensatory technologies that stand in for some putative lack or deficiency that is supposedly the mark of anomalous embodiment. More recently, however, the emphasis has firmly switched to enhancement and supplement, and it is that more productive trajectory that I shall pursue. My argument is that in the era of postmodernity, the disabled body specifically can raise acute questions about the always ambivalent relationship between embodied subjects, pleasure and biotechnology. Desire is no longer focussed on the replication of a more or less acceptable model of normative practices but on a highly productive alternative that inevitably queers the meaning of sexuality itself.

For Further Details on the conference, including registration – please click here

Further Details: Theorizing Normalcy and the Mundane 3rd International Conference (Chester, UK)

 Theorizing Normalcy and the Mundane 3rd International Conference

“Cripping the Norm” 

** Extended call for papers - new deadline: 15th May 2012 **

** Conference website for details and registration now online: click here **

Dates: 26th- 27th June 2012

Where: University of Chester

Keynotes confirmed:

• China Mills (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) – for details click here   
• Cassie Ogden(University of Chester, UK)
• James Overboe (Wilfrid Lauier University, Canada) – for details click here
• Margrit Shildrick (Linkoping University, Sweden) – for details click here

A conference jointly-hosted by University of Chester in association with Critical Disability Studies (Manchester Metropolitan University) (MMU) and the Disability Research Forum (Sheffield Hallam University)

This 3rd international conference builds on the success of the Normalcy2010 and Normalcy2011 conferences held in Manchester and seeks, again, to bring together an international group of disability studies researchers. Our conference moves to the beautiful Cathedral town of Chester (located on the border of England and Wales)

This conference will critically explore and debate issues in the following areas:

- exploring the cultural and political production of normalcy
- addressing our obsession with reason and rationality
- connecting ableism with other hegemonies including heterosexism, racism and ageism
- analysing the barriers and possibilities of the mundane and extraordinary
- deconstructing new pathologies and ‘abnormalities’
- celebrating deviations from the norm
- affirming crip identities and ways of living

Our aim is for this conference to be as inclusive as possible.  We welcome activists, undergraduate and postgraduate students, practitioners and academics to join us. In the spirit of an eco-friendly conference, registered delegates will be sent an e-pack. Details of accommodation near the venue will also be sent to delegates.

This year, to cover costs of refreshment and lunches, we will be charging a flat rate of £75 per delegate. Free registration is still available however for full time students and the out of work.

For further information (or to request a code to allow free registration) please contact Dr Cassie Ogden: c.ogden@chester.ac.uk – tel (01244 512068)

When registering online please complete the form below before clicking on “add to cart”.

Second Keynote’s Title and Abstract Announced for Theorising Normalcy and the Mundane: 3rd International Conference (Chester, UK: June 2012)

If you need any further encouragement to attend the Theorising Normalcy and the Mundane: 3rd International Conference at the University of Chester (June 26th-27th 2012), here are details of our second keynote speaker: China Mills, who will be discussing…

Spoof: Faking Normal, Faking Disorder

 Abstract:

“[T]he most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed” (Steve Biko, 1978: 92).

How do spoof, ‘fake’ psycho-pharmaceutical adverts work to queer the ‘real’ adverts, and the disorders they market the drugs for? How do they crip conceptions of normality and sanity?

These spoof ads point to a creeping psychiatrization of our everyday lives, a psychiatrization globalised through ‘mental health literacy’ campaigns and psycho-education in low-income countries of the global South. This paper will explore how this psychiatrization interlaces with colonial subject formation. For while pharmaceutical adverts and psychiatry interpellate, hail, ‘make up’, and elicit particular subjects – as pharmaceutical citizens, neurochemical selves; there is also a force at work in ‘making up’ these subjects, through the power of the gaze, that for Frantz Fanon; objectifies, seals, crushes and abrades. But how does medication broker subjectivity? How does it, as the ads claim, restore us to ourselves, make us whole again?

This paper will attend to the visual, to mechanisms of looking, to psychiatric fields of visibility. In India, many mental health Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), go to rural areas to ‘identify’ people with ‘mental illness’, making them visible through diagnostic systems developed in the global North, and medicating them. They say these people are ‘invisible people’. So how do medication and psychiatry make people visible? What ways of ‘seeing’ do they make possible? For Homi Bhabha (1994) invisibility does not signify lack; instead it works to disrupt identification and interpellation through refusing presence. Thus how might these ‘invisible people’, those who refuse to ‘reproduce hegemonic appearances’ (Scott, 1990), work to disrupt the gaze of psychiatry? Might invisibility; the doubling, dissembling image of being in two places at once (Bhabha, 1994), work as both a ‘symptom’ of oppression, and a means of subversion?

To read psychiatrization as a colonial discourse opens up possibilities to explore how the secret arts, the hidden transcripts, of resistance of the colonised might be read in people’s resistance to psychiatry – from the slyness of mimicking normality, to the mockery of ‘spoof’ drug adverts. How the ‘disembodied eyes’ of the subaltern that see but are not seen, might disrupt and subvert both the presumed ‘I’ of the unitary ‘whole’ subject, and the surveillant, penetrative ‘eye’ of psychiatry.

How medication might work to make people visible is more troubling if we read invisibility as camouflage and potential subversion. It suggests that medication might make people more vulnerable in their submission to sociality, in their domestication. But with what conceptual tools can we establish whether being invisible is an act of resistance through camouflage, a strategy solely for survival, or a mark of adaptation and assimilation? Perhaps certain forms of psychiatric ‘looking’ allow us not to ‘see’; enable us to encounter difference and yet defer it, domesticate it– to recuperate the hegemonic, the status quo, in the final look.

In this paper I will explore how spoof adverts may mimic ‘real’ ads in a similar way to how some people mimic normality, slyly; a ‘resemblance and menace’ that mocks the power of the ‘real’ and the ‘sane’, their very power to be a model (Bhabha, 1994:86). Will you be able to tell the difference between the ‘real’ and the ‘fakes’?

 

China Mills is in the final stages of writing up her PhD thesis, which employs a colonial discourse analysis of Global mental Health’s ‘scale-up’ of psychiatry, and the psychiatrization of India. She is funded by the Education and Social Research Institute, at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. China has worked within, and been allied to, the UK and Indian psychiatric user/survivor movement for some years, and is a member of the editorial collective of Asylum magazine for democratic psychiatry (www.asylumonline.net).

For more information on the conference click here.