UK Funding Opportunity: Are you a Future Research Leader?

The ESRC has recently announced a call for outline proposals through their Future Research Leaders scheme.

The scheme will support outstanding early career researchers to carry out excellent research and to develop all aspects of their research and knowledge exchange skills.  It  is open to high-quality candidates from anywhere in the world who have a maximum of four years’ postdoctoral experience and the support of an eligible UK research organisation.

Applications must be submitted electronically by 15^th September 2011. 

For further details, please follow this link.

Recommended Reads: New Publications to Pre-Order this Summer…

The Question of Access by Tanya Titchkosky (Associate Professor and an Associate Department Chair at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada)

Description: Values such as ‘access’ and ‘inclusion’ are unquestioned in the contemporary educational landscape. But many methods of addressing these issues – installing signs, ramps, and accessible washrooms – frame disability only as a problem to be ‘fixed.’ The Question of Access investigates the social meanings of access in contemporary university life from the perspective of Cultural Disability Studies. Through narratives of struggle and analyses of policy and everyday practices, Tanya Titchkosky shows how interpretations of access reproduce conceptions of who belongs, where and when. Titchkosky examines how the bureaucratization of access issues has affected understandings of our lives together in social space. Representing ‘access’ as a beginning point for how disability can be rethought, rather than as a mere synonym for justice, The Question of Access allows readers to critically question their own implicit conceptions of disability, non-disability, and access.

Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic by Nirmala Erevelles (Associate Professor of Social Foundations of Education at the University of Alabama, USA.)

Description: This book explores the possibilities and limitations re-theorizing disability using historical materialism in the interdisciplinary contexts of social theory, cultural studies, social and education policy, feminist ethics, and theories of citizenship.

Critical Disability Studies *FREE* Conference *Theorizing Normalcy and the Mundane* 2011 – An Update

The Critical Disability Studies *FREE* Conference *Theorizing Normalcy and the Mundane* 2011 is fast approaching so we thought we’d give you a little reminder and update…

Dates and Venue: Wednesday 14th and Thursday 15th September 2011 held at Manchester Metropolitan University.

A FREE! conference co-hosted by the Research Institute of Health and Social Change at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), University of Chester, University of Iceland, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and Sheffield Hallam University.

This two day conference builds upon the first, and hugely successfully, ‘Theorising Normalcy and the Mundane’ conference held in May 2010.  It brings together an international group of researchers and will address diverse issues including:

• 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’

Confirmed keynote speakers include Anat Greenstein (MMU, UK), Rebecca Mallett (Sheffield Hallam University, UK) and Fiona Kumari Campbell (Griffith University, Australia).

This year the conference is running alongside the Asylum 2011 Conference. The Asylum 2011 conference sessions have been incorporated into one overall programme and have been tagged accordingly. The abstracts are all together in the Normalcy conference abstracts booklet available here.  In the spirit of an eco-friendly conference, delegates are asked to print the details they require – there will not be hard copies of the programme/abstract available on the day.

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. Deadline for attendance: 22nd August 2011

Both conferences have been extremely popular so if you are down to give a paper and/or to attend but now you cannot come, please let the organisers know soon as possible. 

As the conference is FREE!, lunch and refreshments will be available for purchase at the University, if you wish.  Please let us know if you have any dietary requirements so we can make the restaurant aware of delegate requirements.

Contact Details: For the sake of ease, we are keeping the original email so please email abstracts and attendance to: normalcy2010@hotmail.com

Interested in presenting your work at a DRF Seminar? Here’s Your Chance…

Shortly, we will be drawing up the schedule for the DRF Seminar Programme 2011-2012 . 

The seminars are informal and held once a month at Sheffield Hallam University in Sheffield, UK.  They usually consist of two paper presentations from active disability researchers focusing on ‘work in progress’ but can also include roundtable discussions on a topic of interest or a recent publication. The success of the DRF has been the wide variety of papers, presenters and topics we have covered so no area is out-of-bounds – we are open to all suggestions.

If you, or anybody you know, would like to be present your work or facilitate a discussion please contact Rebecca Mallett on r.mallett@shu.ac.uk.  (Although this offer is open all year round, if you know you would like to present during the forthcoming year, we ask that you make contact before Mon. 12th September 2011 so that the planning process can begin!)

For more information on DRF Seminars – click here.  For an overview of past papers/presenters – click here.