The University of Exeter (UK) are seeking applicants for a Lecturer in Inclusive Education and a Professor in Special Educational Needs and Inclusive Education– please click on the links for more information or visit the searchable ‘job’ site at www.exeter.ac.uk/jobs.
Month: May 2012
New issue of Review of Disability Studies (8:2) is now available
The new issue, Volume 8 Issue 2, of the Review of Disability Studies is now posted online at www.rds.hawaii.edu.
Articles include:
- Teacher Educators’ Varied Definitions of Learning Disabilities – Rachael Gabriel (University of Connecticut, USA) and Jessica Lester (Washington State University, USA)
- Parental Chronic Illness: Current Limitations and Considerations for Future Research – J.W. (Bill) Anderson (Illinois State University, USA), Caitlin A. Huth (Eastern Illinois University, USA), Susan A. Garcia (Western Governors University, USA) and Jennifer Swezey (Advocate Lutheran Children’s Hospital, USA)
- Disability Studies and the Language of Mental Illness – Katie Aubrecht (University of Toronto, Canada)
- Education of Children with Disabilities as Constructed within a Russian Newspaper for Teachers – Maria Oreshkina (University of Scranton, USA), Jessica Lester (Washington State University, USA) and Sharon Judge (Old Dominion University, USA)
- Conceptualizing the “Dis” of Our Abilities: A Heuristic Phenomenology – Jamie Buffington-Adams (Indiana University, USA)
The new issue also includes Book and Media Reviews (of The Stress of Combat, the Combat of Stress: Changing Strategies towards Ex-Service Men and Women and Historicizing Fat in Anglo-American Culture) as well as Disability Studies Dissertation Abstracts.
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
REMINDER: DRF Seminar: Fri. 25th May 2012 (Sheffield, UK)
Date/Time: Fri. 25th May 2012 (Friday) 1.00pm – 2.30pm
Venue: Room 10212 in the Arundel Building, City Campus, Sheffield Hallam University (More information on the venue can be found here.) ***Please note the change to our usual room***
Join us for:
Everything about us without us: the struggle of disability activists for Independent Living in Iceland
Embla Ágústsdóttir, chairwoman of the independent living cooperative in Iceland (NPA miðstöðin), embla@npa.is
&
Freyja Haraldsdóttir, directress, of the independent living cooperative in Iceland (NPA miðstöðin), freyja@npa.is
Chair: Jenny Slater
Abstract: Iceland is one of the countries that lacks policy and practice for personal assistance and independent living for disabled people. A user-led cooperative on personal assistance was founded by 33 disabled citizens in Iceland in 2010, who have since been fighting for the recognition of personal assistance as a way in providing services.
The government decided in the beginning of 2011 to start a three-year pilot project following the transference of services for disabled people from the state to the municipalities. This pilot project has been delayed but is in its first stages and will be ongoing until the end of year 2014 when personal assistance is supposed to become a legal right.
In this presentation we want to shed some light on the struggle for independent living in Iceland. We want to share our experience on how this process has developed from the viewpoint of disability activists and how we have experienced the need to fight for our involvement and having a voice, even when it comes to working with disability organizations and the academia.
Is, after all, everything about us supposed to be without us?
Please feel free to circulate and hope to see you there!
CCDS Event: Foreign Bodies: Disability and Beauty in Toni Morrison’s Writing (June 2012, UK)
Event: Centre for Culture & Disability Studies (CCDS) Research Seminar
Date: Weds. 27th June 2012: 3.15pm-4.45pm ~ Venue: Eden, 109, Liverpool Hope University, UK.
Brief Description:
Foreign Bodies: Disability and Beauty in Toni Morrison’s Writing
~ Dr. Alice Hall (Université Paris-Diderot, France)
This paper examines the relationship between disability and beauty as a central preoccupation of Toni Morrison’s fictional writing, her critical discourse and her most recent work as a curator. I am interested in how Morrison’s critical writing about race and identity intersects with shifting notions of beauty in her fiction, but also, in turn, how these ideas can provide a conceptual framework for writing about literature and disability in general.
Dr Alice Hall holds an MPhil in Criticism and Culture and a PhD in twentieth century literature from the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. She recently completed a postdoctoral position at the Centre for Advanced Studies, University of Nottingham and is the author of Disability and Modern Fiction: Faulkner, Morrison, Coetzee and the Nobel Prize for Literature published by Palgrave Macmillan in November 2011. She currently teaches at Université Paris Diderot and is working on her second book. She has taught widely on twentieth and twenty-first century literature, including topics such as Modernism, the body, short stories and the novel.
For further information from the organisers, please contact: Dr. David Bolt: boltd@hope.ac.uk
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
Event: DRF ‘Encore’ Seminar: 25th May 2012 (Sheffield, UK)
The final DRF seminar of the 2011-12 academic year is scheduled for tomorrow (3rd May 2012) and we are pleased to announce that there will be an encore.
Date/Time: Fri. 25th May 2012 (Friday) 1.00pm – 2.30pm
Venue: Room 10212 in the Arundel Building, City Campus, Sheffield Hallam University (More information on the venue can be found here.) Please note the change to our usual room.
Join us for:
Everything about us without us: the struggle of disability activists for Independent Living in Iceland
Embla Ágústsdóttir, chairwoman of the independent living cooperative in Iceland (NPA miðstöðin), embla@npa.is
&
Freyja Haraldsdóttir, directress, of the independent living cooperative in Iceland (NPA miðstöðin), freyja@npa.is
Iceland is one of the countries that lacks policy and practice for personal assistance and independent living for disabled people. A user-led cooperative on personal assistance was founded by 33 disabled citizens in Iceland in 2010, who have since been fighting for the recognition of personal assistance as a way in providing services.
The government decided in the beginning of 2011 to start a three-year pilot project following the transference of services for disabled people from the state to the municipalities. This pilot project has been delayed but is in its first stages and will be ongoing until the end of year 2014 when personal assistance is supposed to become a legal right.
In this presentation we want to shed some light on the struggle for independent living in Iceland. We want to share our experience on how this process has developed from the viewpoint of disability activists and how we have experienced the need to fight for our involvement and having a voice, even when it comes to working with disability organizations and the academia.
Is, after all, everything about us supposed to be without us?
Please feel free to circulate.
Disability Research Forum 