Reminder: A Week of ‘Disability’ Events (May, 2014: Sheffield, UK)

If you are in/around Sheffield next week and are into ‘disability’, you are certainly in for a treat. There are 3 events (detailed below) which might just take your fancy. Info below.

Event 1: the next (and final for this academic year) DRF seminar

Date/Time: Wednesday, 7th May 2014 (10.30am-12.30pm)

Slot 1:  Joshua Sawiuk (Univ. of Leeds, UK): The Importance of the Social Life for Disabled Students in Higher Education

Slot 2: Charlotte Jones (Univ. of Sheffield, UK): Intersex and/as Disability: Exploring the tensions between identity, medicalisation and social justice

Venue: The seminar will be held in Room 10110 (first floor) of the Arundel Building, 122 Charles Street, City Campus, Sheffield Hallam University, S1 1WB.  For a map of City Campus click here.

To offer to present in 2014-2015 seminars 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.

Event 2: Symposium: Disability and Austerity: Pan-national Reflections

Date/Time: Thursday, 8^th May 2014 (2pm-5pm)

Venue: University of Sheffield – Education Building, Room 1.02.

Event 3: Gender and Disability: Asking Difficult Questions

Date: Saturday, 10^th May 2014

Venue: University of Sheffield- Humanities Research Institute (HRI), 34 Gell Street, Sheffield, S3 7QY.

Event: Understanding and Communicating Pain: An Interdisciplinary Approach (May 2014: Durham, UK)

Event: Understanding and Communicating Pain: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Date/Venue:

• 07 May 2014, 6.00 – 8.00pm Calman Learning Centre, Durham University, UK
• 08 May 2014, 9.00 – 3.00pm, Wolfson Research Institute, Durham University, UK

Description:

Pain is not just an individual physical or emotional experience. The ways in which it is represented and imagined, and the knowledges, beliefs and values that surround it, have a direct effect on how it is experienced and managed by individuals, families and social groups. This event takes an interdisciplinary look at how pain is caused, experienced, understood and communicated exploring the following questions:

• How do different cultural and sub-cultural groups deal with pain: what kinds of beliefs and values do they have about pain; what kinds of rituals and forms of therapy do they employ in managing it; how do they communicate it? What can we learn from diverse cultural and historial perspectives on pain?
• Pain is represented in the arts in multiple ways: as something to be feared and conquered; as something that offers fascination and drama. What kinds of images of pain do we draw on in the UK? How can images of pain in the visual and literary arts affect people’s experiences of pain and our strategies for managing it?
• How do beliefs and ideas about pain affect its representation as a social problem, for example in relation to policies providing access to health and social services? What kinds of scientific evidence are required in demonstrating the efficacy of pain management therapies? How do dominant societal ideas about pain affect social and economic policies relating to worklessness and benefits?
• What is the science behind pain and its perception by people and how is this linked  to the social and psychological questions? What is is the basis for the analgesic “placebo” effect? What is the link between pain and addiction/reward?  What is the basis of pain experience changes as we age?
• Why are numbers of prescriptions for analgesics excessively higher (5-fold in some cases) in Teesside than the rest of the country? (http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/local-news/teesside-pcts-spend-most-painkillers-3679095)

Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study and Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing, in collaboration with the Durham Forum for Health, will explore these questions in these two events; firstly a public talk, followed by a full day workshop.

07 May: An evening public event centred on a panel discussion with three speakers, addressing the questions above and inviting contributions from a public audience. 

• Chair: Professor: Professor Jane Macnaughton
• Dr Clare Roques: Is Pain a Problem to be Fixed? An International Perspective
• Dr Suzannah Biernoff: Iconographies of pain and stoicism
• Dr Rachael Gooberman-Hill: Research into pain: ethnographic and clinical perspectives

 08 May: A one-day workshop, co-hosted by the University’s Biophysical Sciences Institute, aimed at initiating an interdisciplinary project on pain.

REGISTRATION IS ESSENTIAL; BOOK YOUR PLACE NOW – More information can also be found here.

Event: Sexuality Summer School 2014 (26th-30th May: Manchester, UK) @SSS_Manchester

Event: Sexuality Summer School 2014 – 3 Public Lectures (free and all welcome)

Dates: 26^th – 30th May 2014

Programme: please find detailed below.

• Monday 26 May – 12pm-2pm: Professor Jasbir Puar (Rutgers) ‘A Body with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled’

Venue: Manchester Museum, Oxford Rd, Kanaris LT (1st Floor)

In this paper Puar historically situates the most current intersectional flavors of the day, “trans” and “disabled,” through their emergence as the latest newcomers to the intersectional fray.  She looks at how their parallel yet rarely intersecting epistemological constructs—both come into being, or becoming, in the early 90s in the academy as well as in broader political terms and movements—require exceptionalizing both the trans body and the disabled body in order to convert the debility of a non-normative body into a form of social and cultural capacity, whether located in state recognition, identity politic formations, market economies, the medical industrial complex, or subject positioning.

• Tuesday 27 May – 4pm-6pm: Professor Valerie Traub (University of Michigan and Simon Visiting Professor, Manchester) ‘Anatomy, Cartography, and the Prehistory of Normality’

Venue: John Casken Lecture Theatre, Martin Harris Centre, Oxford Rd, University of Manchester. Sponsored by EAC, SEXGEN and Pride. Followed by wine reception at Contact Theatre.

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, European cartographers and anatomists developed novel strategies for representing the diversity of human bodies in their atlases of the world and its inhabitants. Tracking their implicit taxonomies of gender, sexuality, race, and class, Valerie Traub speculates on the effects of their strategies on the historical emergence of the concept of “the normal.”

• Thursday 29 May – 5pm-7om: Public Lecture by Professor Mary Bryson (University of British Columbia) and Chase Joynt (Chicago) ‘ Biopolitics Under the Skin: Relating Cancer Narratives – An Archive of the ‘Talking Dead’?’

Venue: John Casken Lecture Theatre, Martin Harris Centre, University of Manchester. Followed by wine reception at Kro.

This talk situates the Cancer’s Margins project (www.lgbtcancer.ca) and its preliminary findings in an overview of feminist, postcolonial, and queer biopolitical scholarship. concerning anatomy, pathographies, embodiment, chronicity and new analytic modes of technomaterialism that have foregrounded and articulated complex and discontinuous assemblages that twist, warp and reimagine modernity’s bedrock binaries, including ‘alive<>dead’, ‘real <>fiction’, ‘subject<>object’, ‘now<>then’ and so on. This lecture will engage with the opportunity, and perhaps, the obligation, to think critically about the move to delimit historically, and as a gesture to an entirely different futurity, the time when a biopolitics of embodied humanism was organized in a relation of explicit politicization.

 

The Sexuality Summer School is sponsored this year by the Faculty of Humanities; Cornerhouse; Contact; Manchester Pride; Screen; Science, Stroke, Art 2014; and SEXGEN.

For more information about the Sexuality Summer School, including details of previous events, go to sexualitysummerschool.wordpress.com, email us and get on the mailing list at sexualitysummerschool@gmail.com, find Sexuality Summer School on Facebook or tweet us @SSS_Manchester.

Conference: Learning Disability Studies in Academia: Challenging attitudes, changing lives – Manchester, UK: 9th June

Learning Disability Studies in Academia: Challenging attitudes, changing lives

A free conference at the University of Manchester, 9^th June, 10-4.

 Following the recent cases of death and abuse of learning disabled people and in particular the preventable death of Connor Sparrowhawk (LB), this conference will ask:

• How can Learning Disability Studies make a real difference to the lives of learning disabled people?
• How can Learning Disability Studies take more of an active role in challenging abuse and improving professional practice?
• How can universities become more inclusive of learning disabled people and their views and expertise?

Keynote Speakers: Dr. Sara Ryan (by video link), Connor’s mother and the Partnership Steering Group, Learning Disability Studies. Other speakers include Prof. Dan Goodley, Dr. Katherine Runswick-Cole, Dr. Andrea Hollomotz.

The conference is aimed at academics, practitioners, learning disability activists, learning disabled people, family members, carers and students.

This conference is held in support of the Justice for LB campaign. Twitter @JusticeforLB and #107days hashtag.

To get details and book your place e-mail:

mailto:learningdisabilitystudiesmanchester@outlook.com

 

Event: Manchester Centre for Youth Studies Launch (June, 2014: UK)

Event: Manchester Centre for Youth Studies Launch – ‘Contesting Youth in the UK – Key Challenges and Agendas’

Date: Thursday 26th June 2014

Venue: Geoffrey Manton Building, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK (further details and directions to the venue can be found at www.hssr.mmu.ac.uk/mcys/)

Description: to mark the launch of the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies (MCYS), MMU are hosting a one day free event titled ‘Contesting Youth in the UK – Key Challenges and Agendas’ on Thursday 26th June 2014, in the Geoffrey Manton Building, Manchester Metropolitan University. This exciting and informative event will be used as a means to show-case work undertaken by colleagues at MMU that identifies the key challenges and agendas for research in this field. The event will bring together MYCS researchers, community groups, policymakers and practitioners working with young people, and local youth in a dialogue about how a new inter-disciplinary research centre can best engage with and address the challenges facing young people today.

The programme of events for Thursday 26th June can be found below.

For more information please contact: Dr Hannah Smithson: Co-Director MCYS (e mail: h.l.smithson@mmu.ac.uk)

Register for the event on Eventbrite here.

Programme for the Day

9.00 – 9.45 am: Registration

10.00 – 10.30 am: Welcome address

10.30 – 11.30 am: Keynote address- Helen Donohoe, Director of Research and Policy for ‘Action for Children’

11.45 – 12.30 pm: MMU Research ‘Spotlight’ Panel One

12.30 – 1.30 pm: Lunch (provided)

1.30 – 2.30 pm: Roundtable Session, discussants include:

• Tony Lloyd – Greater Manchester’s Police Crime Commissioner (young people and crime)
• Neil Mcinroy – CEO Centre for Local Economic Strategies (youth unemployment)
• Dr Jenny Slater – Lecturer in Disability Studies, Sheffield Hallam University (young people’s disability rights)
• Helen McAndrew – Head of Manchester Secondary Pupil Referral Units (young people and education)
• Sufiya Ahmed – Author (gender and diversity)

2.45 – 3.30 pm: MMU Research ‘Spotlight’ Panel Two

3.30 – 4.00 pm: Open discussion

4.30 pm onwards: Book launch and drinks reception – Dr Melanie Tebbutt: Being Boys: Youth, Leisure and Identity in the Inter-war years, Manchester University Press.

Symposium: Disability and Austerity: Pan-national Reflections (May, 2014: Sheffield, UK)

Event: Symposium: Disability and Austerity: Pan-national Reflections

Date/Time: 8^th May 2014   2pm-5pm

Venue: University of Sheffield – Education Building, Room 1.02. http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ssid/maps/education

Description: The symposium will include the following brief presentations to spark debate and conversation:

• Dan Goodley (University of Sheffield, UK): Defining and contesting austerity
• Nick Hodge (Sheffield Hallam University, UK): The impact of austerity on the aspirations of people with autism
• Katherine Runswick Cole (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK): Cruel optimism and disability
• Susana Rojas Pernia (University of Cantabria, Spain): Disability barriers in Spain
• Rebecca Lawthom (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK): Revolting subjects and austerity

If you would like to attend please email d.goodley@sheffield.ac.uk

If you like the sound of this… also consider coming to the May DRF seminar. Details below.

Wednesday, 7th May 2014: 10.30am-12.30pm – Arundel 10111 (SHU)

Slot 1:  Joshua Sawiuk (Univ of Leeds, UK): The Importance of the Social Life for Disabled Students in Higher Education

Slot 2: Charlotte Jones (Univ. of Sheffield, UK): Intersex and/as Disability: Exploring the tensions between identity, medicalisation and social justice

Reminder, next DRF seminar tomorrow: history, Deafness, colonialism, Scotland, discourse…

A reminder that the next DRF seminar is tomorrow, Tuesday 7^th April, 2pm-4pm in Arundel 10111.

Slot 1: Esme Cleall (Univ. of Sheffield, UK): Orientalising Deafness: disability and race in imperial Britain

Slot 2: Arianna Introna (Univ. of Stirling, UK): A Scottish ‘paradox of devaluation in the midst of perpetual discussion’? Narratives of Disability in Scottish Studies

Abstract: Scottish cultural and literary discourse has oscillated between visions of Scottish culture perceived as ‘neurotic’, ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘deformed’ due both to disabling historical processes and to the ensuing cultural anxiety, and conceptualizations which have re-valued it as ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’. Both perspectives have reproduced unexamined assumptions regarding the undesirability and necessary erasure of disability. In order to investigate the extent to which the neglect of a disability studies perspective in Scottish literary criticism may be rooted in the specificities of a Scottish cultural context, my presentation will examine the simultaneous reliance on and rejection of narratives of disability in Scottish Studies. This exploration is work in progress as part of my PhD research on the interaction between representations of disability and the politics of belonging in Scottish literature.

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.