Call for Papers: Different Bodies: (Self-)Representation, Disability and the Media (University of Westminster)

About the conference

This one-day conference will take place on 23 June 2017 at 9am to 6pm at Regent Campus, 309 Regent Street, London.

This one-day conference seeks to explore representations of the body as strange, shameful, wrong, impaired, wounded, scarred, disabled, lacking, different or ‘other’ in contemporary media.

The advent of digital media has underlined the importance of visual culture and our curiosity in representations of the body to form opinions about ourselves and others. Media portrayals of bodies can affect our lives because media are one of the primary agents of socialization (Moore and Kosut, 2010). Bodies we see in newspapers, on television and in our social media feeds are often made to appear perfect in order to conform to racialized and heteronormative ideals of what it means to be beautiful and normal in contemporary capitalist societies. Presentations of the body that are white, young, slim and productive have been critiqued from different fields in academia such as feminism, queer theory, disability studies, critical theory and postcolonial studies.

The digital media landscape is posing new challenges to the study of body representation. The Internet and social media in particular have led to an increased representation and engagement with the body through practices such as selfies, webcamming, blogging, vlogging and so on. While digital media may contribute to an empowerment of excluded and silenced bodies, they may equally open up spaces of discrimination, threats, hatred, trolling and silencing online, as the #gamergate controversy or author Lizzie Velásquez’ self-presentation on social media have recently illustrated.

A critical approach to representations of bodies and disability is therefore essential as a means of change (Bolt, 2014). This conference aims to develop a new understanding of disability and the media in the 21st century by establishing a dialogue between different scholars on the theme of body representations. In particular, we seek to formulate new questions to comprehend how the tension between non-digital and digital media is creating spaces for new ways of framing disabled bodies. How are new narratives being developed to recount diversity? What is their function? What is the relationship between representation of the body in news outlets and self-representation on social media? What are the epistemological opportunities the media could embrace in order to promote equality, health literacy and ultimately, a more comprehensive understanding of what it means to be human?

We encourage interdisciplinary paper presentations of 15 minutes that aim to explore how narratives and images of other bodies are constructed in the media and what their aesthetic, social, cultural, epistemological and political implications are.

Themes

Papers may draw on media and communication studies, as well as queer theory, disability studies, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, critical theory, psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies, literature, history, visual studies, anthropology, health communication, religious studies, medicine and philosophy.

Possible themes include but are not limited to:

• Researching bodies and the media: frameworks and methodologies
• Journalism and practices of othering the body
• The mediated body as spectacle
• Celebrity bodies and the spectacles of transformation
• The abject body
• Stigma and the body
• De-colonizing and de-westernising the mediated body
• Neoliberalism, policy and austerity politics
• (Dis)Empowerments of the disabled body
• The objectification of the disabled body in the media
• Contemporary coverage of disability in print/online/television/radio
• Reality television and the body
• Auto-ethnographic accounts of the body in / through digital media
• The medicalised body in the media
• Representing wounds and scars
• Affective labour of bodies
• The body and trauma

This conference is part of the research project ‘Facial Disfigurement in the UK Media: From Print to Online’, led by Dr Diana Garrisi (University of Westminster) and Dr Jacob Johanssen (University of Westminster), which is financed through the University of Westminster Strategic Research Fund.

Invited speakers include Henrietta Spalding, Head of Advocacy at the UK charity Changing Faces.

How to submit papers

Please send in abstracts of no longer than 500 words to both Jacob Johanssen (j.johanssen@westminster.ac.uk) and Diana Garrisi (d.garrisi2@westminster.ac.uk) by 28 April 2017.

Conference attendance will be free and registration will open in late spring.

We seek to provide an open and inclusive space for everyone.

May’s Disability Research Forum session

Our next Disability Research Forum session will take place on Tuesday, 23rd May 2017 at 1:30-3:30pm. Location to be announced.

Our first speaker will be Lindsay Miller

A dis-ordered refusal to be healthy: Messing up ideological purity & disciplines as violence

This talk, which is part of a larger PhD project that has just begun but that is ultimately untimely, aims to get us in deep trouble – through unsettling positionality – in order to dis-order shallow, clean, rigorous disciplinary modes of thinking connected to the bordering and ordering of security regimes (border imperialism) concerned with maintaining, largely through an imperialistic act of hiding, ideological purity connected to anormative, regulative production of truthful universal knowledge (Halberstam, 2015; Walia, 2013). I, like John Law in After Method (2004), “want to move from the moralist idea that if only you do your methods properly you will lead a healthy research life.” The imperative to heal, to be healthy, to be well, and the categorization and measurement thereof, will be exposed as restraining the possibility of other >>risky, unbecoming<< ways of living. What if we are unable, unwilling, or outright refuse to heal? What if healing, being read as healthy, requires a reintegration into the very structures that are responsible for the original violence? What, then, is made possible by such a refusal? And is this risk one worth taking?

Lindsay Miller is a first-year PhD student in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield. Currently studying the entanglements of border imperialism, psychiatric imperialism, and the huMan – especially as they emerge within and are legitimating forces of settler colonialism – their studies refuse allegiance to a disciplinary category and also refuse the perceived border between theory&practice. @praxivist

Our second speaker will be Michael Miller

Re: Forms of disruption, discipline, and disability

This paper considers forms of reform, broadly, and disciplinary reform more specifically related to efforts in changing conceptions of disability, and disabled people, in the classroom and wider ableist society. Recognizing that in-class disruptions are considered threats to a wider order and serve as justifications for discipline, how can we otherwise consider the classroom in relation to these events and students, recognizing the refusal and opportunity in the disruptions? Further, I want to think about how we might all think about these ‘events’ as discontinuous happenings within a structurally ongoing violence.

The classroom is an assertion of a naturalized order – with an Other just as necessary to a Normative Self as the institution of Education is to a Normative World. This paper, as an aspect of my PhD research, will think specifically about the distinguished, intertwined categorizations of students who cannot/will not fit compulsory expressions (Erevelles 2014). A question further than recognition and subversion that I am asking is: What if we changed our thinking of radical reforms beyond measures of temporary relief to facets of a structurally violent society, to considering how reforms actually serve the institutions they are enacted to erode (Ferguson 2012)?

Michael Miller is a PhD student at the University of Sheffield in the School of Education. Primarily focused in critical disability studies, Michael is thinking about and further developing their own (in)comprehensions of discontinuities of violence in/as education, asking what a crip refusal to reformative policies might become. @no_michael_ 

Dis/Cinema presents: Who Am I to Stop It? (2016)

This event takes place on Wednesday 26 April 2017 at 6 to 8pm at Hicks Building room K14, the University of Sheffield

Dis/Cinema is hosting a screening of Who Am I To Stop It, a documentary on isolation, art, and transformation after brain injury. The film centers on art not as rehabilitation but as a tool for personal growth, meanful work, and social change. Who Am I To Stop It takes an intimate look at life and art with brain injury through witnessing the lives of three artists (Dani, Brandon, and Kris) as they create art, interact in their communities in the Pacific Northwest of the US, and go about their daily lives.

This event is facilitated by the film’s director Cheryl Green MFA, MS who integrates her training in Performance As Public Practice and Speech-Language Pathology to explore how story can be used to break down stigma and barriers. After decades of repeated sports concussion and a series of mild traumatic brain injuries in 2010 and 2011, she began making films that combine personal narrative and activism to create dynamic, artistic tools to challenge misconceptions and stereotypes of disability while celebrating pride in disability experiences. Cheryl is host of the podcast Stories from the brainreels, a blogger, Closed Captioner and transcriptionist, and of course, a filmmaker who is proudly neurodivergent.

Who Am I To Stop It is Closed Captioned and Audio Description is available.

For accessibility enquiries, please contact us at discinemasheffield@gmail.com

Booking via Eventbrite can be completed here

May’s Disability Reading Group session

Our Next Disability Reading Group session will take place on Tuesday May 23rd at 12 -1pm in Room 10211, Arundel Building, 122 Charles Street, City Campus, Sheffield Hallam University, S1 1WB.

Michael and Lindsay Miller will be leading the session and they would like us to look at the following article: Kumari Campbell, F. A. (2008). Exploring internalised ableism using critical race theory. Disability and Society. 23 (2). 151-162.

For more information about the session or in case of any further questions, please contact srhannam@my.shu.ac.uk

Invitation to contribute to a new edited collection examining disability and research

Dr. Bronagh Byrne (Queen’s University Belfast) and Dr. Ciaran Burke (Ulster University) are currently accepting abstracts for chapters in a new edited collection examining disability and research.  The text itself will explore the empirical process from the perspective and experience of the disabled researcher.  As a companion to texts examining research processes with disabled respondents, this collection will provide a resource for disabled researchers that considers how we can navigate the rules and procedures of social research methods, whilst retaining the scientific rigour of the chosen method. We also wish to consider the consequences that can arise from disabled researchers’ attempts at “passing” and the benefits that can emerge from a reflexive approach to method.

To this end we envisage an edited collection that encompasses contributions from disabled researchers both within and beyond the disability studies field, reflecting the fact that disabled scholars may not necessarily work on disability issues. Examples of issues that may be considered include physical and communicational barriers inherent in some research processes, the disjuncture between need for adjustments to carry out ‘good quality research’ and availability of resources, implications for researcher identity, and disclosure of disability to research participants. There may of course be many other issues that warrant consideration.

The deadline for abstracts is Monday 8^th May.  To discuss the focus of the text or potential abstracts please contact Dr. Ciaran Burke c.burke@ulster.ac.uk

Let’s Talk About Money event at Manchester Metropolitan University

This event will take place on Friday 7^th April at 10:30-15:00

The location is Lecture Theatre 3, Geoffrey Manton building, Manchester Metropolitan University

Money & Equality – are people with learning disabilities getting the money they need to lead good lives?

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Disabled People says that governments should make sure that disabled citizens have enough money to have healthcare, homes and jobs and be full members of their communities.

The United Kingdom government signed up to this convention to say they would do this.

Many disabled people and organisations from the UK told the United Nations that the government had policies that took away money and rights from disabled people. The United Nations investigated what they said and wrote a report.

This event is to talk about what the report said and what the experience is of people with learning disabilities.

We want to talk about whether there is enough money for people to live good lives in their communities and to take part as equal citizens.

We want to talk about whether our members with learning disabilities are having funding cut to for the help they need, benefits, housing and speaking up.

We will respond to the government on this report so we will use what our members say in this event to tell them what you think.