Society for Disability Studies

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Welcome to the Society for Disability Studies 23rd Annual Conference at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The theme for this convention is “Disability in the Geo-Political Imagination.”

The development of global studies has increasingly called for a cross-cultural and comparative approach to questions of marginalization, stigma, diaspora and resettlement, labor and exploitation, climate change, and the world-ranging production of impairment and disability from violence, inhumane treatment, crumbling infrastructure, and environmental degradation. A significant amount of scholarship also examines new resistance cultures and the galvanization of global networks as members of diverse disability communities try to navigate productive collaborations across newly wired cybernetic systems and claim the possibilities offered by globalization. New opportunities and new problems abound around forging transnational communities, increased mobility, health and charity tourism, the implementation of universal rights, increased transparency of states and organizations, better community-based rehabilitation, and more varied work possibilities.

This year’s Society for Disability Studies conference features the theme “Disability in the Geo-Political Imagination” to spur ongoing efforts in interdisciplinary analyses. Such a theme arrives at a timely moment in the wake of the signing of the United Nations Charter on the Rights of People with Disabilities by leaders in 140 nations (including, most recently and somewhat belatedly, the United States). As a result of the emergence and ratification of this convention, disability has become a more visible topic within the public sphere. Nations, perhaps including the United States, that previously undervalued disabled populations now contend with what it means to be truly inclusive. Disability-advocacy organizations now seek to make further claims upon the state as a guarantor of rights and liberties. This SDS conference theme includes proactive responses and solutions to the critique that disabled populations—particularly those who are disproportionately poor and people of color—are ill represented, under-analyzed, and under-theorized, particularly in the context of global studies. As the local and global may be seen as intertwined and haunting each other, so can questions of disability, race, class, and gender.

Disability studies explores the distance that exists between popular representations of disability as tragic embodiment, and politically informed disability cultures that define themselves against such devaluing views. Authors of panel and paper proposals will ideally feature new ways of conceptualizing people who experience disability as social actors connected or disconnected on a global scale. In particular, the SDS Program Committee seeks entries from those areas of inquiry that resist, revise, and re-imagine contemporary understandings of human differences and embodiment such as critical race studies, feminist/womanist studies, class-based analyses, queer studies, trans-gender studies, and other critical perspectives linked to social justice initiatives.

We imagined submissions that attend to local conditions, including those in our host city of Philadelphia, within a global context and to cultures of empowerment and resistance within the complexity of global exploitation and opportunities. Topic questions might include:

• What is the relationship between disability studies and other critical studies of experience—cultural studies, critical race studies, gender, feminist, and women’s studies, queer studies, subaltern studies—that critique social norms of embodiment, capacity, and aesthetic?
• How do we analyze and theorize around international disability experiences? How do we bridge the disjuncture between the global and the local?
• What is the role of disability in critical resistance to privatization, the penetration of neoliberal thinking and practice, the retrenchment of social/economic benefits, the ideas/practices of social entrepreneurship, all both nationally and internationally?
• What are the effects and affects of neo-liberalism on disability rights, service provision, policy, art, culture, and politics?
• How do transnational disability movements develop and what is their relationship to national borders?
• What is the role of disability in the public imagination as constituted through and within representation in media?
• What infrastructure best supports the production of new interventions and innovations in the realm of community-based rehabilitation and other services, new cloistered living schemes, and disability programming as a result of the UN convention?
• What is the relationship between new forms of labor and disability, informal and formal economies, and how they intersect with disability?
• What critical analysis is needed from disability perspectives on the development of new technology?
• What are the impacts of declarations of the suspension of social liberties in the context of arguments around a “state of exception” with respect to social justice for disabled populations?

Interdisciplinary work will bring together presenters in different fields and using diverse methodologies. Formats will vary, including individual papers, organized paper sessions, discussion panels, poster sessions, artistic and performance events, films, roundtables and more. Thanks to the artists, activists and scholars who will share their work in Disability Studies here.