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Call for Proposals

Society for Disability Studies 21st Annual Conference

New York City, June 18-21, 2008

“Cosmopolitan? Disability Studies Crips the City”

Submission Deadline: 1 December 2007

As Disability Studies becomes more aware of the boundaries of its own discourses, we want to explore critically the lands of its origins, the limits of its imagination, and the challenges of experiencing wider space. Bodies, ideas, and words travel across borders, negotiate restricted space and resistance, and become transformed as they journey. How do notions of disability, Disability Studies, and disability culture shift in these travels? Who participates in these travels and who is denied entrance? How is space produced, enacted, and lived in by disabled people? How are local life worlds configured in space? What is at stake in seeing ourselves as citizens of a more complex world in which multiple, simultaneous identities are engaged in transit and dialogue?

New York, this city of immigrants, is the staging ground for the 2008 SDS conference. Thus, many cherished American ideas are up for grabs: melting pots and assimilation, the energy of new beginnings, the emergence of undergrounds and renaissances, beliefs in rugged individualism and transnational capitalism, mechanisms of control and security, and architectures of access. As we imagine disability and disability studies in this iconic location, we ask, What are our Ellis Islands, our Statues of Liberty, our Grand Central Stations, our Stonewalls? Where are our Christopher Streets, our Broadways, our Greenwich Villages?

How might New York City, a site both global and local, guide our understandings of disability and Disability Studies from international and transnational perspectives? How might such multiple locations in turn illuminate, enrich, and challenge disability experiences and Disability Studies within the United States? What are the assumptions at work in casting New York as a cosmopolitan city, and to what effect? What does it mean to imagine cosmopolitanism—evoking the city without borders, people as citizens of the world—from disability perspectives? How might notions of the city, cosmopolitanism, and the urban produce Disability Studies scholarship that speaks to applied disciplines and theoretical examinations of identity, citizenship, space, and authenticity?

We invite proposals from any field that examine the ways in which disability and urban issues intersect; engage the mobility of metaphor and the refiguration of space; and/or explore the ways in which Disability Studies shifts and translates in application to specific sites and communities. Potential topics include:

• Public Health
• Violence, War, and Terror
• Mobility and Metaphor
• Housing, Home, and Homelessness
• Access and Spatiality
• Immigration and Translation
• Education
• Globalization and Transnational Critique
• Artistic Practices, Cultural Production, and Crip Culture
• History and Memory
• Categorization and Citizenship
• Public Policy in the Global City
• Bodies and Borders
• Surveillance and Security, Visibility and Invisibility
• Activist Communities, Strategies, and Identities
• Architectural Mappings and Geographical Textures
• Pollution, Garbage, and Environmental Devastation

SDS invites activists, artists, and scholars to submit proposals for all work in progress in Disability Studies. We welcome interdisciplinary proposals that bring together scholars in different fields or using different methodologies, embodying the kinds of translation and movement evoked in this year’s theme. Work can be submitted in a variety of formats, including workshops, paper presentations, poster sessions, performances, video/DVD recordings, etc. For the 2008 conference, we also would like to introduce new seminar slots for the discussion of shared readings, pre-circulated papers, or other focused topics. The Program Committee will make every effort to honor participants’ requests insofar as presentation format. We ask participants to bear in mind that the committee may reassign participants to other presentation formats, styles, and panels in order to develop the richest program possible.

Accessibility in presentations is central to the philosophy of SDS. Presenters should explore ways to make physical, sensory, and intellectual access a fundamental part of their presentation. All presenters are required to, at minimum, provide e-text versions of papers in advance of the conference (for open captioning), large-print hard copies (18 point font or larger) of all handouts, hard copies or outlines of their talks in 12 point and 18 point fonts, audio description of visual images, charts, and video/DVDs, and open or closed captioning of films and video clips. Presentations should also be planned so that their delivery will accommodate open-captioning and ASL translation. In order to facilitate ASL interpretation and open captioning, drafts of accepted presentations will be due by 1 May 2008. If you have questions about making your presentation accessible, please contact Alison Kafer or Petra Kuppers. Please note: English and ASL are the two main languages in use at SDS; if you have other language needs, please indicate such on your proposal and we will try to assist you in obtaining accommodations.

The deadline for proposals is 1 December 2007. Participants will be notified of their acceptance by 15 February 2008. All abstracts will be reviewed by the conference Program Committee: Alison Kafer and Petra Kuppers, co-chairs; Chris Bell, Pamela Block, Aimee Meredith Cox, Lakshmi Fjord, Bruce Henderson, Eunjung Kim, Susan Magasi, Chris McCohnell, Mansha Mirza, David Mitchell, Michelle Nario-Redmond, Santiago Solis, Sunny Taylor, and Cindy Wu.

For your convenience, the electronic form for submitting your proposal is available at the SDS conference web site at http://www.disstudies.org/conference/2008/cfp/app. Please submit proposals electronically via the online application or by submitting the application in text and rich text format using the form available at http://www.disstudies.org/files/conference/2008/cfp/app/proposal.doc. to Lisa Pollich at conference@disstudies.org. Questions about the conference program or submission process should be directed to Alison Kafer or Petra Kuppers. Questions related to the online application can be addressed to Pratik Patel.

If electronic submission is not possible, please mail or fax proposals to arrive by 1 December 2007:
Lisa Pollich
Society for Disability Studies
JFK Institute for Worker Education
The City University of New York
101 West 31st St.
14th Floor
New York, NY 10001
Fax: 646.344.7319