The Society for Disability Studies, probably the premier academic U.S. disability studies organization, has issued a call for proposals for the 21st Annual Conference, to be held in NYC June 18-22, 2008.
The (wonderful!) theme of the conference is "Cosmopolitan? Disability Studies Crips the City." Submission deadline is Dec. 1, 2007. Here is an excerpt from the Call:
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?
More helpful details and context are available on the website, including accessibility instructions for submitters.
Call for Papers:
DIFFERENT BODIES: DISABILITY, IMPAIRMENT & ILLNESS Area
2008 Film & History Conference
“Film & Science: Fictions, Documentaries, and Beyond”
October 30-November 2, 2008
Chicago, Illinois
www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory
Third-Round Deadline: August 1, 2008
AREA: Different Bodies
The rise of the disability rights movement over the last forty years, the emergence of disability studies in the humanities, and critical works in the field of film and television, such as Martin F. Norden’s The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disabilities in the Movies and Charles A. Riley II’s Disability and the Media, suggest that body differences—through disability, impairment, and illness—lie at the heart of our media heritage: they appear in some of the most popular films of early cinema, in the rhetoric of wartime propaganda, and in contemporary narratives about our culture’s most closely held values: individualism, self-determination, and community membership. How have different bodies been represented in film from its earliest era? How have these representations worked to construct American or other national or cultural identities? How have they been used to mediate historical events or shape civic opinion? How has the dominance of science and medicine in American culture intersected with the representation of disability, impairment, or illness?
This area welcomes presentations on disability, impairment, and/or illness in film, television, or video from any era, including silent films (The Light That Came, Orphans of the Storm), post-WWII injury narratives (The Best Years of Our Lives, Pride of the Marines), biopics and docudramas (The Miracle Worker, My Left Foot), public-service television and videos (Muscular Dystrophy Telethons), public-health initiatives and instructional films, newsreels and broadcast media, documentaries (Nazi Medicine, Murderball), blockbuster dramas (The Three Faces of Eve, Elephant Man), comedies (Pumpkin, Monk), fantasized impaired or disabled bodies (Frankenstein, Edward Scissorhands), actualities and direct cinema, international film, and disability or impairment readings of science fiction or medical films (The Thing, Aliens).
Presentations may focus on analyses of individual works, explorations of particular oeuvres, discussions of the material or cultural circumstances of production, or investigations of disability, impairment, or illness history or culture in relation to film. Papers that address the representation of science or medicine in the portrayal of different bodies are particularly encouraged, as are those that consider films in their historical context.
Paper topics might include cultural and historical notions of disease, health, independence, adulthood, and citizenship, class, race, gender, the psycho-social dynamics of charity, idealized bodies, medicalized bodies, illness or impairment metaphors, economic and physical access to means of production, the impact of genre expectations, the dynamics of translation (ASL to written subtitles), wartime media and propaganda, the promotion of science, American mythology, national identity, or other body-related issues in film and television.
Please send your 200-word proposal by August 1, 2008, to the area chair:
Marja Mogk, Chair of Different Bodies
Department of English
California Lutheran University
60 West Olsen Road #3900
Thousand Oaks, CA 91360
805-493-3394
Email: mmogk at callutheran.edu
Panel proposals for up to four presenters are also welcome, but each presenter must submit his or her own paper proposal. Deadline for third-round proposals: August 1, 2008.
This area, comprising multiple panels, is a part of the 2008 biennial Film & History Conference, sponsored by The Center for the Study of Film and History. Speakers will include founder John O’Connor and editor Peter C. Rollins (in a ceremony to celebrate the transfer to the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh); Wheeler Winston Dixon, author of Visions of the Apocalypse, Disaster and Memory, and Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood; Sidney Perkowitz, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Physics at Emory University and author of Hollywood Science: Movies, Science, & the End of the World; and special-effects legend Stan Winston, our Keynote Speaker. For updates and registration information about the upcoming meeting, see the Film & History website (www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory).
Posted by: Marja Mogk | May 06, 2008 at 08:25 AM