Letter from the President
Dear SDS Community,
I hope your summer has provided you moments of rest, creativity, and reconnection amid all the challenges we have on the global stage. I’m writing to you today from the muggy U.S. Northeast, where summer’s end feels to be coming toward me a little too quickly!
This past six months have unfolded a little differently than I had initially hoped. I had expected that we would be able to host an annual SDS conference this past spring, but the timeline was simply too quick and we had too many moving parts to grapple with in order to ensure success. Instead, we’ll be issuing a call for papers and participation this fall for a spring 2025 conference, which will include in-person and online options and follow a previously announced decentralized model. I apologize for our ambition and any frustration or disappointment. Our goal is to make a very accessible, very sustainable conference that meets our members’ needs, and we want to make sure we do it right.
The Board has been quietly working on streamlining our policies and practices, which has included substantial bylaw revisions. The most important of these is the revision of how we run elections. Previously, individuals were elected to general, member-at-large seats on the Board and the roles of Treasurer, Secretary, Vice President, and President were decided annually among the elected Board members. Now, we’ll be electing individuals to at-large seats as well as into these dedicated administrative roles for three years terms. This change was made to ensure that the Board has the experience and skills needed to fulfill these administrative roles—and that individuals know what they’re committing to in their tenure on the Board.
With that background, we are currently gearing up for our annual election, which will take place during the final weeks of August. Maybe SDS is always at a moment of possible reinvention, but it is especially true these days as most of our members are graduate students and early career faculty. We’ve been working to host more online events for our members, reconsidering how to host our annual conference, and how to make Board work sustainable—but the Board can always use more ideas and enthusiasm. If you’re considering running for a Board position or know someone who would make an excellent and committed Board member and have questions, please get in contact: I’m happy to explain what the roles are like these days, as I’m sure other Board members are too.
If you’d like to propose an online event, you can use this form to communicate with the Board. This August, we’ll be hosting a “Preparing for the Academic Job Market” event (date TBD), followed by a “Back to School” event, with a discussion of Margaret Price’s recent book Crip Spacetime (featuring commentary by Aparna Nair, Benjamin Reiss, & Helen Rottier) on September 3rd from 12-1:30 Eastern (RSVP to come). We’re also planning an event for later in the fall with artist Sandie Yi. Again, we’re open for suggestions and welcome a variety of possible formats. Recordings and transcripts from our earlier events should be posted soon.
If it’s time for you to renew your SDS membership, you can do so through our Patreon page, which allows you to pay monthly or a reduced annual rate. If you need an invoice for your membership, please contact our administrative assistant Tawny Whaley, who can prepare one for you.
You can also access our Discord server for discussions, publication and event announcements, and general conversation and follow SDS on Twitter/X for announcements. More ways to connect are coming!
Thank you for your continued support of SDS, and my best wishes,
Matthew Wolf-Meyer
President, Society for Disability Studies
A Brand New Look for SDS
Our new logo, a dandelion head with a few tufts floating through an embracing circle, is drawn from the critical interdisciplinary and intersectional scholarly and advocacy work that drives our SDS Principles. Black feminist scholar adrienne maree brown explains in her book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, the natural elements she ties to emergent strategy, or the strategy for building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions. Of dandelions, she writes, “Dandelions are often mistakenly identified as weeds, aggressively removed, but are hard to uproot; the top is pulled but the long taproot remains. Resilience. Resistance. Regeneration. Decentralization” (46). We see the dandelion as emblematic of embodied experience of disabled lives and the interwoven network of scholarship, advocacy, activism, and collective identity-making that allows us to, in the words of Mia Mingus (2010) Create Collective Access (CCA).
