Here and There, Then and Now: Disability Studies at the End of the World
Call for Papers
Amidst escalating political repression, imperialist violence, climate crisis, and warfare, how do we practice disability studies at the end of the world? What can disability studies and the disability community teach us during a time of rampant fascism and global collapse? How might we amplify disabled expertise and crip wisdom – centering ways of living with injury and interdependence – as a way of refusing the ableist nihilism that underwrites apocalypse’s finality and its fixation on healing, cure, and redemption? How do we draw on reservoirs of collective crip memory that persist in the face of dispossession, precarity and debilitation, that brim with ideas, dreams, hopes, visions, and critiques that survive even as many of our bodies do not? What might we gain from centering disability as a site of valuable knowledge, embodied wisdom, and radical creativity in our current political moment?
Striking at apocalyptic forecasts that assert “unprecedented times,” Indigenous, Black, postcolonial, and transnational disability studies challenge this temporality of the world’s seeming end, reminding us that, for many, the world has already ended and begun again many times over. How might the experience and concept of disability help us re-frame what the end of the world means? How have our disabled ancestors accessed the end of the world as the beginning of another? How might radical, diverse, and distinct crip knowledges help us attune to possibilities of and for other worlds?
Finally, what is the role of “study” and “studies” in the ending and remaking of worlds? What does a “field” like disability studies need to do in this current political, environmental, and affective moment? What shape can world-making projects take in a “field” such as ours, which coalesces across and through hierarchies of labor, citizenship, health, gender, sexuality, race, mobility, discipline, age, and access? How might we envision community, care, and collaboration in a time of stoked division?
In keeping with the legacy of the Society for Disability Studies’ annual conference as a site for gathering, reckoning, and pause, we invite proposals that take up these questions and other related, novel provocations. We particularly welcome sessions reckoning with the past, present, and future of the “field” that broadly address its “state” through unresolved conflicts, emergent positions, and methodological commitments in disability studies, disability justice organizing and advocacy, and disability art. Proposals that aim to bring new interlocutors into dialogue and foment new coalitional possibilities across academia, advocacy, activism and the arts, are especially encouraged.
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The SDS welcomes sponsors for our 2027 conference. Individuals and organizations may sponsor registration fees, access costs, or in any other way. We also welcome institutional and organizational sponsorships with the opportunity to increase your organization’s visibility among SDS membership. Learn more by clicking the link below, or email meeting@disstudies.org.