Volume 8

2016-12-06

Call for Papers, Volume 8

Submission Deadline: February 27th, 2017

In this 8th iteration of Critical Disability Discourses/Discours critiques dans le champ du handicap (CDD/DCCH), our editorial team would like to return to the foundational question:

What is knowledge?

Knowledge about disability is typically located within research, academic, and other “expert” settings, and many people with disabilities are prevented from participating in what we call knowledge production. Recent work by disabled people breaks with these practices, challenging the kinds of knowledge that are privileged.

Volume 8 of CDD questions the nature of knowledge and knowledge-production by signalling to marginalized events, contexts, producers, and experiences of knowledge. These include communities of disabled people, as well as scholars and activists, who are disavowed from participating in the processes of meaning production that are generally favoured in academic research and activist exchanges. We encourage Disabled and Mad people, who are located in the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality and often excluded from these processes, to contribute to this volume.

We will prioritize submissions from writers, artists, photographers, videographers, and others, who are or who identify as

  • Disabled BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Colour), and those producing works that centre on the experiences and knowledges of disabled BIPOC people
  • Queer, Two-Spirited, and Trans disabled people
  • Mad and institutional survivors, including but not limited to survivors of asylums, psychiatric institutions, regional centres, hospitals, group-homes, and long-term care homes
  • Autistic or labelled as autistic
  • Psychiatric system consumers, survivors, or ex-patients
  • Having intellectual disabilities or labelled as having intellectual disabilities
  • Practising anti-colonialism and resisting Eurocentric knowledge production
  • Having chronic illness(es)  
  • Using non-verbal or non-written communication styles

Form and Style

We also hope to collectively challenge and resist common assumptions about the location of knowledge and the ways these are grounded in practices and mirrored in the realities of power. Consider, for example, that interactions and knowledge that occur online and outside of academic settings create the meaning of disability for many.

Our editorial team also recognizes the need to move beyond frameworks that favour written text and to acknowledge the particular role that writing plays in limiting access to, and expressions of, knowledge.

While written submissions are welcome, we strive to create space for other forms of authorship and invite submissions that produce and share knowledge in the following ways:

  • Art-based approaches
  • Videos
  • Scholarly style writings (such as articles with footnotes) as well as non-scholarly style writings
  • Creative writings, blog writings, and poetry
  • Audio-based works
  • Facebook posts (possibly in a form that is archived or curated as a thread)
  • Collaborative or co-produced documents that reflect duo-ethnographic or multi-ethnographic approaches

We also welcome other possibilities.

Possible Themes

We invite authors to draw upon the themes listed below. Projects which do not reflect these ideas are also welcome.  

 

  • Colonial overtones in disability activism and research

- Critical engagement with research that is conducted in the Global South by scholars based in or trained in the Global North

- Perceptions of universality versus specificity

- Eurocentric knowledge production within and part of academic and other institutions

 

  • Constructions and experiences of disability in intersectional contexts

- Research from marginalized communities within the Global North, with particular attention to the production of and resistance to able-bodied, cisgendered, and heterosexual white supremacy  

- Police violence against disabled Black and Indigenous bodies

- Collective actions, community/local mobilizations, and popular movements that disrupt and dismantle able-bodied white supremacy, such as Black Lives Matter

- Disability, disablement, and Trans bodies, particularly experiences of Trans women of color

 

  • Confinement and Institutional Survivorship

- The appropriation of histories of survivorship by those outside of Mad, consumer, survivor, and ex-patient communities or communities of people labelled with intellectual disabilities

- Considerations of how survivors are positioned or not positioned as authorities on institutional histories and the work that is being done to recognize their expertise

 

  • Disability in the context of neoliberalism/transnational capitalism

- Disability as a result of global/transnational capitalism, neo-liberal labour/work practices, particularly in the Global South

- The ways in which neoliberalism/transnational capitalism  affect policy/pedagogy/research/activism

- The ways in which disability interacts with other categories of difference in the context of transnational capitalism

 

Submission Guidelines

 

  • In submitting to CDD, authors affirm that the work is original and unpublished, is not in press or under consideration elsewhere, and will not be submitted elsewhere while under consideration by the Journal.

 

  • Authors are responsible for ethics approval for manuscripts and must receive approval from their own institutions. Proof of ethics approval (if applicable) should be provided to the Journal.

 

 

  • We ask that written articles not exceed 7000 words.

 

If you have any questions, contact CDD Managing Editor, Natalie Spagnuolo, at cdsj@yorku.ca