CFP--Composing Disability: Crip Politics and the Crisis of Culture

George Washington University, March 22-23, 2018

Crip Politics and the Crisis of Culture

Keynote Speakers To Be Announced

Abstracts of 500 Words: September 30, 2017
Send to: composingdisabilitygwu@gmail.com

In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” as Word of the Year, putting forward an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The “post-truth” era in part marked the emergence of a new and global authoritarianism evident around the world. It also marked a moment in which the neoliberal consensus, itself no stranger to evasions of the truth, was in crisis, from Brazil to the United Kingdom, from France to South Korea, from Mexico to Spain, and of course the United States. The fracturing of the neoliberal consensus has happened on the left but—especially with the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency—has consolidated even more on the right, even if the extreme racism, nationalism, and protectionism of the new authoritarianism generally masks an even deeper entrenchment of a global austerity politics that protects global finance and sustains neoliberal business as usual.

What might disability politics, disability arts, and disability studies look like in this “post-truth” era or in other eras in which the term might resonate? Does the “post-” in “post-truth” invite us to interrogate the making and breaking of history, and of time itself? What is the relationship between alternative facts and speculative fictions? How have crip bodies, minds, and behaviors been caught up cultural crises across time or space? How have disability politics and theory always contended with ableist evasions of basic facts connected to disabled lives, experiences, knowledges? Conversely, in what ways does the new authoritarianism present decidedly new challenges for crip politics and theory?

Composing Disability 2018 takes stock of the current moment while recognizing that what we might term “the crisis of culture” is not located solely in the present moment. We invite proposals that address crip politics and “the crisis of culture” from any time or place. The biennial Composing Disability conference has always sustained a focus on writing and rhetoric, and so we particularly invite proposals focusing on the ways in which we use rhetoric and composition to engage critically the crisis of culture. As an interdisciplinary gathering, we are especially interested in proposals from multiple fields where critical disability studies is flourishing and expanding.

Topics might include:

• Crip/Queer studies and the crisis of culture
• Crip stories and crip histories
• Queer of color critique and crip of color critique
• Im/migration, xenophobia, and mobility
• Transnational crip alliances
• Dis/continuity and disability cultures
• “La teoría crip”—breaking the hegemony of English in disability/crip theory
• Postcolonial and anticolonial disability movements and cultural production
• Disability and indigenous resistance movements
• Crip pedagogy in a time of intolerance
• Alternative facts and speculative fictions
• Health care policy and the new authoritarianism
• Black Lives Matter and crip politics and theory
• Crip ecologies
• Food systems, food crises, and disablement
• Cripping local food
• Cripping food justice
• Fake News and awkward truths
• Dystopian visions and crip futures
• Disability theory and the assault on scientific facts
• Feminist disability studies in the Trump era