Thank You, 2018 Composing Disability Presenters

Last week saw the fourth installation of the Composing Disability conference series.  Crip Politics and the Crisis of Culture was a great success, and the planning committee extends its heartfelt thanks to all of the presenters, participants, and various administrative offices at The George Washington University that were instrumental in helping the event happen.

As of right now--late March 2018--Composing Disability (and this blog) will enter hibernation mode.  When the planning for future Composing Disability events gets underway, updates will be posted here.

2018 Composing Disability Featured Speaker

Liz Crow

Composing Disability: Crip Politics and the Crisis of Culture will feature a Keynote Presentation from Liz Crow.

Liz is an artist-activist working through performance, film, audio and text. Founder of Roaring Girl Productions and a former NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) fellow, her work has been shown at Tate Modern, Washington DC’s Kennedy Center, on the Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth and the Thames foreshore. Liz is undertaking a practice-led PhD into methodologies of activism.

Readers are encouraged to consult the Crip Politics and the Crisis of Culture conference schedule for the details of Liz's talk.

Readers are also encouraged to consult the archive of featured Composing Disability speakers for a historical overview of the event series.

Composing Disability Brief Restaurant Guide

This map includes some affordable, easy dining options for attendees at Composing Disability: Crip Politics and the Crisis of Culture.

Composing Disability 2018: Crip Politics and the Crisis of Culture Program of Events

Composing Disability 2018: Crip Politics and the Crisis of Culture Program of Events

The George Washington University

Thursday, March 22nd-Friday, March 23rd

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Thursday, March 22nd

Session 1: 10:45am-12:00pm
Panel: Performance and Theater--Jack Morton Auditorium

• “‘Today for you, tomorrow for me’: Queer Contagion and Crip Chronicity in the AIDS Musical,” Sam Yates, George Washington University
• “Adaptive Activism in a Time of Crisis: How Disability Refigures the Cultural Landscape,” Ann M. Fox, Davidson University

Session 2: 1:00pm-2:30pm
Panel: Madness and Post-Truth--Jack Morton Auditorium

• “Citizenship, Madness, and the Age of . . . ,” James Berger, Yale University
• “Cripping the Position of the Mad Subject in the Post-Truth Era,” Meghann O’Leary, University of Illinois at Chicago
• “Crip Technoscience Manifesto,” Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, Vanderbilt University and University of Toronto

Panel: Disability and Literature--Marvin Center 309

• “No Pity: Mary Wilkins Freeman, Subsistence, and ‘The Tears of Things,’” Clare Mullaney, University of Pennsylvania
• “‘He Will Be What You Make of Him’: Aesthetic Inclusionism and Social Death in Stephen Crane’s ‘The Monster,’” Joshua Kupetz, University of Michigan
• “Diagnosis, Eugenics, and Creative Kinship,” Theodora Danylevich, George Washington University

Keynote: 2:45pm-4:15pm
Liz Crow--Jack Morton Auditorium

Liz Crow is an artist-activist working with performance, film, audio and text. Interested in drama, life stories and experimental work, she is drawn to the potential of storytelling to trigger change. Described as “a director of real visual flair”, her work has been praised for its ability “to get under the skin of a subject.” Liz’s work has shown at Tate Modern and the Smithsonian Institution, as well as on television and at festivals internationally. Through a four-year NESTA (National Endowment for Science,Technology and the Arts) fellowship, she explored ways to combine her creative practice and political activism. Liz is a graduate of the Skillset Guiding Lights scheme where she was mentored by Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty), an Associate of the Centre for Cultural Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University, and is currently a doctoral candidate on a practice-led PhD at the University of England.

Session 3: 4:30pm-6:00pm
Panel: Narrating a Life 1--Jack Morton Auditorium

• “Unseen Voices: Disability Life Writing and Archival Martyrdom,” Jonathan Hsy, George Washington University
• “Disabled South Asian Masculinity in My Name is Khan,” Sukshma Vedere, George Washington University
• “Impairment Materiality and the aesthetics of Crip Social Realism: Lukacs, Jameson, Haraway and Crow in conversation with New Materialist and Modern Expressionist Super-Crip Futurisms,” Zahari Richter, George Washington University

Panel: Disability and Performance--Gelman 301

• “Me Before You-thanasia: The Erasure of Disability Through Able-Bodied Love,” Olivia Eggars, George Washington University
• “Side Shows: Fascination in Difference,” Grace Mitchell, George Washington University
• “‘Getting it Right': Balancing Narrative Freedom and Positive Representation in Disability/Illness Narratives,” Julia Weiss, George Washington University

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Friday, March 23rd

Session 4: 9:00am-10:30am
Panel: Contemporary Crisis and Sanctuary--Jack Morton Auditorium

• “Debt Crisis: Student Debt and the Temporalities of Disability at Gallaudet University,” Jaime Madden, Minnesota State University
• “The Measure is the Man: Cultural Category Crisis, the Failure of Postmodernism, and Dismodern Re/measurement,” Shaun Ford, Purdue University
• “Livable Cities, Habitable Worlds,” Aimi Hamraie, Vanderbilt University

Panel: Disability at the Intersection--Marvin Center 301

• “Ablenationalism in Life and Death: Racialized Affectivity and Interspecies Entanglements Contemporary Crisis and Sanctuary,” Anastasia Todd, Arizona State University
• “From U.S Disability Rights Historiography to Crip Pasts: On Truth’s Excess” Lezlie Frye, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
• “Investigating Labor Practices Through Representational Detective Work” MarChé Daughtry, Williams College

Session 5: 10:45-12:00pm
Panel: War, Empire, Conflict--Jack Morton Auditorium

• “Cripping Victoria: Constructing Alternative Nineteenth-Century Histories of Disability,” Joyce L. Huff, Ball State University
• “War and the Disablement of Bodies,” Sona Kazemi Hill, University of Toronto
• “Cripping the Normativity of Work,” Ling Liu, George Washington University

Panel: Stigma, Legitimation, and Resilience: Campus and Community Ethnographies (George Washington University, University Writing Program)--Marvin Center 301

• “Skipping Class: Young Women, Disabilities, and Education,” Eleanor Bock, Sarah Cassway, and Quinn Casey, George Washington University 
• “More Than Senioritis,” Riley Doyle, Mo Mobley, and Shira Strongin, George Washington University 
• “Middle-Aged Black Women's Experiences of Physical Disabilities: Culture and Attitudes Toward Disablement,” Lorrin Davis and Rolaine Thompson, George Washington University 

Session 6: 1:00pm-2:30pm
Panel: Politics and Reproduction-Jack Morton Auditorium

• “Embedded Truths and Transparency in Mexican Sexual Disability Politics,” Susan Antebi, University of Toronto
• “Cripping Birth: Resisting Eugenic Nationalist Rhetoric within the Contemporary Midwifery Movement,” Ally Day, University of Toledo
• “Disability, Risk, and the Politics of Spectral Medicine,” Kelly Fritsch and Anne McGuire, University of Toronto and University of Toronto

Panel: Necropolitics and Globalization--Marvin Center 405

• “Concealment and Contamination: The Slow Death of the Hibakusha in the Aftermath of the Atomic Bombings,” Soo-jin Kweon, George Washington University
• “Violence Against the Korean American Community in Media Depictions of Black/Korean Relations surrounding the 1992 Los Angeles Riots,” Chung, Nancy. George Washington University 
• “Under Construction, or Under Water? Resurfacing the Jericho Road: On Systemic Violence and the Surfacing of Necropolitics,” Shawn Meddock, George Washington University

Session 7: 2:45pm-4:15pm
Panel: Genre--Jack Morton Auditorium

• “Recovering Puritans: Reading The Witch as Mad Feminist Camp,” Cynthia Barounis, Washington University in St. Louis
• “Of Metaphor and Metonymy: Articulating Disability in the Graphic Body Memoir,” Renata Lucena Dalmaso, Universidade Federal do Sul e Sudeste do Pará (Unifesspa)
• “Feeling Crip: Mania, Queerness, and Party Drugs,” Brady James Forrest, George Washington University

Panel: Narrating a Life 2--Marvin Center 405

• “Queer Forms: Establishing a Politics of Empathy in Christina Crosby’s A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain,” Michael Doss, University of Delaware
• “Towards a Political-Personhood: Contested Truths in Lauren Slater’s Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir,” Megan O’Donnell, University of Delaware
• “Disembodied Voices in British Biopics: The King's Speech and The Theory of Everything at the Cross­-Roads of Fiction and Body Politics,” Alexa Joubin, George Washington University

Closing Plenary: 4:30pm-6:00pm
Jack Morton Auditorium
Robert McRuer, Jonathan Hsy, David Mitchell, and Abby Wilkerson

Coming Soon! Full information regarding Composing Disability 2018

We are Figures, Photo by Claudio Ahlers/Roaring Girl Productions

Save the Date!  Composing Disability: Crip Politics and the Crisis of Culture will be held at George Washington University on March 22-23, 2018.

We will have a full update on our next conference soon.

In the meantime, watch this site.

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