*CFP* “DISAPPEARING DISABILITY”, CHAPTER BOOK

This is a Call for chapters for a collection of essays, between 2000 and 5000 words each, as well as creative works that show how disability appears and disappears in our midst. This collection will serve to introduce readers to disability studies.

Through a relational orientation to disability, the work collected here represents a critical return to how disability appears, including its appearance in the field of disability studies. DisAppearing DisAbility will provide a resource to Canadian colleges, universities and beyond. Engaging political, artistic, and philosophical provocations of the (dis)appearing act of disability in our lives, the diversity of topics in this collection represents the singular aim of revealing what disability means while potentially remaking these meanings in more life-affirming ways.

There are many ways that disability appears in everyday life, often as calamity, loss, danger, and dysfunction. This collection is dedicated to revealing the cultural values and assumptions that make these appearances possible while making other appearances of disability seem impossible. Can we imagine, for example, disability appearing as /not /a problem, as necessary, or even as desirable? This collection explores these imaginaries by orienting to disability as a set of cultural interpretations reflective of the worlds from which they spring and into which disability appears and disappears, again and again.

These (dis)appearances include disability on the streets, in police encounters, in classroom practices, in storybooks, in other textual representations of disability, and in our everyday expectations in the midst of unexpected encounters. Each chapter should invite the reader into an analysis of cultural scenes of disability, scenes that are connected to issues of race and racism, indigeneity, gender and sexuality, class or other important social differences. This collection is guided by the hope of being a call to engage the marginality of disability in social thought and action, while exemplifying how to do disability studies. Through examples of how to critically notice and theorize current interpretations of disability, we hope this collection will revitalize our relations to (dis)appearances of disability as essential ways of moving, understanding, and being-in-the-world. The chapters, then, should bring readers closer to a humanity that weaves us into stories of disability’s (dis)appearances in everyday life.

We invite essays, but also poetry, short stories, and other creative works that draw out the significance of how disability becomes manifest, yet is made to disappear, only to re-appear in unexpected forms. These journeys into the meaning of various cultural representations of disability are simultaneously pathways into doing disability studies.  Thus, the editors will introduce the selected chapters by drawing out the methodological moves made by the authors. These introductions will help readers learn about how to do a disability studies analysis — in other words, how to do disability studies. We will also include short excerpts of classic disability studies texts in order to further illustrate how and why disability studies works as it does. This curation of the chapters will enable DisAppearing DisAbility to actualize our commitment to offering university students, teachers, and anyone interested in the meaning of disability a way into developing deeper relations to the cultural tensions that are often present when we are present with the (dis)appearances of disability. We aim to select contributions of various forms, that reflect an orientation to disability’s (dis)appearances and that unveil cultural tensions as they entangle us and our conceptions of disability, thereby revealing how the meaning of people becomes manifest.

Regarding tensions, contributors might consider contradictions in our lives and how we live when contradictions present themselves /together/ in the face of disability/. For example, attempts to move closer to disability through diagnoses, definitions, or programs can result in distancing ourselves from the complexity of disability. These moves can be understood as enacting interpretive relations. We are always immersed in interpretive relations when we perceive bodies, minds, and senses. There is no final meaning nor certain outcome for any interpretation of disability. Embracing this orientation nurtures the need to question how meaning is given to disability and the social and political consequences of doing so.

The chapters in DisAppearing DisAbility orient to the inescapable fact that we make disability meaningful through our interpretive relations to it in ways that require further analysis. What relations to disability are you called into? What relations call to you?

We invite submissions (essays between 2000 and 5000 words, and poetry, short stories, visual art with descriptions) that show how disability appears and disappears in our midst while introducing readers to doing disability studies.

Your submission should include:

• Your name 
• Title of work
• Genre of work
• A 500-word description of your proposed work
• A 200-word statement on your relation to disability and disability studies as they reflect the general themes and tensions of DisAppearing DisAbility, as described above, by November 29th, 2019 to disappearingdisability@gmail.com.
• Notice of acceptance January 2020
• Chapters due 6 months later.

Editors: Tanya Titchkosky, Elaine Cagulada and Madeleine DeWelles (OISE of the University of Toronto).