Apologies if you receive this message twice, I seem to have problems getting anything through JISCMAIL
I am just back from the Normalcy (and Asylum) conference and concluding various things. I have to say that for a conference challenging normative values it was all a bit normal and mundane so far as radical alternatives go, nobody rode a motorcycle onto the podium for instance, though in these days of health and safety concerns it would never be allowed ☺
Apart from that what I have observed is that whereas once critical disability studies was on the outside and pretty much excluded from academic discourse the centre has moved somewhat and now the critical disabilities circus is the new hegemenony excluding in it’s turn other groups who present creative challenges to that new centre. That was certainly apparent in more than one way, in that for all the talk of empowering discourses and emancipator paradigms, (and I am trying not to steal Steve Graby’s thunder here) it is all carried out from within, rather than without the central academic paradigm, and trapped within all the restrictions, conventions and customs that, that entails.
Let us not forget that academia is like a spring, no not a wellspring but the bouncy kind. It expands it’s access and then retrenches again when it threatens to become too democratic and inclusive. Economic and social forces combine to recreate a new eliteism.
When I first joined this list I was on the outside, and I am now narrowly maintaining a grip on the inside, but I don’t forget why I got involved in the first place, and that was to challenge, to upset, to take back what had been stolen.
I can see as many on the outside still needing to do that. For all the talk of challenging normalcy and all it’s lost the plot to some extent and I was so glad to present something arrogantly political yesterday, it felt such a relief.
There were papers there, and one in particular that was not only an example of poor scholarship it was a means of repression of authenticity and autocthoneity in itself.
I’m not letting it lie, I intend to do something about it. (not any particular paper I feel needs to be further interrogated, prosecuted and rioted against in whatever order) but the status quo altogether and it’s unfortunate academic underpinnings.
Wait and see, somethings coming, and no it is not Marlon Brando’s mo’sickle in the Wild One, that particular spirit of rebellion is being celebrated comfortably in the mainstream these days in Coventry’s Transport museum.
Larry
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