Sponsored by the Disability Specialty Group and Geographic Perspectives on Women Specialty Group
Organizers: Catherine Jampel (Clark University, Worcester, MA), Sara Loftus (West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV)
Session Type: Workshop followed by Panel
The goal of this session is to bring critical approaches in geography and disability studies together through a workshop and panel discussion. The focus is on research that is moving beyond the medical/social model binary toward theorizing disability through alternative frameworks such as embodiment (Imrie 2010; Chouinard 2010), the political/relational model (Kafer 2013), non-representational theory (Hall & Wilton 2017), neurodivergence (Yergeau 2018), and biopolitics (Puar, 2017).
We aim to facilitate a workshop in which participants give and receive feedback on work in progress, followed by a set of panel presentations and discussion. Details on the workshop format are provided below.
We welcome any work in geography that takes a critical approach to disability and ableism. We seek participants who are thinking about, working through, or have answers to offer about questions such as:
Which critical approaches to disability in geography and in and around disability studies have you found useful? How have you operationalized these insights in the social sciences, given that disability studies leans toward the humanities?
How have you linked other critical approaches in geography, whether long-standing (e.g. feminist geography) or emerging (e.g. abolitionist political ecology), to critical approaches to disability?
What do geographical concepts such as place and scale offer critical studies of disability?
How do geographers participate in and contribute to conversations about the intersection of disablement and geopolitics (Puar 2017)? To the production of disability identity and experience in a range of places, such as intimate geographies of the home (Sarrett 2015) or public spaces of encounter (Wiesel and Bigby 2014)? And how might geographers' further contribute to these conversations?
In this type of session, previously utilized at the Dimensions of Political Ecology (DOPE) conference in 2016, we deliberately share work in progress in order to give and receive feedback and to create a forum for discussion, collaboration, and building relationships. For this workshop, presenters will circulate up to 10 pages of work in progress (e.g. a conceptual framework, a challenging ethnographic moment) in mid-March. Participants who are interested in being part of the discussion, but do not wish to present work, will receive materials in mid-March as well. During the workshop session(s), we will briefly introduce each presenter's work and then we will discuss the work and provide feedback and ideas. Finally, we will have a group discussion, and/or openroom networking (go grab that one person you wanted to talk more with and meet your future coauthor!).
If you are interested, please write to both Sara Loftus at [log in to unmask] and Catherine Jampel at [log in to unmask] by Thursday October 11 with your name, contact information, and following information:
Presenters:
200-500 words (no more than 1 page single-spaced) on the ideas you are working with
A list of the references you are working with (no more than 1 page)
Why you want to participate in this session (no more than a few sentences)
Career stage
Participants (to receive materials ahead of time):
Why you want to participate in this session (no more than a paragraph)
Career stage
We will contact everyone by Tuesday, October 16. -- Work Cited
Hall, E., & Wilton, R. (2017). Towards a relational geography of disability. Progress in Human Geography, 41(6), 727–744.
Imrie, R. (2010). Disability, Embodiment and the Meaning of the Home. In V. Chouinard (Ed.), Towards Enabling Geographies (pp. 20–41). New York: Routledge.
Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Puar, J. K. (2017). The right to maim: debility, capacity, disability. Durham: Duke University Press.
Sarrett, J. C. (2015). Custodial Homes, Therapeutic Homes, and Parental Acceptance: Parental Experiences of Autism in Kerala, India and Atlanta, GA USA. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 39(2), 254–276.
Wiesel, I., & Bigby, C. (2014). Being recognised and becoming known: encounters between people with and without intellectual disability in the public realm. Environment and Planning A, 46(7), 1754–1769.
Yergeau, Melanie. (2018). Authoring Autism: on rhetoric and neurological queerness. Duke Press. *****************************************
