Composing Disability: Crip Ecologies, April 7-8, 2016

Sunaura Taylor, Arctic Wheelchair, 2013
Watercolor and Ink on Paper, 7" x 10"

George Washington University’s biennial Composing Disability Conference returns in Spring 2016 with the theme of  "Crip Ecologies."  The event will be held April 7-8, 2016; featured speakers include Sunaura Taylor and Riva Lehrer, with others to be announced soon.  Crip Ecologies is sponsored by the Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion, the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, Disability Support Services, the Department of English, the University Writing Program, the GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (GWMEMSI) and the GW Digital Humanities Institute (GWDHI).

We invite proposals for papers and panels for this event. 250-word abstracts for papers and 500-word abstracts for complete panels should be sent by October 15, 2015 to cripecologies@gmail.com

Deadline for Abstracts: October 15, 2015

Crip Ecologies:  This symposium seeks to bring together scholars, artists, advocates, and activists working across the fields of ecocriticism, disability, and queer studies.  Our goal is to think through the queer interchanges of environments and bodies in more radical ways.  As vulnerable embodied beings that interact with our environments, we experience ourselves and others through a defining porosity: we are not only affected by the places we inhabit, but we also leave our imprint on these locations as well.  Marginalized subjects, including disabled people, often experience their lives in greater proximity to environmental threats such as toxicity, climate change, generational exposures to unsafe living conditions due to poverty, militarization, body exhausting labors as in the case of migrant workers, etc.  Further, we seek to investigate how non-normative bodies/minds can reframe what it has historically meant to be an environmentalist or "nature lover?”  Crip Ecologies will draw out these wanted, unwanted, and even unknowable intimacies with our environments as materials for new trans-historical, cross-cultural, and crip/queer research about human, non-human, organic, and inorganic relationships that mark our experiences in the world.

Possible topics include:

Composing Crip Ecologies

Crip Ecologies and Militarization/War

Crip Ecologies and Art
Crip Ecologies and Localism

Crip Ecologies and Environmental Justice

Crip Ecologies and Food Justice

Crip Ecologies and Farming

Crip Ecologies and Racial Borderlands

Crip Ecologies, Time, and Places

Crip Ecologies and the University

Toxicity, Embodiment, and Uneven Development

Queercrip Bodies in the Global South

Disaster Capitalism, the Environment, Disability

Entanglement Theory

Media Studies and Digital Interfaces

Crosscultural and Transhistorical Worldings

Race, Class, and Environmental Justice

Accessibility and Ecological Backlash

Politics of Racial/Crip/Queer/Trans Spaces

Intersectional Bodies and Policing in Security States

Class and Toxic Exposures under Neoliberalism

Rhetorics of Inclusion/Biopolitics of Exclusion

Non-productive Bodies and Alternative Practices of Everyday Life

Expendable Bodies and Economies of Neglect (Necropolitics)

Crip Mental Health Ecologies

For more information about the Composing Disability series at GW, visit this page on the Disability Support Services website and explore the Composing Disability tumblr site. You can also follow Composing Disability on Twitter (@ComposingDis) or join the community on Facebook.

Graduate Seminar: Crip/Queer Theory with Professor Mitchell

Professor Mitchell Reading
Jacques Ranciere's Mute Speech

Fall 2015 Graduate Seminar: Crip/Queer Theory

Crip/Queer Theory charts out key intersections between Disability, Queer, and Critical Race Studies.  Our goal will be to mine the spaces between historically pathologized sexuality, ability, and racialized statuses. In particular we will focus on questions of "agential materialism" where one cannot only find experiences of oppression, but also alternative ethical maps for living.  How are contemporary theorists beginning to conceive of bodies beyond the limits of social constructivism's passive, culturally inscribed surfaces?  What can the artful navigation of inhospitable social terrains tell us about what crip/queer and racialized lives might offer as viable counter-cultural options outside of homogenizing norms?  Key works covered may include:  Alison Kafer's Feminist Queer Crip, Tobin Siebers's Disability Aesthetics, Asma Abbas's Liberalism and Human Suffering, Alexander G. Weheliye's Habeas Viscus, Elizabeth Grosz's The Nick of Time, Jacques Ranciere's Mute Speech, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's The Biopolitics of Disability, Jose Munoz's Cruising Utopia, Jack Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure, and Robert McRuer & Anna Mollow's Sex and Disability.

Thursdays 6:10-8 PM CRN 66741; ENGL 6520.10 Ethnicity and Identity; 3 CR; Rome 771; 8/31/15-12/09-15; Professor Mitchell.