Dear all,

We write to you with the exciting news that after one year of hiatus, the Disability Studies workshop has returned for the 2021-22 academic year! This is a one-quarter CAS workshop that will be held in Winter Quarter 2022 on alternating Fridays from 2:00 PM – 3:20 PM (see flyer attached). Our Faculty sponsors are Michele Friedner from the Department of Comparative Human Development and Sarah Taylor from the Divinity School. This year, the workshop will be coordinated by Zihao Lin and Erika Prado.

We invite works-in-progress that theoretically engage with a disability as a category and experience. We are also open to submissions on issues that do not explicitly use the concept of disability but are closely related, such as injury or illness, studies of cognition and sense-perception, and bodily difference. The workshop would like to provide a platform for work that uses disability as a critical lens to explore wider socio-economic, cultural, and political domains.

We welcome all UChicago members including Ph.D., MAPSS, and undergraduate students and faculty as well as scholars from our neighboring universities and Chicago area community members. In previous years, our participants have come from various disciplines including English, Psychology, Comparative Human Development, Political Science, History, and Social Services Administration.

We invite submissions by graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and faculty across departments within the University of Chicago. The workshop will be open to drafts of dissertation chapters, book chapters, journal articles, dissertation proposals, and conference papers. Alternative presentation formats such as practice job talks are also welcome.

Possible paper topics include but are not limited to:

• Everyday life with a disability

• Intersections of disability and other categories of experience (race, gender, sexuality, class, age)

• Medicine, healthcare, and caregiving

• Disability and public policy, education, pedagogy, social services

• Disability, work, and political economy

• Mental health and disability

• Disability and war

• Disability representation in media, literature, music, and the arts

•  Disability, war, and religion

•  Disability, legal institutions, and human rights

• Transnational disability experiences and theories

…..

Please indicate in your submission the following:

1)     A Title

2)     A brief write-up or abstract of 200-300 words describing your work

3)     An indication of the type of submission (Article, paper, book chapter, conference paper, etc.)

Proposals can be submitted to both workshop co-coordinators, Zihao Lin (linzh@uchicago.edu) and Erika Prado (erikaprado@uchicago.edu) by 5 pm on December 17, 2021.

Please get in touch with Zihao Lin and Erika Prado if you have any questions concerning the workshop. Both of us would be happy to discuss how your work fits in with the workshop and its objectives.