Prague , Czech Republic, 19-21.9.2013.
Institution: Department of Gender Studies, Charles University Prague, Gender Research Office and Department for Development Studies, University of Vienna, Czech Academy of Science
Deadline: 15.6.2013
The organizers of the conference wish to provide space for critical dialogue between disability studies and studies of Central and Eastern Europe, postcolonial studies, global and development studies.
This year’s interdisciplinary meeting focuses on mapping out the ways in which development policies and strategies as well as the very concept itself allow for or contribute to upholding global inequalities.
For instance, a growing number of both disability scholars and activists is calling for a sustained and critical engagement with the ways in which disability policies and rights agendas carried out in the name of global development reinscribe the hegemony of the global North. This diagnosis however does not only apply to a presumed North/South axes. Similar critique has been directed at the narratives of development that frame the transformation of the Eastern and Central European countries from communism/socialism into capitalism (and their subsequent inclusion into the European Union); such narratives have served to reproduce the hegemonic notion of the “progressive West” and the “backwards Eastern” peripheries and were instrumentalized in transmission of neoliberal capitalism. These processes have had very specific impact on lives of people with disabilities, on their political/activist formations as well as on state disability policies and their recent austerity cuts.
Furthermore, on the level of the epistemological, conceptual and political foundations the field of disability studies is implicated in global hegemony. As Helen Meekosha phrases it, disability studies practice “scholarly colonialism” by leaving the spaces of the global South “assumed.” As a result, the social and material realities of many disabled and crip lives remain under-theorized. Moreover, both in the post-socialist spaces and in the global South, the absence of disability identity-frameworks and recognizable (i.e. “western”) political agendas is often perceived as a lack of political consciousness. Thus, a thorough engagement of disability theory with “southern disabled bodies” (Connell) and the “post-socialist crip” is long overdue.
The conference language is English and the conference will be held in Prague.
Please send a 500 Word abstract for individual presentation, a workshop or a thematic panel by June 15, 2013 to: cripping_development2013@
Confirmation of acceptance: June 30, 2013
With further inquiries please contact Kateřina Kolářová at: kater_kolar@gmx.de
