9:35am December 16, 2013

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Disabled friends, writers, scholars, bloggers, activists! If the internet, blogging, fandoms, and online communication have been important parts of your voice, self-discovery, identity, community, access, activism, and liberation, then you might be interested in contributing to this upcoming book!

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Call for chapters: Literary Disability Studies goes Online (abstract due 1 January 2014)

Some of the most significant developments in critical disability studies in recent years have come from the directions of both literary theory and internet studies. This edited collection seeks to bring these disciplines together to explore the internet-literature interface and its significance to disability studies.

In Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse David Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder argue that disability is a ‘prevalent characteristic of narrative discourses’. Since then, culturally based analysis within disability studies has been concerned with the way disability is used like a prosthesis to prop up narratives. At the same time, the broader field of literary studies has been influenced by the internet and world wide web with digital and electronic literature becoming an increasingly important part of the twenty-first-century canon. Yet despite celebrations to the contrary, much of the internet remains inaccessible to people with a variety of impairments.

The book will consider the ways the web relies on established literary practices but has also created new forms of literature and disability’s continuing role as a narrative prosthesis in this new literary arena in terms of both representation and access.

For example, blogging as an internet specific form of literature holds much significance to critical disability studies. Significantly, an investigation of disability blogging and the impact of impairment on blogging decisions (Goggin and Noonan, 2006) was included in the first critical study of the ways blogs are used by different groups of people (Bruns and Jacobs, 2006) and emphasized the importance of accessibility and alternative formats. According to Goggin and Noonan, ‘the Internet, and blogging in particular, offer new modes for people with disabilities to author, communicate, consume, and exchange in their preferred medium or media.’ This book will build on these insights along with the increasingly converging online environment to consider the continuing importance of literature to current debates about disability.

Possible topics include (though not limited to)

· Online activism
· New forms of writing/ literature
· Inspiration porn
· Increased access to literature
· Disability communities online
· Accessibility
· The move from a text based medium to one dominated by image, video and sound
· The internet as a new subject for literature
· Hypercriticism
· People with disability as wreaders and/or produsers
· Fanfiction
· Alternative formats
· The role of ‘comments’ in creating a disabled voice
· Disability as click bait
· Travel blogs
· Illness narratives
· Extraordinary bodies

Send abstracts of 300-350 words and a short bio to Katie.ellis@curtin.edu.au before 1 January 2014.
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Lydia Brown on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/lmxzb/posts/10151830296888157

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What I hate is feeling left out of these books, collections, and academia. I quit grad school for many reasons. This was part of it. Most of this is just a bunch of words to me. This type of writing/format was impossible for me to understand, change to, and use. Is it executive dysfunction that limits me? Is it disability itself in the form of autism? Is it that breaking point of pushing yourself so hard that you lose abilities? I used to be able to read the words above and at least make some general idea in my head what it meant. I can’t, anymore. Graduate school broke me. Writing this much is difficult. So much planning. I have a lot to say but I can’t get it organized to say or write. Especially in proper academia style. We are leaving people out asking them to understand an abstract and to make one. And to understand the process. And to write it academically instead of with whatever language style they *can* use. That is as much as I can say, right now.
Auti-Stim 12 December 2013.

(via auti-stim)

I’d like to submit but what Auti-stim said

(via nicocoer)

Same exact problem.

In fact I was semi-sarcastically thinking of submitting something on how the Internet allows me to be able to publish despite not being able to either read or write this kind of pretentious bullshit due to cognitive limitations.

I never feel good enough for these types. I think i’ve actually tried to read that Narrative Prostheses thing and couldn’t even discern a single word that made sense.

Notes: