Proposal deadline (extended): February 1, 2020

Co-editors:

• Jessica M. F. Hughes, Assistant Professor, Millersville University, jessica.hughes@millersville.edu
• Mariaelena Bartesaghi, Associate Professor, University of South Florida, mbartesaghi@usf.edu

This is a call for an edited volume on Disability in Dialogue. We invite chapter proposals (1500-200 words) that employ discourse studies methodologies to analyze disabled dialogues and dialogues about disability for a volume of interest to dialogue, communication, disability and discourse scholars.

Everyday dialogues are consequential. Spoken, written and digital discourse in conversations, public hearings, assessment measures, social media sites, organizational manuals, and institutional policies defines disabilities, grants certain bodyminds access, and excludes others. It is through dialogue as embodied inter-action that disability dis/appears and that disabled identities are constituted and that we experience ableism and manage impairment. Disability is also a way of knowing. Disabled dialogues realize our understanding of dis/ability and communication.

As with ‘disability,’ there are many discourses of ‘dialogue.’ For us, ‘dialogue’ calls attention to interaction (whether face-to-face, digital, or temporally distant), asymmetries (of knowledge, status, access), dilemmas, tensions, problems, voices, and affective experience. Analyzing disability in dialogue is a method for theorizing these and other dimensions of discourse to account for disabled ways of knowing, thinking, perceiving, and being in the world.

This collection was first conceived in light of the following questions. How might we center disabled perspectives to theorize dialogue? What sorts of ways of communicating does disability afford? How does disability shape dialogue and vice versa? What does it mean to identify as disabled, to claim an experience in terms of disability, to belong within a discourse, to access a diagnosis? How does the dis/appearance of disability rearrange the past, present, and future and redefine relationships and experiences? What kinds of moral accounts accompany disability in dialogue? What might be the power of dis/ability and what sort of power is it? How is ableism constituted in dialogue? What kinds of dialogic moments have the most potential to dismantle ableism and make the world a more inclusive place for all bodyminds?

We invite chapters that raise these and other questions about disability in dialogue. Chapters should start by defining dialogue and then offer empirical analyses that pay close attention to spoken, written, and/or other semiotic forms that constitute dialogue, in order to guide us in an examination of the consequentiality of disabled dialogues and discourse about disability.

Submission proposals are due February 1, 2020 and should include

• Name(s), affiliation and contact information of author(s)
• A 150 word bio
• Chapter title
• A 1500- 2000 word description of your proposed chapter plus references

Notices of acceptance will be sent by March 31, 2020. Full chapters are due October 1, 2020.