Composing Disability: Writing, Communication, Culture

This symposium (November 3-4, 2011) works to consider some of the ways that disability studies and disability culture are transforming higher education and to assess how academic spaces and programs might be generated to respond to that transformation. “Composing Disability” brings together Disability and Deaf Studies, Writing Studies, Education, and Global Cultural Studies for spirited, collegial dialogue about the production of disability culture, disability writing, and disability representation in and beyond the academy today.

The panels scheduled for this two-day event are devoted to examining the impact of specific disabilities on the processes of writing and culture-building: for example, Deafness and Writing, “Mental Illness” and Writing, Autism and Representation. However, on a broader thematic level, the symposium works to complicate (pre)conceptions of what constitutes disability (and the differences between disability categories and diagnoses), as well as what constitutes writing, culture, communication, and academic community. We have invited presenters and panelists across a variety of academic departments (English, Composition and Rhetoric, Disability Studies), student support offices (Disability Support Services, Academic Support Services, Writing Center Support Services), as well as a diverse selection of keynote speakers and performers (Michael Davidson, Terry Galloway, Lisa Johnson), and a variety of student presenters from The George Washington and Gallaudet Universities. We have collaborated with VSA, the International Organization on Arts and Disability, to generate sessions for talking about disability culture and program-building at the university level and beyond, and have arranged for representatives from Landmark College’s Institute for Research and Training to provide attendees with an extended, interactive training session on supporting students with disabilities as they themselves navigate the writing process.

The symposium will be of interest to students, academics, and education professionals in the Mid-Atlantic region and nationwide. Likewise, we imagine that professionals from across any number of academic support offices, academic departments, and student support offices will find this event informative and generative. One of our challenges to the attendees will be for them to push themselves to attend panels outside of their fields so as to begin the fruitful work of cross-curricular pollination. We also hope to conclude the event with an open mic reception that will allow attendees to reflect openly on what they learned during the symposium while also generating, in a very concrete way, the dialogue that is the central focus of this event.

Keynote Speakers and Performers

Michael Davidson – author of Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body. Davidson is a Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Terry Galloway – a deaf and queer, writer, performer, and author of Mean Little deaf Queer. Galloway is also the co-founder of Actual Lives, a writing and performance workshop for adults with and without disabilities, and Mickee Faust Club, a performance group responsible for award-winning video parodies.

Merri Lisa Johnson – author of Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality and the editor of Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire. Johnson is the director of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina Upstate.