https://mla.confex.com/mla/2026/webprogrampreliminary/Session21868.html

This session invites proposals that explore personal and phenomenological accounts of impairment—not merely as a physical condition of illness or disability but as an embodied experience that generates cultural, social, and political insights.

While disability studies have long critiqued the social structures that create disabling environments, disabled scholars also seek to foreground impairment itself as a site of knowledge production—whether through Tobin Siebers’s theory of complex embodiment or Jonathan Sterne’s call for a political phenomenology of impairment. Challenging traditional deficit-based understandings of disability as mere loss, new frameworks highlight the cognitive, cultural, and communicative benefits of these conditions. Deaf gain, for instance, emphasizes how sign languages enhance visual-spatial cognition and contribute to linguistic and artistic diversity. Similarly, blind gain considers how blindness fosters alternative sensory experiences and modes of perception that reshape knowledge production and dissemination.

This session invites proposals that consider: How do lived experiences of impairment shape knowledge production? How can impairment be theorized beyond the limitations of the social model? We welcome interdisciplinary approaches and encourage submissions engaging with disability phenomenology, auto-theory, and critical perspectives on impairment in relation to academia, writing, art, technology, and media.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Impairment as a generative epistemological framework
• Personal narrative in theorizing impairment
• Impairment and its relation to writing, research, and pedagogy
• Alternative modes of communication in academic and creative fields
• Theorizations of deafness, blindness, limited mobility, or other physical/sensory differences
• Theorizations of fatigue, sensory impairment, and neurodivergence
• Intersections of impairment with chronic illness and pain studies
• Impairment and its relation to disability justice and activism

The CDI acknowledges that disabled scholars remain significantly underrepresented in higher education and is dedicated to showcasing how their lived experiences contribute to knowledge production as well as intellectual and cultural diversity on campus and beyond. This session aims to highlight how disabled scholars and scholars engaging with impairment integrate their lived experiences and critical perspectives into their scholarship.

Please submit a 250-word abstract by March 15, 2025, to Junting Huang at huangjt09@gmail.com. This session will take place in person at MLA 2026 in Toronto (January 8–11).