2025 marks the 35th year since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Though ADA advances have often been celebrated in mainstream media and the rights they support taken as secured, it has come under attack through rollbacks since 2016, and most recently by removing DEIA initiatives within the Department of Education. At the same time, national and international discourse community efforts through conferences and other open forums have grown more diffuse.  With this in mind, this conference, “New Directions in Disability Studies,” will reflect on where disability studies has come from and what it will be in the future.  

Life writing, including the experience of multiple marginalizations alongside disability, is one example of where disability studies has come from. Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals is influential. More recently, Theri Alyce Pickens, author of Black Madness, has published autobiographical poetry.  

Protest is another example of where the field has come from. The influence of the disability rights movement with Ed Roberts and his cohort cannot be understated. 

Artistic production is another example of where it has come from. Works by artists like Riva Lehrer and poets like Jim Ferris and scholars like Tobin Siebers have contributed to our understanding of disability aesthetics

Research in the academy, broadly construed, including theory, representation, constituencies, conferences, and protocols of practice, are all examples of ways disability studies has developed. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s work remains crucial to understanding the various ways disability appears in narratives. Lennard Davis’s Disability Studies Readers have proven invaluable in capturing multiple voices in disability theories, advocacy, and experience. 

Community has always been a part of the formation of disability studies in any of theseexamples, and we hope that community-building will be part of disability studies’ work in academia moving forward. Indeed, disability as an identity distinct from the medical model emerged from disabled communities housed in institutions and other areas at the margins of society. Community-building continues to be a valuable initiative when protections—in private and public spaces—are haphazardly enforced and assistance is long in coming, as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha reminds us in their discussion of care webs.

Following Talia Schaffer’s work on creating care communities in academia, this conference asks what community-building entails within the university to meet another’s needs, whether this is as structured as creating a new disability studies program or as malleable and contingent as care webs when acting in solidarity with others experiencing precarity. Therefore, “New Directions in Disability Studies” will necessarily be interdisciplinary and welcomes proposals in related fields such as medical humanities, narrative medicine, social sciences, and the arts. We are interested in ways that we have come together as a community in the past and how we can reclaim, build on, or reimagine disability community, epistemology, and aesthetics in the future, particularly within the academy, even in the face of new political realities.  

Though community is a central idea to this conference, we welcome any proposal for a 15-minute presentation of scholarly or creative work that offers new directions in disability studies. Topics may include but are not limited to: 

• Disability (and) pedagogy/Disability studies pedagogy
• Disability (in) community of practice

• Historical developments in disability studies or future casting in disability studies 
• Arts-based approaches to disability advocacy 
• Narrative, storytelling, arts, aesthetics, or poetics and disability
• Disability in the news and media
• Barriers to access
• Disability and social and institutional change

• Intersectional work combining disability studies with other frameworks, such as gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory, post-colonialism, ecocriticism, animal studies, etc.  

• Case studies of outreach to local communities using narrative medicine or related methods 

• Disability ethics
• Care work/care webs/communities of care

• Life writing on health and disability, including excerpts from memoirs, poetry, autoethnography, autiethnography, and so on  

Proposals for pre-arranged roundtable discussions or panels are also welcome.

“New Directions in Disability Studies” will be held at the University of Cincinnati on October 9 and 10, 2025 with a virtual option available upon request. 

Please email the following to Cheli Reutter at reuttemm@ucmail.uc.edu:

• Abstract of 200-300 words
• Bio of 50-100 words that includes your name (and optional title and pronouns) as you wish it to appear in conference materials
• Technology request if you intend to present virtually

Proposals are due no later than August 1.