Call for Chapter Proposals: Cultural Stations of Disability by David Bolt-Routledge Autocritical Disability Studies book series

Edited by David Bolt, this book will explore disability as a cultural construct with which the contributors engage on a daily basis and/or in the name of academic research.

Earlier this year, in Finding Blindness: International Constructions and Deconstructions, it was argued that, irrespective of eye conditions or the lack thereof, blindness is an understanding at which we arrive, on the way to which we pass or visit many cultural stations. The proposed book will have a similar premise but will consider disability in its broadest sense, rather than focusing on blindness in particular.

In the terms of autocritical discourse analysis, which combines autoethnography and CDA, a cultural station may be a range of toys, a comic, a television series, a novel, an album, a play, an advertising campaign, an artistic movement, a course, or a multitude of other things, the key point being that it was discovered in our past yet impacts on present understandings.

This edited volume will explore cultural stations that have impacted on the various understandings of disability at which the contributors have arrived. As in related works, particular attention will be paid to language, assumptions, identity, and social implications.

The selected chapters will each have an extent of 5,000 words. However, the initial chapter proposals should be no more than 200 words and should indicate 2 cultural stations of disability. Along with a brief bio, these proposals should be submitted to the editor (boltd@hope.ac.uk) on or before 14 February 2024; the shortlisted chapters will be due 1 February 2025.

The volume will be proposed for inclusion in the Routledge Autocritical Disability Studies book series.

Already available in this series:

• David Bolt, Disability Duplicity and the Formative Cultural Identity Politics of Generation X

• Erin Pritchard, Midgetism: The Exploitation and Discrimination of People with Dwarfism

• David Bolt (ed), Finding Blindness: International Constructions and Deconstructions

• David Bolt (Ed), Metanarratives of Disability: Culture, Assumed Authority, and the Normative Social Order