Religion and Disability Studies Unit

The Religion and Disability Studies Unit invites proposals that critically examine the relationship between disability and religious thought, practice, or history. We welcome papers on all topics, yet with particular interest in non-Christian perspectives and underrepresented cultural locations. We especially seek proposals on the following:

• The 2024 presidential theme of non/violence and marginality. Suggested topics include the disability rights movement in the 21st Century, the portrayal of nonviolent resistance in the documentary Crip Camp, how violence against the environment adversely impacts person with disabilities, archival violence in religious and institutional settings, and practices of peacemaking among and by the disabled.
• Experiences of persons with disabilities with incarceration and policing.
• The 40th anniversary of the Claggett Statement - a statement built on liberation theology that addresses the realities and desires of Deaf Christians.

For a possible co-sponsorship with the Christian Spirituality Unit: Critical analysis of how the lives and experiences of persons with disabilities and/or their communities express prayer in distinctive, constructive, or liberative ways.

For a possible co-sponsorship with the Eastern Orthodox Studies Unit: We invite presentations on disability experiences and Orthodox Christianity. We are especially interested in examinations of how the religious backgrounds, commitments, or influences of persons with disabilities have been impacted by religious commitments, religious institutions, and local parish life. We also welcome proposals that critically examine the relationship between disability and Orthodox theology, thought, practice, and/or history. Papers are particularly welcomed that confront healing narratives, suffering discourse, and religious stigmas around disabilities with an emphasis on the intersection of disability (as an identity and minority) with gender, culture, and Orthodoxy.

For a possible co-sponsorship with the Religion and Economy Unit: We seek proposals that identify and describe ableist economies and forms of resistance against them. How do religious institutions, practices, and language get used both to support and to undermine such economies? We are especially interested in proposals that take up the notion of attention economies and the ways in which ableist norms define how to "pay" attention, who has a "deficit" of attention, etc.

A co-sponsorship with the Christian Systematic Theology Unit: A book panel on The Disabled God Revisited: Trinity, Christology, and Liberation (T&T Clark, 2023) by Lisa D. Powell. This session is closed, and we won't be accepting proposals for it.

A co-sponsorship with the Liberation Theologies Unit: A book panel on Disability Ethics and Preferential Justice: A Catholic Perspective (Georgetown University Press, 2023) by Mary Jo Iozzio. Panelists will critically engage the book's merits as a primer on disability ethics and an example of mature Catholic reflection on disability and liberation, as well as its potential impact on other theologies of disability and liberation. This session is pre-arranged and closed, and we won't be accepting proposals for it.

A co-sponsorship with the Status of Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Profession Committee: A roundtable discussion of the absence of brown bodies in conversations about disability and the all-too-common treatment of BIPOC perspectives as an afterthought. This session is closed, and we won't be accepting proposals for it.