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New Book – “Disability and Sanctity in the Middle Ages”, ed. by Stephanie Grace-Petinos, Leah Parker, Alicia Spencer-Hall

This volume significantly expands current understandings of both disability and sanctity in the Middle Ages. Across the collection, heterogeneous constructions, and experiences, of disability and holiness are excavated. Analyses span the sixth to the fifteenth century, with discussion of holy men and holy women, Western Christian and Buddhist traditions, hagiographic texts, images, and artefacts. Each chapter underscores that disability and sanctity co-exist with a vast array of connotations, not just fully positive or fully negative, but also every inflection in between. The collection is a powerful rebuttal to the notion of the integral relationship of disability—medieval and otherwise—with sin, stigma, and shame. So doing, it recentres medieval disability history as a lived history that merits exploration and celebration. In this way, the volume serves to reclaim sanctity in disability histories as a means to affirm the possibility of radical disability futures.

Table of content:

Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Introduction: Medieval Disability beyond the Sin-Sanctity Binary
Part I: Disabled Saints
1. Francis’ Disappearing Infirmities: Disability and the Expectations of Masculine Sanctity in the Thirteenth Century
2. The Paradoxes of Margaret the Lame: Disability and Authorial Work in Thirteenth-Century Magdeburg
3. Perspectives on Blindness, Deafness, and Muteness in the Chinese Eminent Monks Literature: The ‘Eight Difficulties’ in Context
4. Perfect Disabled Embodiment: Gelongma Palmo in the Tibetan Buddhist Hagiographies
5. Writing Sanctity Upon the Body: The Healed Wounds of St Æthelthryth and St Edmund
6. Sacred Spectacles? Eyeglasses, Iconography and the Holy Body Part II: Saints and the Disability Community
7. The Socio-Economic Value of Healing Miracles in the Liber Miraculorum s. Fidis
8. Disability and Healing Touch in Representations of the Midwife with the Withered Hands in Late Medieval Books of Hours
9. Holy Women and Leprosy: Communities of Care
10. Healing the Unborn: Natal Disability and the Old English Life of St Margaret in London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius A.iii
Epilogue: Curative Time and Crip Ancestorship
Index

Source : Amsterdam University Press

VariAbilities 2025 – Representing the Body: Exploring Unique Representations across Visual Disciplines – 11-15 June 2025, Mercy University, New York, U.S.A.

VariAbilities 2025Representing the Body: Exploring Unique Representations across Visual Disciplines

To be held at Mercy University

11-15 June 2025, New York, U.S.A.

The representation of the body is a fundamental aspect of human culture, reflecting societal values, norms, and power structures. From ancient civilizations to contemporary times, various visual disciplines have been employed to create different forms of bodily representation to convey meaning, express emotions, to teach and tell stories. This conference seeks to examine a wide range of representations across multiple visual forms, and across a wide history, shedding light on the ways in which they intersect, diverge, and influence one another.

Some of the key questions we shall address might be: How do different visual disciplines (e.g., medical imagery and illustration, painting, photography, sculpture) represent the human body, and what are the implications of these representations? What role does performance play in bodily representation, and how do various forms of performance (e.g., doctor/patient interactions, dance, theatre, music) shape our understanding of the body? How do word-based and image-based portrayals of the body differ (e.g. literary and cinema, poetry and portraits), and what insights can be gained by comparing these approaches?

In what ways do representations of the body reflect social attitudes towards gender, race, class, VariAbility, and other forms of identity? These some of the many questions you may wish to explore, you may have others!

Please email a 300 word proposal to Variabilities8@gmail.com

by 31st January 2025

www.peculiarbodies.org

Variabilities 2025

The event will take place at the Mercy University Campus in Manhattan, where there is some dorm accommodation for delegates should they choose it. There is also some scope for online presentations for those who have travel issues.

Come and tell us what the “body” means to you.

Please disseminate this call for papers as widely as you can – thank you!

“Disability, poverty and work in the Middle Ages” – Fribourg Colloquium 2025, 3rd – 5th September 2025

Medieval Institute, University of Fribourg

For the medieval period, disability studies really emerged at the turn of our century. They are now well represented, both in the historical sciences and in philology and literature, especially in the English-speaking world, but also to a lesser extent in Germany and elsewhere, and to a very limited extent in the French-speaking academic world.
However, persons with disabilities had featured in earlier academic research: in studies on poverty.
Indeed, the major studies from the 1960s to the 1990s, such as those of Michel Mollat and Bronislaw Geremek, often readily assumed that disability and poverty were inextricably linked: infirmi were unable to work because of old age or disability, and this inability to work inevitably led to poverty. At the same time, studies of poverty in the Middle Ages present disabled persons as the ‘good poor’ par excellence, those who could legitimately claim charity, by contrast with the mendicants validi who took advantage of society through laziness or vice. So, despite some more nuanced research, a strong image of the disabled
person as a beggar took hold, and has not been challenged since.
It is true that medieval iconography invites such shortcuts, since the most convenient way of graphically presenting a poor person at the time, apart from dressing him in rags and making him stretch out his hand, was visible disability and the objects associated with it: crutches or wooden legs. Moreover, the most abundant historical sources–hagiography on the one hand; practice records from urban governments on the other, and documents inherited from charitable institutions– seem to associate disability and poverty almost automatically.
From 3 to 5 September 2025, the Medieval Institute at the University of Fribourg will host an international and interdisciplinary colloquium on the subject of “Disability, poverty and work in the Middle Ages”, in order to re-examine these automatic associations. Indeed, the categories linked here are problematic, since the category of ‘disability’ did not exist in the Middle Ages, while ‘poverty’ and even ‘work’ were highly polysemous and also need to be historicised.
The aim will therefore be to draw on a range of disciplines – history, art history, legal history, literature in different languages, theology, philosophy and archaeology – to reflect on the links between ‘disability’, poverty and work, using a variety of sources and materials (literary, iconographic, normative and practical sources). The conference will provide an opportunity to reflect together on issues such as the presence in sources of disabled people who appear to be neither poor nor inactive, the social acceptance of their inactivity, and the different experiences of work or the lack of it depending on the social status and gender of the disabled person.
Contributions from young researchers are welcome. The languages of the conference are French, German, Italian and English. The costs of travel and accommodation will be covered. The deadline for submitting proposals is 31 January 2025.


Contact: Olivier Richard, Professor of Medieval History, olivier.richard@unifr.ch

New Book – Crip Authorship, Disability as Method, Edited by: Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez by New York University Press, 2024

About this book

An expansive volume presenting crip approaches to writing, research, and publishing.

Crip Authorship: Disability as Method is an expansive volume presenting the multidisciplinary methods brought into being by disability studies and activism. Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez have convened leading scholars, artists, and activists to explore the ways disability shapes authorship, transforming cultural production, aesthetics, and media.

Starting from the premise that disability is plural and authorship spans composition, affect, and publishing, this collection of thirty-five compact essays asks how knowledge about disability is produced and shared in disability studies. Disability alters, generates, and dismantles method. Crip authorship takes place within and beyond the commodity version of authorship, in books, on social media, and in creative works that will never be published.

The chapters draw on the expertise of international researchers and activists in the humanities, social sciences, education, arts, and design. Across five sections—Writing, Research, Genre/Form, Publishing, Media—contributors consider disability as method for creative work: practices of writing and other forms of composition; research methods and collaboration; crip aesthetics; media formats and hacks; and the capital, access, legal standing, and care networks required to publish. Designed to be accessible and engaging for students, Crip Authorship also provides theoretically sophisticated arguments in a condensed form that will make the text a key resource for disability studies scholars.

Essays include Mel Y Chen on the temporality of writing with chronic illness; Remi Yergeau on perseveration; La Marr Jurelle Bruce on mad Black writing; Alison Kafer on the reliance of the manifesto genre on disability; Jaipreet Virdi on public scholarship for disability justice; Ellen Samuels on the importance of disability and illness to autotheory; Xuan Thuy Nguyen on decolonial research methods for disability studies; Emily Lim Rogers on virtual ethnography; Cameron Awkward-Rich on depression and trans reading methods; Robert McRuer on crip theory in translation; Kelsie Acton on plain language writing; and Georgina Kleege on description as an access and aesthetic technique.

Contents

Introduction: On Crip Authorship and Disability as Method. Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez

Section I: Writing

1.Writing While Adjunct. Mimi Khúc.

2. Chronic Illness, Slowness, and the Time of Writing. Mel Y. Chen.

3. Composing Perseveration / Perseverative Composing. M. Remi Yergeau.

4. Mad Black Rants. La Marr Jurelle Bruce.

5. Plain Language for Disability Culture. Kelsie Acton.

6. Peter Pan World: In-System Authorship. Isolation Nation.

7. LatDisCrit and Counterstories. Alexis Padilla.

Section II: Research

8. Virtual Ethnography. Emily Lim Rogers.

9. Learning Disability Justice Through Critical Participatory Action Research. Laura J. Wernick.

10. Decolonial Disability Studies. Xuan Thuy Nguyen.

11. On Still Reading Like a Depressed Transsexual. Cameron Awkward-Rich.

12. On Trauma in Research on Illness, Disability, and Care. Laura Mauldin.

13. Injury, Recovery, and Representation in ShikaakwaLaurence Ralph.

14. Collaborative Research on the Möbius Strip. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp.

15. Lessons in Yielding: Crip Refusal and Ethical Research Praxis. Zoë H. Wool.

16. Creating a Fully Accessible Digital Helen Keller Archive. Helen Selsdon.

Section III: Genre

17. Manifesting Manifestos. Alison Kafer.

18. Public Scholarship as Disability Justice. Jaipreet Virdi.

19. Crip Autotheory. Ellen Samuels.

20. Disability Life Writing in India. Mohaiminul Islam and Ujjwal Jana.

21. The History and Politics of Krip-Hop. Leroy F. Moore, Jr. and Keith Jones.

22. Verbal and Nonverbal Metaphor. Asa Ito.

Section IV: Publishing

23. Accessible Academic Publishing. Cynthia Wu.

24. #DisabilityStudiesTooWhite. Kristen Bowen, Rachel Kuo, and Mara Mills.

25. A Philosophical Analysis of ASL/English Bilingual Publishing. Teresa Blankmeyer Burke.

26. Crip World-Making. Robert McRuer.

27. Disability in the Library and Librarianship. Stephanie S. Rosen.

28. The Rebuttal: A Protactile Poem. John Lee Clark.

Section V: Media

29. Crip Making. Aimi Hamraie.

30. Fiction Podcasts Model Description by Design. Georgina Kleege.

31. Podcasting for Disability Justice. Bri M.

32. Willful Dictionaries and Crip Authorship in CART. Louise Hickman.

33. How to Model AAC. Lateef H. McLeod.

34. Digital Spaces and the Right to Information for Deaf People During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Zimbabwe. Lovemore Chidemo, Agness Chindimba, and Onai Hara.

35. Crip Indigenous Storytelling Across the Digital Divide. Jen Deerinwater.

Find the introduction in Open Access here:

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.18574/nyu/9781479819386.001.0001/html#overview

Link on the publisher’s website:

https://nyupress.org/9781479819362/crip-authorship/

New Paper – Hólmfríður Sveinsdóttir, “A Material Culture of Medieval Disability: Contextualising Norwegian Votive Offerings” (open access)

Sveinsdóttir, H. (2024). A Material Culture of Medieval Disability: Contextualising Norwegian Votive Offerings. Norwegian Archaeological Review, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2024.2332383
 

Abstract

In this paper, the potential for material culture studies within the history of disability is explored through a study of preserved anatomical votives from medieval Norway left in connection with miraculous healing practices. The Norwegian votives, which include wooden body parts of hands, arms, finger, feet and legs as well as mobility aids, are here related to the lived experience of the physically impaired. Anatomical votives have been interpreted as meaningful depictions of how an individual conceptualised the body part in question, which they sought healing for. Through a posthumanist approach, anatomical votives can, however, not only be seen as solely representational of a body part but as material extensions of the body. Preserved mobility aids, here identified as hand-trestles and a knee-brace, provide insight into the availability of aids for individuals with lower limb impairments in the medieval North. The study of the material culture of disability can elucidate cultural notions of disability in relation to physical impairment. While written miracle accounts have been identified as important sources for the study of medieval disability, their associated material culture is here presented as important data for the embodied experience of the physically impaired in medieval Norway.

 
Read it in Open Access here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00293652.2024.2332383