"The Price of Coal" (23 March, Swansea)

From:  http://www.dis-ind-soc.org.uk/en/events.htm?id=1
Roadshow: The Price of Coal

Sat 23rd March 2013

National Waterfront Museum, Swansea

Disability history roadshow at the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea, 23^rd March 2013 (10am–4pm).

Click here for the day's programme (PDF)

Click here for the flyer (PDF)

Did you or a member of your family work in the coal industry in south Wales? Did you face difficult working conditions or the constant threat of accident? Did you experience injury, illness or disease as a result of this work? If so, come along to the Disability History Roadshow at the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea on Saturday 23 March 2013 between 10am and 4pm. The Roadshow will focus on the human costs of this most dangerous of industries and explore the consequences for the people of the mining communities of south Wales. It will include:

• talks by historians on the industry and working conditions;
• historic documentary films on disease and disability;
• photos, documents and archives;
• readings of poetry and historical sources;
• medical equipment;
• archivists on hand to discuss any historical documents relating to the coal industry that you might wish to bring along.

Come and find out more about how our fathers and grandfathers, working in the bowels of the earth, faced danger, disease and death in the course of their daily lives and paid the heavy price of coal.

Confirmed speakers and guests include: Rhodri Morgan, Hywel Francis MP, Steven Thompson (Aberystwyth University), Ben Curtis (Aberystwyth University), Anne Borsay (Swansea University), David Turner (Swansea University).

Jo Walton, "Among Others"

I stopped and turned around.  I could feel my cheeks burning.  The bus station was full of people.  "Nobody would pretend to be a cripple! Nobody would use a stick they didn't need! You should be ashamed of yourself for thinking that I would.  If I could walk without it I'd break it in half across your back and run off singing.  You have no right to talk to me like that, to talk to anyone like that.  Who made you queen of the world when I wasn't looking? Why do you imagine I would go out with a stick I don't need--to try to steal your sympathy? I don't want your sympathy, that's the last thing I want.  I just want to mind my own business, which is what you should be doing."

It didn't do any good at all, except for making me a public spectacle.  She went very pink, but I don't think what I was saying really went in.  She'll probably go home and say she saw a girl pretending to be a cripple.  I hate people like that.  Mind you, I hate the ones who come up and ooze synthetic sympathy just as much, who want to know exactly what's wrong with me and pat me on the head.  I am a person.  I want to talk about things other than my leg. (191)

--From Jo Walton, Among Others (Tor Books, 2010), winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

I got this book for Christmas because it was well-reviewed, but I didn't realize how much I'd like the main character Mori, a physically-disabled Welsh girl about my generation (she's a year or two older than I was in 1979-80, when the book is set), awkward and lonely and haunting the local library, reading many of the same books I did at that age (but far more, because I was never a fast reader).  Her disability isn't a main theme of the book, but it's important.  And maybe young and not-so-young readers will learn something from the character's experiences, which are based on the author's:  "all the disability stuff in the book is entirely from experience," Walton told the Guardian.  Another extract:

I found myself being helped down to the car.  That sort of help is actually a hindrance.  If you ever see someone with a walking stick, that stick, and their arm, are actually a leg.  Grabbing it or lifting it, or doing anything unasked to the stick and the arm are much the same as if you grabbed a normal person's leg as they're walking.  I wish more people understood this. (224)

Disability Blog Carnival NEWS!

After six years of organizing the Disability Blog Carnival, I decided to let it drop... but I'm happy to say, it's baaaaa-aaaaack!  Emma at Writer in a Wheelchair is going to pick up the baton for the next few months.  Here's the announcement, and here's the nitty-gritty details:

On the 28th of each month I will post a collection of links to different posts about disability and/or by disabled bloggers.  Things that have caught my eye but also things that people send me.  My plan is that for the first three months I’ll host it here to get it started but then from April I might see about getting different hosts and it moving around again.

I encourage anyone who loved the carnival, anyone who contributed to the carnival, and anyone who never heard of the carnival, to support Emma in this.  It can't work without submissions, so write stuff or send her links to stuff you saw and liked.   Blog carnivals are, at their best, great snapshots of a vibrant community.  I can't wait to see the Disability Blog Carnival in 2013.

Disability Blog Carnival #84 is up NOW!

Dave Hingsburger hosts the October edition of the Disability Blog Carnival, at Rolling Around in My Head, here.   It's short but Dave puts a lot of context into his collection of links.  Thanks Dave!

Did you know that the Disability Blog Carnival started in October 2006?  So we just passed its sixth anniversary.  Back then, it was twice a month, and often jam-packed with links.  Well, the online climate is different today--blogs have to compete for attention with so many other venues and formats.  I know I'm not blogging much nowadays, and that seems to be true for a lot of folks.  Submissions for the carnival have been sparse for a couple years now, and some editions never even post.  I think, therefore, that the we've come to the end of the run for the Disability Blog Carnival.  The existing eighty-four editions remain a strong record of disability blogosphere for a vibrant six years. 

If there's anyone who'd like to take over organizing the Disability Blog Carnival, perhaps to restart it sometime in 2013 or beyond, I'm glad to help, just holler.  (There are several other blog carnivals on disability themes still happening right now, too.)

Big Day for Disability History

Two big projects in US disability history are launching into the world today:

Today's the release date of Kim Nielsen's A Disability History of the United States (Beacon Press 2012), a concise (272 pages!), inexpensive (just $16 in hardcover!), and sweeping account, starting before 1492, and landing in the present-day.  If this is exactly the book you've needed for a class, for a book group, for your own study, you're not alone.   I've only been reading in disability history for seventeen years, but back in the 1990s, you'd be lucky to find a text that even acknowledged the existence of disability before Samuel Gridley Howe's 1848 report to the Massachusetts legislature.  (All my graduate projects had colonial and Early Republic settings, so I noticed.)  So for that aspect alone, let alone all the other goodness involved, I'm thrilled to greet this book.

Also--DVR alert--start popping the popcorn and dimming the lights!  Tonight is the first night of Turner Classic Movies' month-long feature, "The Projected Image:  A History of Disability in Film."   More than twenty films, various eras and genres, all with disability themes, airing all five Tuesdays in October.  Lawrence Carter-Long will co-host the series with Ben Mankiewicz.  Tonight's lineup:  An Affair to Remember (1957);  Patch of Blue (1965); Butterflies are Free (1972), Gaby-A True Story (1987), and The Sign of the Ram (1948).  All with closed captions, all with audio description.  It's a big deal that a cable network is devoting this much time to disability history and culture, and to make it accessible too; if you don't get TCM, consider calling your cable company and just subscribing for October.  That'll be great for you (20+ movies on disability themes, plus the rest of their lineup), and it'll send a signal that this kind of programming is appreciated. 

Also, if anyone wants to see a discussion feature here on DSTU, for either Kim Nielsen's book, or the TCM Film Series, I'm game.  Just holler in comments, and I'll be glad to set that up.  Otherwise, the hashtag for twitter discussions of the film series is #ProjectedImageTCM, and TCM has its own discussion boards that are certainly available for the purpose.

ETA:  Here's a podcast interview with Kim Nielsen about the new book.  

CFP: Disability and the American Counterculture

Spotted on DS-HUM:

Special issue CFP: Disability and the American Counterculture
Guest edited by Stella Bolaki and Chris Gair

The American Counterculture has a complex relationship with disability. At
its heart is the reinvention of the term freak that serves as an early
example of empowering, though not unproblematic, appropriation of what had
previously been a derogatory term. Freak Out!, the debut album by The
Mothers of Invention—labelled a “monstrosity” by Frank Zappa—is a prime
example of the association of freakery with the forms of avant-garde
experimentation representative of one form of countercultural practice. In
addition, representations of disability and illness occur repeatedly in
countercultural work: the asylum and hospital become central tropes for
examinations of the relationship between sanity and madness in Allen
Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, while
canonical Beat/countercultural novels such as Jack Kerouac’s Desolation
Angels and Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America and movies such as
Richard Rush’s Psych-Out feature disabled characters not only to derive
rhetorical force in their critique of hegemonic culture, but also to
question core countercultural ideologies. In terms of aesthetics, William
Burroughs’ experimental “cut-up technique” has been discussed in the
context of his interest in virology and Andy Warhol’s work of trauma,
injury and violence alongside what Tobin Siebers has called “disability
aesthetics”. More recent work, such as E.L. Doctorow’s novel Homer and
Langley, the Hollywood film Forrest Gump and Simi Linton’s memoir My Body
Politic, examines the connection between disability and the counterculture
through different lenses and with various aims.

What do perspectives informed by disability studies have to offer to
typical readings of the American counterculture and its fundamental ideals
of movement (both geographical and ideological), youth and vitality? In
what ways did the American counterculture and the disability movement
approach notions of the “normal” and the “abnormal” body? Beat and
countercultural writers and artists have been criticised for their
romanticised view of other cultures and for appropriating and shedding
roles and personas from various marginalised groups at a dizzying pace. How
different was the appropriation of disability to the American
counterculture’s interest in other cultures (Eastern, African American,
Native American) and their potential for constructing a subversive
identity? What are the legacies of the American counterculture and its
various discourses and styles of liberation for contemporary disability
life writing, arts and activism? With such questions in mind, the co-
editors invite proposals on an array of topics which include (but are not
limited to) the following:

•perspectives from disability studies/theory on iconic as well as
understudied Beat texts and countercultural ideals more broadly
•challenges to “normalcy” from disability movements and the American
counterculture (comparative perspectives/debates)
•disability as theme and/or aesthetic in countercultural writing, art, film
and music or in more recent works that reference the American counterculture
•appropriation and reinvention of the term “freak” by the counterculture
•approaches to spectacle, the stare, the performative, and fashion in
American counterculture and disability cultures/arts
•disability in the sixties-era communes and communal living groups
•feminist disability studies and the counterculture
•crip perspectives on the American counterculture
•legacies of the American counterculture and countercultural ideals,
practices and styles for disability writing, arts, and activism

Discussions of specific literary and cultural texts are invited, but
preference will be given to projects that use individual texts as vehicles
to address broader cultural debates and theoretical inquiries related to
disability studies and the American counterculture. A one-page proposal and
a one-page curriculum vitae should be emailed to S.Bolaki@kent.ac.uk and
Chris.Gair@glasgow.ac.uk by the end of July 2013. Finalists will be
selected by 1st October 2013, and full drafts of articles will be due on
1st March 2014.

Lecture series: Disabilities and Abilities in the Middle Ages & the Renaissance

Starting last week, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Ohio State University is offering a series of ten free public lectures on disability in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.  I'm not in Ohio, and I'm guessing a lot of our readers aren't either, but it's still interesting to see the lecture titles (links lead to each lecture's facebook event page, for further information):

Friday, 7 September 2012
Christine Lee, Lecturer in Viking Studies, Nottingham University
"Able Bodies:  Considerations of (Dis)ability in Anglo-Saxon England"

Friday, 28 September 2012
Paul Hyams, Professor of History, Cornell University
"Serfrom without Strings:  Amartya Sen in the Middle Ages"

Friday, 12 October 2012
Julie Singer, Assistant Professor of French, Washington University in Saint Louis
"Mental Illness, Self-Violence, and Civil War"

Friday, 16 November 2012
John Lindow, Professor of Scandinavian, UC-Berkeley
"Maimed Bodies and Broken Systems in the Old Norse Imaginary"

Friday, 30 November 2012
Shigehisa Kuriyama, Reischauer Institute Professor of Cultural History, Harvard University
"Toward a History of Distraction"

Friday, 8 February 2013
James Clifton, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
"Blindness, Desire, and Touch in Two French Paintings"

Thursday, 21 February 2013
Michael Thomsett, Independent Scholar, Author of The Inquisition: A History
"Legal Disabilities of Inquisition Victims"

Friday, 8 March 2013
Encarnación Juárez-Almendros, Associate Professor of Spanish, University of Notre Dame
"Teresa of Avila and her Neurological Condition"

Friday, 22 March 2013
Christopher Baswell, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of English, Barnard College/Columbia University
"Three Medieval Cripples:  The Performance of Authenticity"

Friday, 12 April 2013
Ian Maclean, Professor of Renaissance Studies, All Souls College, Oxford
"Renaissance Bodies and their Imperfections"