CFP: Special Issue of Disability Studies Quarterly on Autism

Submission deadline: Jan. 1 2009

Projected publication date: Summer 2010

Co-editors: Emily Thornton Savarese, University of Iowa, and Ralph James Savarese, Grinnell College

We are looking for completed articles, from a disability studies perspective, on what the medical community refers to as ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). We are especially interested in pieces that engage the so-called “low-functioning” end of the spectrum, where increasingly those presumed retarded and lacking social awareness are writing back to the empire of science. As the field of disability studies has theorized cognitive difference, it has had to refine its cherished social-constructionist approach, making sure to account for physiological distinctiveness in the organ of sensibility, a distinctiveness that has been interpreted in a myriad of ways, most quite prejudicial. We are interested in the burgeoning neurodiversity movement, which has self-consciously resisted such prejudicial interpretations, often revealing the “science” of autism to be anything but reliable and objective. How to talk about autistic difference? How to represent it? How to convey its gifts and challenges? Who can talk about it? What role should parents play in this representational arena? What role should teachers, doctors, researchers, therapists, media entities, and academics play? What kind of interdisciplinary approaches are needed to understand, respect, and even cherish autism?

We are open to the widest array of progressive approaches and topics. The latter include, but are not limited to, issues of:

race/ethnicity

sexuality

self-representation/autobiography

movement and cognition

perceptual acuities

popular cultural representations

internet

blogging

literacy

communication

the arts

treatments, cures, prevention

science/research

eugenics

education/inclusion

disability rights

employment

perseveration, echolalia

independence


Questions or queries may be sent to emsavarese@hotmail.com or savarese@grinnell.edu