Disability Studies: Austerity and Precariousness Seminar Series

Please find here an Introductory You Tube video, and an Eventbrite link for tickets and a full timetable for the day.

Disability studies is a scholarly movement that engages with interdisciplinary insights into the construction(s) of disability and ableist-normativity and what these dividing practices means for social policy, social care, legal regimes and biopolitics more generally. Precariousness ‘implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. It implies exposure both to those we know and to those we do not know; a dependency on people we know or know not at all’ (Butler, 2009, 14).
 
Precariousness can be a significant measure of the efficacy of social policy and law.  This seminar series will bring together researchers whose work focuses on the marginal, the aberrant, disabled people, displaced persons and the trans/categorically ‘othered’ to explore austerus, those ‘dry, harsh and sour’ landscapes of thinking about difference, variability and the increasing (re)turn to classifying populations creating inside and outwith zones of belonging and exclusion.
 
 
This series is sponsored by:
(Dis)places: Embodiment and community in critical and creative motion
 
(Dis)places: is a new grouping that goes by a name that is emblematic of its intended flexibility, critically and creative, without us taking ourselves too seriously. The ‘dis’ element, reflects, firstly, the School’s historical and continuing strengths in disability-related research – broadly defined. Bracketing it alongside ‘places’ draws attention to our interest in marginal spaces – physical, political, educational, cultural, economic, etc. – in which disabled people, as well as other groups and communities, find themselves. (Dis)places: Embodiment and community in critical and creative motion highlights the broad disciplinary base of our group – humanities, theology, social sciences (pure and applied), as well as making links with creative arts.
 
 

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