SDS Call for Papers

August 1, 2019

Dear Colleagues,

For the past decade or so, a group of anthropologists interested in disability have been presenting in multiple sessions (a 'stream') at the Society for Applied Anthropology annual meetings. For the 2020 annual meeting, we will continue that initiative by gathering a list of all of the sessions (all or in part) and papers with a disability focus. We have three goals: to promote disability scholarship, to create a community of disability topical scholars within SfAA, and to ensure maximum disability access to the SfAA meetings. Most of the anthropologists involved are active members of the Society for Disability Studies (SDS), the Society for Medical Anthropology (SMA) and in the Disability Research Interest Group (DRIG) - but we also often have contributors from the subfields of Educational Anthropology, Linguistic Anthropology, Bioarchaeology, and other subfields.  

We have a good working relationship with the SfAA, and they are very responsive to our requests for programmatic and physical access to SfAA. We are inviting people who are organising submissions related to disability to let us know so we can include you on our list! Please let us know ASAP!

Please also let us know if you need additional panellists, as we can probably steer people your way. Also let us know if you need a home for your paper - we can often be a matchmaker of sorts!

If you are all set, please go ahead with your own submission but remember to also send us a list of titles of the submissions and authors' names asap. 

If you know it already, please include any information on accommodation requests that you have. This is for both your and for SfAA - we work with SfAA to have the most accessible meeting possible without unneeded extra costs. For example, we flag sessions that will need Computer-Aided Real Transcription (CART) and/or ASL, Revoicing, an accessible microphone, podium, stage, etc. Some of these require quite a bit of planning, so if the schedulers know that these accommodations are needed for either the presenter or the audience, they can schedule the session accordingly. 

This is just a sample of what we do. If you think your session/paper will draw either disability scholars and/or practitioners, or if you expect to make an accommodation request of your own (including your hotel room), please let us help! We are not an official group except within SMA, but we have decades of professional experience as disabled and allied disability rights and justice advocates.

Please send your requests, notifications and/or submissions to Narelle Warren (Narelle.Warren@monash.edu), Sara Acevedo (sacevedo@ciis.edu) or Devva Kasnitz (devva@earthlink.net).

©Society for Applied Anthropology 

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