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  • Cripping Development Conference, National Academy of Sciences, Prague
  • Cassandra Hartblay (bio)

In September 2013, scholars and activists gathered at the National Academy of Sciences in Prague’s Old City to think through what a decolonized queercrip disability studies might mean. The conference organizers wrote that they hoped “to provide space for critical dialogue between disability studies and studies of Central and Eastern Europe, postcolonial studies, global and development studies.”

Over three days, the conference unfolded as a unified seminar, allowing those in attendance to interact in an intimate environment. Proceedings included discussions and keynote addresses by invited speakers, a video presentation of a contemporary art performance piece, a presentation of a live artwork, two workshops, five panels of paper presentations, and a crip dance party. At any given point, the audience in the seminar space ranged from 15 to 40 people.

Interdisciplinarity and scholar–activist interplay were central to the goals of the conference, organized by the Gender Research Office of the University of Vienna and the Department of Gender Studies of Charles University in Prague. Contributors included scholars from cultural studies, gender studies, history, sociology, cultural and applied anthropology, as well as activists who do not locate themselves in the academy. A common goal of destabilizing Western academic (especially masculinist, heteronormative, white, mainstream development) voices in transnational problems of disability emerged as a key topic for discussion in both formal proceedings and informal conversations.

Accessibility remained a concern, despite the best efforts of the organizers. Conference conveners sought out physically accessible venues, planned for meals and coffee breaks catering to a range of dietary needs, provided gender-neutral toilets in the main conference space, designated a quiet space, arranged for simultaneous transcription, and requested that presenters provide presentation scripts. But organizers were frustrated to find that lodgings, billed as accessible, turned out not to be for at least one international guest. Linguistic [End Page 225] barriers remained. Some presenters spoke quickly in hard-to-translate English, or did not stick to the scripts they had provided the transcriptionists. This made it difficult for some non-native English speakers to follow presentations and participate in discussion, revealing that accessibility is an important intersection of disability and the postcolonial linguistic order (which continues to elevate English as the language of international exchange).

The conference kicked off with an event at the Czech National Theater. Haute Coutures 01 Fires by Ines Doujak, a performance piece, was regrettably presented in video format instead of live, due to a performer’s last-minute illness. Haute Coutures 01 Fires centers on the narratives of two women who do not know one another, indeed, who could not have known one another across space and time. But in the performance the two women are doubly twins. Metaphorically, they are twins in that they both died in fires in textile workshops. Physically, they are represented in the performance as conjoined: two female performers don a single pair of enormous blue jeans, one in each leg, symbolically merging their narratives and bodies.

Conference co-organizer Kateřina Kolářová introduced the piece, and reminded viewers that the medium of performance is uniquely poised to operate in this interstice of decolonial disability. The scholarly bias for the written word not only limits the kinds of ideas to which scholars have access, but also limits who can participate in critical conversation; performance opens possibilities for affinities, connections, and critiques that may be missed in text-based formats.

Following the screening, respondents Anastasia Kayiatos and Robert McRuer presented remarks, which, although prepared separately, shared important overlaps. American disability studies (of which we might consider both of these scholars provident) has rarely dealt with questions of how global supply chains are complicit in the creation of disability and debility. Doujak’s artwork raised questions about spatially diffuse production/consumption, bodies in labor, and bodies in pain. McRuer and Kayiatos suggested that the Global North is always complicit in othering by imagining the Global South as backwards/crippled/undeveloped, and complicit in material relations that inflict bodily impairment on colonized bodies. Suspended in relations of capital, specifically neoliberalism, there is always greater potential labor value to be extracted from a given body. The “neoliberal...

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