Avoidance and/in the Academy: The International Conference on Disability, Culture, and Education, Centre for Culture & Disability Studies, Liverpool Hope University

I am a relatively new member of the disability studies community and, organized by David Bolt, Claire Penketh, and Chris Lowry, "Avoidance and/in the Academy" was my first disability studies conference. I could not have chosen a better place to start. The event was hosted by the Centre for Culture & Disability Studies (CCDS), Liverpool Hope University, 11-12 September 2013. As I arrived on campus I was not sure what to expect, but over the two full days I heard a range of fascinating and thought-provoking papers and met many enthusiastic and committed scholars.

The growing renown of the CCDS attracted so many excellent speakers to the conference that the organizers devised a programme where plenary talks alternated with parallel sessions chaired by some of the core members. This account is therefore necessarily partial (and reflects my own interests), but I hope it will give at least some sense of the richness and diversity of subjects covered.

On the first day, I attended two panel sessions. Chaired by Owen Barden, "Difficult Readings" featured three papers that considered how the most uncomfortable aspects of disability could (or should) be evoked in language. Theresa Miller (University of Western Australia) used her analysis of Diana Craik 's A Noble Life to argue against the frequent assumption that embarrassing depictions of disability should be avoided because they are either too sentimental or too explicit. Alan Hodkinson (Liverpool Hope University) continued Miller's implicit challenge to the canon by demonstrating that school textbooks constitute a majoritizing ideology which renders the disabled all but invisible by omission. In the final paper of the session, Ria Cheyne (Liverpool Hope University) used a perceptive reading of Stephen King to address some of the common ground between "body genres" such as horror fiction and disability studies. Her contention that King's fiction demonstrates an awareness of disability tropes and an acknowledgement of their artificiality effectively reclaimed King for a disability studies audience.

In the second panel, "Medical Matters," which was chaired by Laura Waite, Clare Barker (University of Leeds) presented a hugely informative and helpful overview of the intersections and tensions between disability studies and medical humanities. These two emerging fields are often grouped together in the university context but the latter's emphasis on the medical might be seen as a barrier to progressive disability research as it runs counter to UK disability studies' investment in the social model. Peter Wheeler (Edge Hill University) used his historical account of the education and training of "the blind" to bring another dimension to discussions of the social model as he demonstrated that it is not a recent invention but rather has been part of radical disability thinking since the nineteenth century.

My highlight on the first day of the conference was undoubtedly Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's (Emory University, Atlanta) clever and compelling keynote reading of the now canonical 2003 New York Times Magazine article by Harriet McBryde Johnson, "Unspeakable Conversations: The Case for My Life." In her elegant reading of this text, Garland-Thomson used techniques borrowed from literary criticism and rhetorical analysis to provide new insights into this article that is usually read from a bio-ethics perspective. Her paper convincingly showed that Johnson's text mobilizes a range of narrative techniques to argue for the inherent value of disability for its own sake.

Any conference organizer will know that the published conference programme is inevitably subject to the vagaries of circumstance. The second day of the conference came with some last-minute cancellations that created space for a fascinating impromptu round-table discussion where Bolt and Garland-Thomson were joined by the editors of the "Corporealities" book series (University of Michigan Press), David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, in a thoughtful and good-humoured discussion of issues around Avoidance and the Academy. These leaders in the field gave generous and authoritative responses to a range of questions from the floor. This was a relaxed and friendly session that was a particularly welcome chance for graduate students and junior academics to...