Boulder, Colorado, United States (and online) - June 10th, 2025
Kuansong Victor Zhuang, Gerard Goggin, Katie Ellis, Meryl Alper, Lorenzo Dalvit, Elizabeth Ellcessor, Beth Haller, Chelsea Temple Jones, Dyah Pitaloka, Abdul Rohman, M. Remi Yergeau, Francis Routledge, Valquiria Ramos Obregón, Wenqi Tan, Samira Rajabi
Hosted by UC Boulder
Supported by ICA Philosophy, Theory and Critique Division
Submission deadline: February 15th, 2025
Notification for accepted abstracts: March 1st, 2025
Preconference: June 10th, 2025
A key focus of this year’s preconference is to foster a supportive community of scholars and thinkers across disability. communication, and media research. We are building upon our inaugural preconference at ICA 2024, where we had more than 50 attendees both online and in-person, to provide a space for collaboration, conversation, and mentorship.
The disability, communication, and media preconference will be a hybrid event. It will consist of:
Postgraduate and early career researcher consortium (to be held in the morning, Mountain Time)
Workshop with expert speakers and senior scholars in disability, communication, and media studies
Roundtable discussion on the futures of the field
ICA 2025 invites us to critically review, disrupt, and consolidate the past, present, and futures of communication studies. Disability, media, and communication research is, of course, a vibrant field cutting across the swathe of communication and media studies (Alper 2017, 2023; Dokumaci 2023; Ellcessor and Kirkpatrick 2017; Ellis 2016; Ellis and Goggin 2015; Ellis et al. 2019, 2020; Ellis and Kent 2011, 2016; Goggin 2021; Goggin and Newell 2003; Hadley and McDonald 2018; Haller 2010, 2023; Jeffress et al. 2023; Riley 2005; Sterne 2021; Tkaczyk, Mills, and Hui 2020).
At the preconference, we view disability—a form of generative knowledge and embodiment—as an avenue for critical, disruptive, and consolidative work as it guides us ‘to think through, act, resist, relate, communicate, engage with one another against the hybridized forms of oppression and discrimination that so often do not speak singularly of disability’ (Goodley 2013, 641).
To this effect, we ask: what does it mean to perform, practice, and research disruption through disability in and across communication and media studies?
This year, the preconference invites postgraduate students and early career researchers* across disability, communication, and media research to present their in-progress work in a collaborative environment, receive mentorship, and learn from established scholars in the field. We are interested in a diversity of projects, including research ideas in their early stages of development (including theses and dissertations), open and critical questions to the field, and the sharing of research results.
Postgraduate students and early career researchers will present their work to a panel of expert mentors. They will then receive feedback from the panel and fellow participants with the goal of developing a conference submission for the following year’s ICA.
Submissions should focus on the application of disability studies in communication and media research, including, but not limited to:
Research that deliberates on how disability studies is disruptive communication and media research
Research that spotlights emergent, cutting edge, and exciting areas of disability communication and media research
Research that brings together disability-led perspectives to engage communication and media studies
Research that consider what it means to do disability-led research in the areas of communication, media, and technology
Research that takes stock of disability, communication, and media research to-date
Research that spotlights disability, communication, and media research away from Global North locations
and/or engages with the following questions:
How can we, as disability scholars, perform, practice, and research disruption in communication and media studies?
How can disability research engage with and enrich communication and media studies and vice versa?
What can we, as communication scholars, learn from disability insights such as “crip time” and “spoon theory” in academic environments?
What are the methodological contours of disability, communication, and media research?
What are the gaps, problems, and areas of concern in disability, communication, and media research?
What is the future of disability, communication, and media research?
We welcome submissions across methodological approaches and mediums. Submissions should also build on the core tenets of disability studies, which demands a critical rethinking of disability in normative societies.
If interested, please submit a 300-word abstract of your research and a short statement of interest/biography on what you hope to get out of the preconference (maximum 200-words) by 15 Feb 2025 at this form: https://forms.gle/wiMu8N8mfdMJW5Ff9.
Please indicate if you will be participating in-person/remotely and any access needs**
Queries can be directed at icadisability@gmail.com.
If the form above, or some aspects of it, is inaccessible, please email us at icadisability@gmail.com.
We will notify accepted abstracts within two weeks after the deadline.
* Please note that early career researchers should be not more than 5 years from award of their PhD; preference will be given to postgraduate students and early career researchers not already in tenure-track positions.
** This preconference will be hybrid, so both physical and remote participation will be possible.
*** Please note that presenters must be available to present in the morning, Mountain Time.
**** Fees, if any, to be announced.
Alper, Meryl. 2017. Giving voice: Mobile communication, disability, and inequality. Boston: MIT Press.
---. 2023. Kids Across the Spectrums: Growing Up Autistic in the Digital Age. Boston, MA: MIT Press.
Dokumaci, Arseli. 2023. Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke UP.
Ellcessor, Elizabeth, and Bill Kirkpatrick. 2017. Disability media studies. New York: NYU Press.
Ellis, Katie. 2016. Disability media work: Opportunities and obstacles. London: Palgrave.
Ellis, Katie, and Gerard Goggin. 2015. Disability and the Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Ellis, Katie, Gerard Goggin, Beth Haller, and Rosemary Curtis. 2019. The Routledge Companion to Disability and Media. London: Routledge.
---. 2020. The Routledge companion to disability and media. London: Routledge.
Ellis, Katie, and Mike Kent. 2011. Disability and new media. London: Routledge.
---. 2016. Disability and social media: Global perspectives. New York, NY: Routledge.
Goggin, Gerard. 2021. Apps: From mobile phones to digital lives. John Wiley & Sons.
Goggin, Gerard, and Christopher Newell. 2003. Digital disability: The social construction of disability in new media. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Goodley, Dan. 2013. "Dis/Entangling Critical Disability Studies." Disability & Society 28 (5): 631-644.https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.717884.
Hadley, Bree, and Donna McDonald. 2018. The Routledge handbook of disability arts, culture, and media. Routledge.
Haller, Beth. 2010. Representing disability in an ableist world: Essays on mass media. Louisville, KY: Advocado Press.
---. 2023. Disabled People Transforming Media Culture for a More Inclusive World. New York: Routledge.
Jeffress, Michael, Jim Ferris, Joy M Cypher, and Julie-Ann Scott-Pollock, eds. 2023. The Palgrave Handbook of Disability and Communication. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Riley, Charles A. 2005. Disability and the media: Prescriptions for change. Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England.
Sterne, Jonathan. 2021. Diminished faculties: A political phenomenology of impairment. Duke University Press.
Tkaczyk, Viktoria, Mara Mills, and Alexandra Hui. 2020. Testing hearing: The making of modern aurality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.