28th Annual SDS Atlanta Conference: Getting it Right/s

Atlanta 2015 Conference - the 28th annual meeting of SDS, the Summit on Disability and Social Justice.

Disability as/is a civil right, a human right, a social right, an economic right, an educational right, a medical right, a sexual right, an employment right, a voting right, a representational right. All of these, and more. Communities and advocates - locally, nationally, transnationally - have been making efforts to get/gain rights, including recognition, legal and/or cultural; and trying, also, to get it right--to address, analyze, reclaim, revise, redress, recover disability representations in literature, culture, politics, and history. The diversity of global articulations of rights; the emergence of critiques of rights frameworks; and transnational developments such as the recent use of language from the American Disabilities Act in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities -- UNCRPD, present the field of Disability Studies, whose growth has paralleled these trends, with an opportunity to consider disability rights in all of its complexities:

When has disability, or its likeness, been considered within grassroots advocacy movements in political geographies around the globe, including nation-states and indigenous governmentalities, and in regional, local, comparative perspectives? When does disability, or its likeness, enter state law, and under what conditions? How have recent or former projects, languages, questions, policies, issues, movements, and events about disability emerged, traveled, and been contested? What conditions allow national laws to migrate transnationally? Are there shifts in the popular emergence and circulation of disability values, and are these shifts expressed with specific forms of representation? How and where has disability politics allied with, or against, “human rights” and/or decolonial frameworks? How have activists and artists crippled state-sanctioned uses of disability?