Constructing Disability, Identities, and Communities through Media Research in Social Science and Disability (RSSD), Volume 18

From watching Hollywood films to couch-surfing streaming services and scrolling through social media on one’s phone to actively participating in online communities, media pervades our lives. For disabled people, the breadth and power of media representations offer challenges and opportunities. Media can create and reinforce stigmatization by the larger society. Mass media, owned by large for-profit companies, often erases the lives and perspectives of disabled people or uses and exploits various disability tropes for profit. Many avenues of media remain largely inaccessible to and exclusionary of disabled people. However, disabled people are also using, creating, and transforming the media to resist and contest mainstream conceptions of disability, develop their own empowered representations, and create communities of support. The goal for this volume of Research in Social Science and Disability is to bring together research and theoretical perspectives rooted in the social sciences to examine the changing production, reproduction, representation, and impact of media for disabled people. In this call for papers, we seek theoretical, methodological, or empirical papers that center disability in the study of media, and that are grounded in the perspectives and literatures of the social sciences.

We welcome submissions from a variety of disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches within the social sciences, and from scholars around the world. We are open to a wide range of topics, which might include:

• Studies of disability representations within specific media forms, such as film, news, art, comedy, publishing, advertising, and social media;

• Accessibility and inaccessibility in media;

• Power and control over media by varied groups, including disabled people, and impact of stratified power over media;

• The use of media in shaping disability culture, activism, and community-building;

• Intersectional analysis of media and disability as connected to gender, sexuality, race, nationality, age, religion, etc.;

• Studies rooted in specific national and international media forms and expressions;

• Theoretical formulations for studying media and disability;

• Methodological issues in the study of media and disability;

• Narrative analysis of disability-based stories in the media;

• Other topics related to media and disability that are grounded in the social sciences