Call for Book Chapters: "Race, Gender and Disability: Navigating Intersectionality in Literature"

Vernon Press invites book chapters for a forthcoming edited volume on the subject of "Race, Gender and Disability: Navigating Intersectionality in Literature."

Emerging as one of the branches of Health/Medical humanities, Disability Studies has been of interest to scholars and researchers from Literature, to Psychology, Medicine, Law and the Humanistic Social Sciences. The past few years have witnessed the rising importance of, and interest in informing disability studies from multidisciplinary/ intersectional approaches. Understanding the term ‘disability’ often ignites questions regarding how and why one’s (dis)ability is distinctly understood and construed by a composite of factors like race, gender and class. How do existing theoretical frameworks diversify the conceptual and contextual understanding of disability beyond its traditional sense, linked only with defects or disease in the biological body? How do biological-physical impairment and the broader range of disabilities (social, legal, etc.) at once overlap and stand apart? How does disability become a mark of, a way to understand, and critique the formation of minority identity, while interrogating the social construction and existence of identities subject to the politics of social control?

To find answer to some such questions, this book aims to bring together critical opinions opening new trajectories that shape the meaning of disability as a product of social injustice and not just a medical condition. The selected chapters and articles will broaden the critical scholarship and discourses on race, gender and disability offering a comparative study of works/texts that present a new body of theory to inter/multidisciplinary scholarship. It proposes to offer fresh research and critical approaches to primary materials, rather than secondary research on the topic.  Each chapter will contribute towards understanding, interpreting, and theorizing the intersections of race, gender and disability, and fill in gaps or create new interrogative spaces. The contributors are expected to make efforts to transgress beyond conventional responses in the field of Disability Studies in various literatures viz., Caribbean, African-American, Australian, South Asian, African, and Maori Literature. 

Chapters will address the following sub- themes-but not limited to- within race, gender and disability in the following areas:

• Law and Social Justice
• Politics of Urban Spaces
• (Dis)ability and Human Rights: Negotiating Identity
• Affect Theory and Disability
• Sexuality Studies
• Queer Studies
• Writing and/or Resisting Racial/Gendered Disability in/through Life Narratives
• Prison Studies

Please send your abstracts on sucharita.sharma@iisuniv.ac.in

Submission of Abstracts: 15 March

Acceptance of Abstracts: 30 March

Submission of full Paper: 30 May