How are artists, academics, theorists, and activists shifting/moving/unsettling understandings and performances of disability within various geographies? How are they disrupting prior pathologized legacies of disability? How does disability, whether visible, less visible, and/or invisible, shift ways of being in this world? How does this diverge with other paradigms within geography, gender, and sexuality? Focusing on the geographical complexity from where our working group members come, we will explore geography’s role, both culturally and physically, in setting conditions and limitations to how different bodies can and do interact everyday. Such geographies—whether local, micro, and/or intimate—have ultimately informed our understandings and perceptions about what it means to be “abled” and “disabled”.
Interested in capturing an array of international, multi-lingual, differential mobile, lived experience, and TAB (temporarily abled body) perspectives on and with disability, this working group will explore the diverse and complex ways geography affects and shapes perceptions and performances of disability. Inviting all complex human beings that identify in the all-too-many-ways-to-cite, we will workshop and discuss in what ways disability produces generative ways of being. Using new perspectives, including some emerging from “crip theory,” we will situate disability as an important performed mode of inquiry (See Hemi Performance & Disability 2014 working group description). This work will begin with how we imagine our own communication and working group structure, and representation and presentation of our own work to our fellow members.