CLST, with generous co-sponsorships from Pitt's Office of Health Sciences Diversity and Pitt’s Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Department, proudly presents a major conference that will be a plenary session of the Cultural Studies Association Convention meeting at CMU: VOICING DISABILITY: Cultural Interventions, Ethical Dilemmas, and Methodological Possibilities. This event, free and open to the public, will be held 9:00 AM-noon in 125 Frick Fine Arts Building at the University of Pittsburgh, with a half-hour reception at noon in the Cloister immediately outside the venue.  Bagels and beverages will be provided in the half-hour before the event begins.

CONFERENCE DESCRIPTION: Given the recent turn in cultural studies toward the ethics of envoicing minoritized personhood in dynamic tension with the contingencies of oppressive social structures, this conference proposes to address advances in cultural approaches toward understanding disability/diffability. The three speakers, all leading scholars in the field of disability studies, have been asked to reflect upon their experiences as examples of emerging “best practices” in opening spaces for too-often silenced people with disabilities, past and present, to be heard broadly beyond their communities.  The conference participants will consider whether spotlighting disabled individuals’ agency resolves or highlights a longstanding contradiction in disability studies between, on the one hand, its history in medically-circumscribed concepts of impairment that underscore claims to public entitlements and other benefits, and, on the other hand, its embrace by people who emphasize disability as a sociocultural construction (and less a limiting condition) and hence seek cultural parity with “abled normals”–neither as a lesser nor constricted form of human existence, merely a different one.

8:30-9:00AM

Beverages and Bagels 

9:00-9:45AM

Welcome: Ronald J. Zboray, CLST Director

Session I: Listening to Voices:

Introduction: Mary Saracino Zboray, Visiting Scholar in Communication

Mary Jo Festle, Maude Sharpe Powell Professor of History, Elon University

Quality of Life: What Oral History with Lung Transplant Recipients Teaches Us

Dr. Festle is Maude Sharpe Powell Professor of History at Elon University, and Associate Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning.  She has published Second Wind: Oral Histories of Lung Transplant Survivors (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Playing Nice: Politics and Apologies in Women’s Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).  Her essays have appeared in numerous readers and her articles have appeared in venues like Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (2010), Oral History Review (2002), and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (1997).

10:00-10:45AM

Session II: Writing Voices

Introduction: Mary Saracino Zboray, Visiting Scholar in Communication

Lennard J. Davis, Distinguished Professor of English, University of Illinois at Chicago

Ventriloquizing Sign Language: The Ethics of Hearing People Writing About Deaf People

Dr. Davis, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Professor of Disability and Human Development in the School of Applied Health Sciences and Professor of Medical Education in the University of Illinois College of Medicine, is arguably one of the founders of cultural studies of disability. His books include: Enabling Acts: The Hidden Story of How the Americans with Disabilities Act Gave the Largest US Minority Its Rights (Beacon 2015); Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction (Routledge 2014); The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era ( U Michigan P 2013); My Sense of Silence: Memoirs of a Childhood with Deafness (U Illinois P 2000); and Shall I Say a Kiss: The Courtship Letters of a Deaf Couple (Gallaudet UP 1999).  He edited the many editions of The Disability Studies Reader (Routledge 1997-2017).

11:00-11:45AM

Session III: Voices in the Archive 

Introduction: Mary Saracino Zboray, Visiting Scholar in Communication

Dea H. Boster Associate Professor of History, Department of Humanities, Columbus State Community College

Slavery, Subjectivity, and Narrative in Disability History

Dr. Boster is Associate Professor of History, Department of Humanities, Columbus State Community College. Her books include African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800-1860 (Routledge 2013) and, with Joel D. Howell, Medicine at Michigan: A History of the University of Michigan Medical School at the Bicentennial (U Michigan P 2017). Her articles and essays have appeared in Bulletin of the History of Medicine (2009), Jeffrey Brune and Daniel Wilson’s Disability and Passing (Temple UP 2013), and Susan Burch and Michael Rembis’s Disability Histories (U Illinois P 2014).

12:00-12:30

Closing Reception