CfP Different Bodies: (Self-)Representation, Disability and the Media
University of Westminster, London, United Kingdom
23 June 2017
This one-day conference seeks to explore representations of the body as strange, shameful, wrong, impaired, wounded, scarred,
disabled, lacking, different or ‘other’ in contemporary media.
The
advent of digital media has underlined the importance of visual culture
and our curiosity in representations of the body to
form opinions about ourselves and others. Media portrayals of bodies
can affect our lives because media are one of the primary agents of
socialization (Moore and Kosut, 2010). Bodies we see in newspapers, on
television and in our social media feeds are often
made to appear perfect in order to conform to racialized and
heteronormative ideals of what it means to be beautiful and normal in
contemporary capitalist societies. Presentations of the body that are
white, young, slim and productive have been critiqued from
different fields in academia such as feminism, queer theory, disability
studies, critical theory and postcolonial studies.
The
digital media landscape is posing new challenges to the study of body
representation. The Internet and social media in particular
have led to an increased representation and engagement with the body
through practices such as selfies, webcamming, blogging, vlogging and so
on. While digital media may contribute to an empowerment of excluded
and silenced bodies, they may equally open up
spaces of discrimination, threats, hatred, trolling and silencing
online, as the #gamergate controversy or author Lizzie Velásquez’
self-presentation on social media have recently illustrated.
A
critical approach to representations of bodies and disability is
therefore essential as a means of change (Bolt, 2014). This
conference aims to develop a new understanding of disability and the
media in the 21st century by establishing a dialogue between different
scholars on the theme of body representations. In particular, we seek to
formulate new questions to comprehend how the
tension between non-digital and digital media is creating spaces for
new ways of framing disabled bodies. How are new narratives being
developed to recount diversity? What is their function? What is the
relationship between representation of the body in news
outlets and self-representation on social media? What are the
epistemological opportunities the media could embrace in order to
promote equality, health literacy and ultimately, a more comprehensive
understanding of what it means to be human?
We encourage interdisciplinary paper presentations of 15 minutes that aim to explore how narratives and images of other bodies
are constructed in the media and what their aesthetic, social, cultural, epistemological and political implications are.
Papers
may draw on media and communication studies, as well as queer theory,
disability studies, postcolonial studies, feminist
theory, critical theory, psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies,
literature, history, visual studies, anthropology, health communication,
religious studies, medicine and philosophy.
Possible themes include but are not limited to:
- Researching bodies and the media: frameworks and methodologies
- Journalism and practices of othering the body
- The mediated body as spectacle
- Celebrity bodies and the spectacles of transformation
- The abject body
- Stigma and the body
- De-colonizing and de-westernising the mediated body
- Neoliberalism, policy and austerity politics
- (Dis)Empowerments of the disabled body
- The objectification of the disabled body in the media
- Contemporary coverage of disability in print/online/television/radio
- Reality television and the body
- Auto-ethnographic accounts of the body in / through digital media
- The medicalised body in the media
- Representing wounds and scars
- Affective labour of bodies
- The body and trauma
This
conference is part of the research project ‘Facial Disfigurement in the
UK Media: From Print to Online’, led by Dr. Diana
Garrisi (University of Westminster) and Dr. Jacob Johanssen (University
of Westminster) that is financed through the University of Westminster
Strategic Research Fund. Invited speakers include Henrietta Spalding,
Head of Advocacy at the UK charity Changing
Faces (http://www.changingfaces.org.
Please send in abstracts of no longer than 500 words to both Jacob Johanssen (j.johanssen@westminster.ac.uk