Dread Scott, I AM NOT A MAN. 2009. Harlem, NY. 

CALL FOR VISUAL ESSAYS AND DIGITAL PAPERS FOR DISABILITY, ART, JUSTICE, AND INTERSECTIONALITY

This issue is inspired by Mia Mingus’ keynote speech at the October 13, 2018 Disability Instersectionality Summit, Cambridge MA.

The editors invite all InSEA members and affiliated members to submit visual narratives/art works/text of art education practices that reveal inconvenient stories about the connections between different systems of oppression. These stories acknowledge and hold the reality of multiple oppressed identities.

Intersections of oppressed sites might include:

Disability    Race    Gender   Adoption   White supremacy   Speciesism   Imperialism     The Medical and Prison Industrial Complex    Feminism    War    Violence    Patriarchy   Sexism   Sexual abuse   Poverty 

Visual stories can acknowledge how these various oppressed sites might intersect with each other and cause multiple oppressed identities and contradictions.

Mia Mingus is a disabled Korean adoptee from Korea. Her story is as much about disability as it is about feminism, queerness, and growing up on a rural island outside the United states. She emphasizes the rarity of opportunities to reveal stories because of institutionalized normalization. Art educators are invited to submit their own and their students’ works that highlight such invisibility, especially in the world-wide climate of intolerance for difference. In her speech, Mingus explains what she means by acknowledging who we are as complicated identities:

Because this space [acknowledgment] should not be rare—this should be the norm. It should not be that we have to leave mainstream disability spaces (or even alternative disability spaces) to be able to be our full selves and have whole conversation about our own lives. It shouldn’t be that we have to leave racial justice and people of color spaces to be able to fully name and examine how abled supremacy and white supremacy work hand-in-hand to oppress and target disabled people of color and all people of color at large. It shouldn’t be that we have to leave queer and feminist spaces to be able to talk about how gender oppression and ableism have deeply intertwined roots. And why it is just as important to abolish the gender binary, as it is to abolish abled supremacy….I don’t just want technical and logistical access. I don’t just want inclusion, I want liberatory access and access intimacy. I want us to not only be able to be part of spaces, but for us to be able to fully engage in spaces. I don’t just want us to get a seat at someone else’s table, I want us to be able to build something more magnificent than a table, together with our accomplices. I want us to be able to be understood and to be able to take part in principled struggle together—to be able to be human together. Not just placated or politely listened to.

Visual stories should be intertwined with textual narratives, which might take a variety of forms, such as a graphic novel style, an illustrated story, a video, or a digital collage with text.

Submit visual and digital work to Guest Editors:
 Dr. Alice Wexler, North American World Councilor, awex26@gmail.com, and Dr. Mira Kallio-Tavin, European World Councilor Elect, mira.kallio-tavin@aalto.fi. 
Please see Guidelines for authors. 
Authors will work collaboratively with IMAG graphic editors for final publication.

Deadline for visual and digital submissions: February 28, 2019

Authors will be notified by: April 30, 2019

Anticipated publication date: October 2019

Reference:

Mingus, M. (2011, Oct. 13). Disability Intersectionality Summit, Cambridge, MA. Retrieved from: https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com