Call for Book Reviews: PUBLIC 66: Ability, Disability & Digital Publishing

PUBLIC: Art | Culture | Ideas is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal that explores the intersection of visual cultures and critical studies. Since 1988, it has served as an intellectual and creative forum that focuses on the intersections of aesthetic, theoretical, and critical issues. In each themed issue, PUBLIC encourages a broad range of dialogue by bringing together artists, theorists, curators, philosophers, creative writers, and historians.

We are currently seeking submissions for reviews of books and media (exhibitions and zines, amongst other forms) for PUBLIC 66: Ability, Disability & Digital Publishing. Reviews should relate to media addressing the themes of the special issue – a list of possible texts for review are included after the issue description below. If you are interested in authoring a review (guidelines also below) please send an email to publicbookreviews@gmail.com including a brief biography and the title of the proposed work for review. If you are proposing a review of a non-academic book, please include a short description of the work and its relation to the special issue themes. The deadline for first-drafts would be April 1, 2022. Expressions of interest should be submitted by February 7, 2022.

For further information on the journal, visit www.publicjournal.ca.

PUBLIC 66: Ability, Disability & Digital Publishing
Edited by Mary Bunch, Julia Chan and Devon Healey
Issue available Fall 2022
Book Reviews Deadline: April 1, 2022

The theme of this issue of PUBLIC is accessibility and disability in the context of both traditional publishing and non-traditional, and emergent ways to publish art and storytelling such as virtual and augmented reality. The editors are guided by a critical-disability approach that questions normative assumptions about human embodiment, sensory capacities, affective experience, and cognition.

Disability, in this understanding, is an essential aspect of human variability with social and cultural dimensions, rather than a deficit to be supplemented or fixed. As a form of social exclusion, disability is a political concern. Disability is also a generative resource that makes cultural and material contributions to the world. This journal issue brings together scholars, artists and practitioners whose work speaks to these critical approaches to disability and publishing. Some contributors address state of the art solutions in accessible media, design, and creation that aim to ameliorate disabling forms of exclusion in the realm of publishing. Others engage with aesthetic and epistemological innovation at intersections of access, human difference, and storytelling.

The issue includes works by presenters at PostScript, the online series organized by Public Access on disability, accessibility, and digital publishing in October 2020. This issue will also include a special digital component that experiments with accessibility and digital forms of storytelling that fall outside of the bounds of traditional publishing.

Reviews Guidelines

Reviews should be 1000-1300 words in length. Book and media reviews should be in line with particular issue thematics and should meet PUBLIC’s mandate involving contemporary art, critical theory, media studies, and the public sphere. The reviews should be timely: generally, books (or other media) for review should have been published no more than 1 year previous to the date of publication in PUBLIC. Consult with the Book Reviews Editors for exceptions.

Reviewers should be objective and not embroiled in some conflict of interest with the subject being reviewed. To get a sense of the style and tone, read the reviews PUBLIC has already published. Two problems to avoid are reviews that are either all description (no analysis) or all commentary (ungrounded). Generally, reviews will cover the book/media form’s context and its stated aims, provide a description of its contents, articulate the author’s analysis and commentary, and conclude on the ramifications and implications of the work. A substantive review will address all 5 of these areas.

Books for review include (but are not limited to):

Beljaars, Diana. 2022. Compulsive Body Spaces. 1st ed. London: Routledge.

Ben-Moshe, Liat. 2020. Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Carlson, Licia, and Matthew C. Murray, eds. 2021. Defining the Boundaries of Disability: Critical Perspectives. Routledge Advances in Disability Studies. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge.

Colangelo, Jeremy. 2021. Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Dickel, Simon. 2022. Embodying Difference: Critical Phenomenology and Narratives of Disability, Race, and Sexuality. New York: Springer.

Dunn, Mary. 2022. Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Healey, Devon. 2021. Dramatizing Blindness: Disability Studies as Critical Creative Narrative. New York: Springer.

Joshua, Essaka. 2020. Physical Disability in British Romantic Literature. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kafai, Shayda. 2021. Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice & Art Activism of Sins Invalid. Chino, CA: Arsenal Pulp Press.

López, Manuel Barberá. 2021. Making the Best of a Bad Job: Representations of Disability, Gender and Old Age in the Novels of Samuel Beckett. Masculinity Studies, vol. 11. New York: Peter Lang.

McCarthy, Grace. 2021. Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare. Routledge Studies in Literature and Health Humanities. New York: Routledge.

Mintz, Susannah B. 2020. The Disabled Detective: Sleuthing Disability in Contemporary Crime Fiction. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Odato, James M. 2021. This Brain Had a Mouth: Lucy Gwin and the Voice of Disability Nation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Okuyama, Yoshiko. 2021. Reframing Disability in Manga. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

St. Pierre, Joshua. 2022. Cheap Talk: Disability and the Politics of Communication. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Ware, Linda. 2020. Critical Readings in Interdisciplinary Disability Studies (Dis)Assemblages. New York: Springer.