Join us for an international and interdisciplinary conference on the aesthetically, epistemologically, ethically, historically, culturally, and socio-politically incisive topic of critical disability and visual media in the twenty-first century. Scholars from across the humanities discuss neurodiversity, blindness, deafness, and wheelchair-use as they are portrayed, championed, complicated, and subverted in theater, video, film, and the arts.
Topics include:
•Disability as the missing aesthetic category in discussions of site-responsive installation, environmental and assemblage art
•The creative use of access tools as means of reimagining the audiovisual capabilities of the theatrical space
•The theorization of comedy’s neurodivergent aesthetics
•Horror soundscape and D/deaf aesthetics as social critique
•Blindness as a form of worldmaking with AI-generated video that displaces or defamiliarizes the dominance of sightedness
•Face blindness as an entry point into the affective politics of AI and its production of perceptual norms
•Variation and sensory difference as choreographic and epistemic possibilities for reimagining embodiment in a post-AI visual landscape
Conference co-sponsored by: Center for Medical Humanities, Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG), University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), Departments of Art History, Comparative Literature, English, Film and Media Studies, Gender and Sexuality, Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Philosophy and Religious Studies
Image credit: Jesús López Vargas
The conference is open to the public. For queries, contact: Zina Giannopoulou (zgiannop@uci.edu)