[Air-L] CFP: Diabetes on Display

[Heather Walker]

 *Please pardon cross-posting*

Dear colleagues,

This email is coming to you from Heather Walker, Ph.D. and Bianca Frazer,
Ph.D. and we are writing to invite you to submit a chapter proposal for a
new volume we are co-editing on diabetes. We are disability studies
scholars with emphasis in diabetes. Combined, we have training in both the
humanities and social sciences. The edited volume we are putting together
is called: *Diabetes on Display: Complicating Social, Political, and
Cultural Representations of Diabetes*. Below is a copy of the call for
proposals (CFP). If you have any questions, you can reach out to us at
bianca.frazer at colorado.edu and heather.walker at hsc.utah.edu.

Please feel free to circulate this CFP to fellow scholars and advocates. It
is an open call.

With gratitude,

Heather Walker, Ph.D. & Bianca Frazer, Ph.D.

*CFP: Diabetes on Display: Complicating Social, Political, and Cultural
Representations of Diabetes*

Call for Chapter Proposals

Edited by Bianca C. Frazer and Heather R. Walker


We seek essays 3000-6000 words in length for inclusion in a book to be
submitted to The University of Michigan Press series titled Corporealities:
Discourses of Disability. The series editor has expressed interest in the
project which will focus on social, political, and cultural representations
of diabetes. We invite works that are theoretical, analytical, and/or
empirical.

In the U.S., diabetes has many social and cultural representations -from a
joke alluding to someone with a “poor lifestyle” to an “epidemic” that
needs to be resolved. The great majority of popularized portrayals are
stigmatizing to populations with diabetes - some more than others.


 Stigma occurs in a social context where a person is understood by others
to have “undesired differentness”’ (Goffman, 1963, p. 5). That *undesired
differentness* can be internalized or contested by those ascribed it as an
identifier. We approach discourses of diabetes representation through the
lens of the abject, because “people’s knowledge about diabetes is filtered
through different modes of experience- individual, familial, community,
cultural” (Bock, 2015, p. 135). This collection seeks to answer three
central questions: What are the social, political, and cultural
representations of diabetes? How do these portrayals interact with the
broader social environment? How do diverse groups of people touched by
diabetes respond to various representations? This volume provides a robust
analysis of representations of diabetes with the intent to deconstruct both
mundane and insidious messages about it in cultural, political, and social
spaces.


The purpose of this book is two-fold: 1) to serve as an intervention in the
humanities and social sciences by offering a critical perspective on
social, cultural, and political representations of diabetes; and 2) to
establish diabetes as a site of inquiry in the field of critical disability
studies where it has been largely overlooked.


Critical disability studies has yet to consider representations of
diabetes, while health-related fields typically view intervention on
diabetes at the individual management and prevention level. The editors of
this collection are guided by Tobin Siebers’ (2017) theory of complex
embodiment as a starting point to engage the social and cultural dynamics
of diabetes in U.S. culture. Complex embodiment views “the economy between
social representations and the body not as unidirectional as in the social
model, or nonexistent as in the medical model, but as reciprocal” (p. 284).
Through this book project we seek to examine such spaces of reciprocity in
the midst of contemporary issues like the insulin crisis to analyze the
complexities of self-care, embodied willpower, and stories that permeate
media about diabetes. Jeffrey A. Bennett’s (2019) account of diabetes in
the public imagination furthered this conversation while the escalation of
the insulin crisis has generated self-representation and social activism by
people with diabetes. In this shifting landscape of activism diabetes is
being politicized - meaning representations of diabetes need to be changed.
A wider population of people with diabetes are coming into empowered
consciousness and engaging in beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors described
by Disability Studies scholar Alison Kafer’s political-relational model of
disability (Kafer, 2013).


Monographs such as *Making the Mexican Diabetic* (2011), *Sugar and
Tension: Diabetes and Gender in Modern India* (2018), and *Traveling with
Sugar* (2019) analyze diabetes in specific contexts. To further this
burgeoning research, this collection brings together scholars from
disparate fields to establish how diabetes is conceptualized in the face of
ableism, racism, neoliberalism, and health care inequity. While medical
anthropology is doing some of this research, critical disability studies
offers unique tools to unpack the historical and contemporary cultural
narratives around diabetes.

The book will be organized into a three-part intervention. We invite
chapters that intervene at the cultural, political, and social levels.
Though not constrained to this list, we invite chapter proposals that
explore or respond to topics like the following:

·  Representations of diabetes in theater and performance

·  Representations of in television and film

·  Representations of complications and diabetes

·  Representations of diabetes in the visual arts

·  Representations of diabetes in memoir, poetry and creative writing

·  Representations of diabetes in social media

·  Representation of diabetes technology or through technology

·  Historical perspectives of diabetes

·  Contemporary perspectives of diabetes (e.g. the insulin crisis)

·  Fictions, stories, and memoirs of diabetes

·  U.S. perspectives on cultures of diabetes

·  Intersections of race, class, disability, gender and diabetes

·  Cyborg experiences and diabetes

·  Diabetes and celebrity

·  Diabetes justice

·  Diabetes activism and advocacy

·  Diabetes Social Movements

·  Morality and diabetes

·  Diabetes and sickness

·  Non-Linear/Crip time and diabetes

·  Cripping diabetes

·  Queering diabetes

·  Sexuality and diabetes

·  Music and diabetes


The selected chapters will be between 3,000-6,000 words. Initial chapter
proposals should be no more than 250 words and use APA format. Proposals
and a short author bio should be submitted via this google form:
https://forms.gle/9z8fLwD5nMrmXwbP7 by March 1st at 12pm CT-USA. The full
book proposal will be submitted in April 2020 to University of Michigan
Corporealities, who has already expressed an interest in relation to the
Discourses of Disability series.



*Timeline:*

CFP: Early January

Proposal submission Due: February 15th

Notification of selected chapters: March 15th

Book proposal submitted: April 15th

Full chapters Due: September 15th

Peer Reviews Due: November 15th

Final chapters Due: January 15th

Manuscript to Publisher: February 15th



*References*:

Bennett, J.A. (2019). *Managing Diabetes: The Cultural Politics of
Disease. *New York, NY: NYU Press.

Bock, S. (2015). “Grappling to Think Clearly”: Vernacular Theorizing in
Robbie McCauley’s *Sugar*. *Journal of Medical Humanities, 36*(2), 127-139.

Goffman, E. (1963). *Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity*.
New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Kafer, A. (2013). *Feminist, Queer, Crip*. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press.

Montoya, M. (2011). *Making the Mexican Diabetic: Race, Science, and the
Genetics of inequality*. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Moran-Thomas, Amy. (2019). *Traveling with Sugar.* Oakland, CA: University
of California Press.

Siebers, T. (2017). Disability and the Theory of Complex Embodiment: For
Identity Politics in a New Register. In L.J. Davis (Ed.), *The Disability
Studies Reader* (313-331). New York, NY: Routledge.

Weaver, L.J. (2018). Sugar and Tension: Diabetes and Gender in Modern
India. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Siebers, T. (2017). Disability and the Theory of Complex Embodiment: For
Identity Politics in a New Register. In L.J. Davis (Ed.), *The Disability
Studies Reader* (313-331). New York, NY: Routledge.



Weaver, L.J. (2018). Sugar and Tension: Diabetes and Gender in Modern
India. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.



-- 
*Heather Walker (Gabel), Ph.D.*
Disability Studies
College of Applied Health Sciences
University of Illinois, Chicago
heather.walker at hsc.utah.edu : 530.755.7673
127 S. 500 E, Suite 620N
Salt Lake City UT 84102