The Disability Coalition Network
Institutions often marginalize people with disabilities by conceiving of disability as an individual property—or problem even—that does not concern our communities at large. In an effort to foster forms of connection that extend beyond this atomized or isolated notion of the individual, the MLA’s Committee on Disability Issues (CDI) has formed the Disability Coalition Network (DCN).
The DCN promotes disability issues as matters of wider social concern by bringing together participants representing a range of different institutions and career stages for pointed conversations about disability rights, advocacy, and justice. Participants in the network will be placed into small, collaborative groups that will meet with some regularity over Zoom or another similar platform. The following discussion threads represent some topics that groups may wish to explore:
- Accessibility: how best to advocate for better access at participants’ home institutions and within the fields represented by the MLA more generally
- Research: how to start or continue a research program within disability studies
- Pedagogy: how to inform your teaching practices with disability studies principles and/or how to build disability studies curricula
- Professional Development: how disability relates to the “profession” as it is currently constructed and ways of navigating the job market, grants and funding, the tenure track, etc.
- Intersections: how disability intersects with other identities and the political and social movements that have grown around them
- Activism: how academic study can be productively paired with disability activism
- COVID: how COVID-19 is changing the academy and the accommodations we are used to seeing there
The DCN is open to any MLA member with an interest in disability advocacy. “Disability” here is intended to be a broadly construed category.
The CDI will recommend further topics of discussion and a basic calendar for remote meetings, but the specific nature of the conversation and the frequency of meetings will be left up to the individual groups. The cycles for coalition groups will last one full year, beginning after the registration period (January 6 – February 18) and culminating with in-person meeting opportunities at the following year’s annual MLA Convention.
To participate in the DCN, please fill out this form.