Call for Submissions: JDH Special Issue 'Designing for Disability Futures'

Journal of Design History

27 September 2024

Call for Papers: Journal of Design History, 'Designing for Disability Futures'
Guest editors: Ignacio G. Galán and David Serlin

What is the future of design for people with disabilities? What kinds of futures have been imagined for people with disabilities in previous generations? Although there are many ways to answer these provocations, this special issue of the Journal of Design History addresses them through a broad exploration of the intersections between design and disability, understood as a framework of diverse epistemes, cultures, and politics that contain multiple and often contradictory futures. In exploring these intersections, this special issue aims to expand how we historicize designed artifacts and environments and the methodologies through which we approach them.

Scholars of disability history and design historians such as Jos Boys, David Gissen, Elizabeth Guffey, Aimi Hamraie, Wanda Katja Liebermann, Barbara Penner, Jaipreet Virdi, and Bess Williamson have explored how specific designs have shaped the myriad histories of disability, both those in distant pasts and those that continue to emerge, and how design reflects the embodied experiences of diverse body-minds. They have discussed the manifold ways in which design has been involved in the production of disability and its segregation or eradication–from asylum architecture to eugenics testing. And they have explored the ways in which the design for prosthetic limbs, office furniture, and classroom environments has enabled disabled individuals and communities to thrive, often against expectations of integration in normative life frameworks.

We seek scholarship that contributes to this literature with a particular focus on the ways in which design has critically intervened in shaping distinct futures for disabled individuals and communities. We are interested in methodological interventions in the writing of design history that are either inflected by the critical lens of disability studies or are the direct result of the distinct aesthetic and sensory experiences of diverse body-minds. Contributions might discuss disability futures by examining how design mediates different bodily experiences and relationships and negotiates social norms and forms of assembly. We hope that contributing authors might engage with contemporary concerns with themes such as futurity, sustainability, crip time and genealogies, the intersections of power and access, and the role of imagination, all of which are pertinent for design and disability histories past and future.

We hope to foster scholarship that expands canonical histories of design and simultaneously challenges monolithic understandings of disability. Questioning the assumptions that have grounded disability histories that are primarily centered in the West/Global North, we seek to recover or illuminate diverse understandings and genealogies of impairment, assistance, rehabilitation, aesthetics, and experience, and we are interested in pieces considering all time periods, geographies, and design media.

Guest editors are available for inquiries, and 500-word abstracts can be sent to them for feedback before December 1, 2024 (igalan@barnard.edu; dserlin@ucsd.edu). By December 15, 2024 authors will be notified whether they should develop a full draft of their submission.

The due date for solicited, complete contributions for peer review is May 1, 2025, through the JDH submission platform. Authors should clearly label their submissions as being for the ‘Designing for Disability Futures’ special issue. Authors are encouraged to follow as closely as possible the guidelines provided by the JDH (including the section “Guidelines on specific papers”).