Call for Papers IFTR 2025 Performance and Disability Working Group

Call for Papers: Disability and Performance Working Group

IFTR 2025 | 9 – 13 June 2025 

Online and in-person participation in Cologne, Germany

The Performance and Disability Working Group invites submissions for the 2025 IFTR Conference in Cologne. Inspired by this year’s theme of Carnival and its carnivalesque dimensions—Ekstasis, Subversion, and Metamorphosis—our working group seeks to consider how disability intersects with, challenges, and transforms the ideas and practices of the carnivalesque.

Historically, carnival has served as a public space that simultaneously celebrates bodily differences and marginalizes non-normative bodies. Its transgressive potential offers a powerful framework for disabled individuals to challenge normative structures and claim public space through performance. This raises critical questions: What does it mean to embody and subvert the carnivalesque as a disabled individual in public performance? How might the sensory and somatic dimensions of public performance serve as sites for crip resistance, joy, and community-making?

We invite papers, provocations, and creative presentations from scholars, artists, and practitioners. Contributions are encouraged to critically engage with disability and performance through the thematic lenses of public performance, particularly its liminal, paradoxical, and embodied nature. How does the carnivalesque—marked by excess, transformation, and celebration—interact with the politics of access, visibility, and crip aesthetics? How might the carnivalesque support, complicate, or undermine efforts to reimagine accessibility, inclusion, and the politics of performance?

Possible Themes and Topics:

● Subversion and Crip Metamorphosis: How does the concept of crip metamorphosis reimagine transformation in performance, moving beyond narratives of cure or overcoming to center disabled embodiment as a site of creativity, power, and resistance?

● Cripping Ekstasis: What does it mean for disabled bodies to “exceed” or experience ekstasis in (carnival) performance?

● Unmasking: How do the concept and practice of unmasking from Disability Studies unravel the power dynamic in public performance? How do performances by disabled artists use masquerade or transformation to explore themes of identity, stigma, or radical visibility? 

● Queering and Cripping Carnival: Intersections of queerness and disability in the carnivalesque, from aesthetics to politics.

● Senses and Sensory Access: How does the sensory intensity of performance create opportunities to rethink access and neurodiversity in performance? What might a relaxed performance or sensory-friendly performance version of carnival look like?

● Mobility: How do disabled people move through and within public performances, and how are these movements represented, negotiated, or reimagined? In what ways do these performances challenge or uphold normative assumptions about mobility, access, and the embodied experiences of disability?

● Spatial Making: How do disabled bodies participate in and shape the spatial making of public performance? In what ways do these spaces accommodate, exclude, or transform in response to the presence of disabled performers and spectators?

● Histories of Disability and Its Subversion: The historical engagement of disability in public performance traditions across cultures and its subversion.

Submission Details:

Abstracts of up to 300 words should be submitted via the IFTR submission portal by 15 January 2025. Acceptance of abstract submission requires IFTR membership and conference registration through the IFTR Cambridge Core website at https://iftr.org   

After submitting your 300-word abstract through IFTR, please also email a copy to the co-convenors, Tony and Hui (tony.mccaffrey@ara.ac.nz,  hepng@gradcenter.cuny.edu), to indicate whether you plan to present in person or online through Zoom by 15 January 2025.