To celebrate the 50th issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Professor David Bolt discusses some of the recent work undertaken by the Centre for Culture and Disability Studies (CCDS) alongside the journal published by Liverpool University Press, playing testament to their wider reach engagement across the Higher Education sector and beyond. He selects four articles from the Journal as a sample of the work from the CCDS which are now free to read for one month via the Liverpool University Press website.
Professor David Bolt
As Director of the Centre for Culture and Disability Studies (CCDS) at Liverpool Hope University, I am pleased that the work we commenced in 2009 has proliferated in so many ways. We have hosted a large number of nationally and internationally recognised events, many of which are available on the CCDS YouTube channel. We have published various authored and edited books, detailed on the CCDS website. We are also extremely proud to be welcoming postgraduates into the 10th cohort of our Disability Studies MA, which was launched at a CCDS conference in 2013, attended by eminent professors in the field such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, David T. Mitchell, and Sharon L. Snyder, with whom I am photographed below.
Central to these research activities is the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, published by Liverpool University Press, part of the esteemed Project MUSE collection, and indexed internationally by Scopus. As Editor-in-Chief I am excited to commend the amazing editorial board by announcing the publication of the 50th issue. This special issue, Decades On, revisits the work of the authors and editors of a dozen key books in the field, more than 20 years on from their groundbreaking publications between 1995 and 2002.
In this spirit of celebration I have selected, for a month of free access, a sample of the CCDS work that has been published in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies:
- Ria Cheyne, Disability Studies Reads the Romance, JLCDS 7.1 (2013): 37-52.
- Owen Barden, Demanding Money with Menaces: Fear and Loathing in the Archipelago of Confinement, JLCDS 14.1 (2020): 91–108.
- Erin Pritchard, “She Finds People Like You Hilarious!”: Why Do We Laugh at People with Dwarfism?, JLCDS 15.4 (2021): 455–470.
- Claire Penketh, Historicizing an Ocularnormative Future for Art Education, JLCDS 16.1 (2022): 5–22.
These articles are all by Core Members of the CCDS who have also guest edited special issues of the journal. What is more, Dr Barden and Dr Penketh are Comments Editor and Book Reviews Editor, respectively.
As ever I must thank everyone involved in sustaining and progressing this journal. It is my sincere belief that the profoundly informed critical engagement with cultural representations slowly but surely changes social attitudes to disability.
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