Call for essays: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Shilpaa Anand* <[email protected]> Date: Tuesday, 6 June 2017 Subject: {Disability Studies India} Call for Contributions: Cafe Dissensus September 2017, 'Narrating Care' To: "[email protected]" < [email protected]>
*Issue 39: September 2017: **Narrating Care: Disability and Interdependence in the Indian Context [Last date for submission: 20 July, 2017; Date of publication: 15 September, 2017]* *Guest-Editors:* Dr. Nandini Ghosh, IDSK & Dr. Shilpaa Anand, MANUU *Concept Note: *Care-giving and care-receiving are complex experiences that are only beginning to draw the attention of scholars and researchers working in the fields of social medicine, disability studies and medical anthropology. Care-giving, however, has appropriately been recognized as an important theme of research by the women’s studies discourse, focusing primarily on women as care-givers in contexts where care-giving becomes invisible or is considered part of traditional gendered roles. What has remained relatively unfamiliar, so also unknown, is the epistemic perspective of recipients of care. The concept of care has, in the last few decades, been problematized as ‘taking responsibility for’ people, who are assumed to need caring as they are unable to exert choice and/or control. Scholars have questioned the emphasis on independence and choice, for many persons with disabilities for whom both cognitive function as well as physical abilities may be highly circumscribed. While care highlights the concept of dependency, it also points to power dynamics within the carer-cared relationship. Care recipients are assumed to be subordinate to the caregiver, as s/he cannot perform daily activities for her/himself and that, as a result, makes the person become dependent on the caregiver. The risk of losing one’s human (and civil) rights has remained higher for those requiring greater levels of care, given that economic security, safety and dignity are threatened when individuals find themselves increasingly dependent on others (as many people with disabilities do) for personal care and formal as well as informal decision-making. ‘Interdependence’, consequently, has emerged as a key concept. It has become significant to recognize that, for disabled people independence is not so much about self-sufficiency as it is about equity, empowerment, choice, and control over their own lives. Defining care as an interdependent relationship also enables us to consider the vulnerabilities of the care-giver whose role may be devalued or dominated in certain contexts. Focusing on interdependence additionally animates reflections on mutually affective bonds that connect, knot, fasten, embrace, or fetter two people simultaneously. Given that, in the Indian context, notions of care are subsumed within familial and communitarian ethics rather than in institutionalized settings, questions of care-giving and receiving require greater and closer examination. The paradoxes of such relationships become more complicated when we consider the intersection of multiple identities. Shared as well as normative understandings of caste rules, religious and cultural practices shape and govern the everydayness of care practices. In India, the family emerges as the primary site for not only care but also management of impairment. In such a context, caring and receiving care become conflicting experiences located at the cusps of in enabling/constraining relationships, often crafted by, love/duty curiously unaware of agency/dependence. The proposed issue of *Café Dissensus* invites narratives of care from receivers and givers in the form of written and graphic texts, photo essays as well as video and audio entries. We are interested in descriptions that give primacy to receivers of care while also not making invisible experiences of care givers. Your entries may be of 1500 words in length (in case of written entries) and emailed to Nandini Ghosh (*[email protected] <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','[email protected]');>*) or Shilpaa Anand (*[email protected] <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','[email protected]');>*) by 20 July 2017. Submission of entries must include a brief bio-note of the author/artist in about 150 words. -- Shilpaa Anand Assistant Professor, Department of English Convener, Committee for Cell for Persons with Disabilities Maulana Azad National Urdu University Hyderabad 500 032. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Disability Studies India" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected] <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','disability-studies-india%[email protected]');> . 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