Call for Proposals

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Yale 6th Annual Symposium for Accessibility and Disability: Call for Proposals

A Google Doc version of the Call for Proposals is available. 

Crip Translations: Access, Technology, Context

Crip theories remind us that, long before the AI industry raced to monetize multimodal machine learning tools, people with disabilities used hacking and “crip technoscience” (Hamraie and Fritsch, 2019) to turn images or sounds into texts—and vice versa. Blind people have long relied on audio descriptions (AD) that translate visual information into sonic data, while Deaf and hard-of-hearing people have been employing sign language or captioning to translate sonic information into textual or embodied language. If machine learning models transform text into images or video renderings in ways that invoke magic—instantly, cheaply, and mysteriously—AD, alt text, and closed captions have historically required intense human labor.

Bearing these histories in mind, what interventions can crip perspectives from scholars, activists, access workers, and artists offer to current debates on accessibility, technology, and disability identity? The 6th annual Yale Symposium on Accessibility and Disability invites submissions for research papers, panels, and workshops on the theme “Crip Translations.” We seek submissions that focus on how those in and outside the disability community communicate, navigate, and make legible or illegible their and others’ bodies, experiences, and expectations across media, location, and time. Though the analytic of “crip translations” can take on a variety of meanings, we are specifically interested in proposals aligned with our three subthemes: access, technology, and context.
 

Themes

The growing field of critical access studies (Napolitano, Pellino, and Rangan, 2026) unpacks how translations are forever partial, limited, and prone to friction. What is gained in the work of interpreters, transcribers, caretakers, and other access laborers? At a moment when interactions and collisions between disabled and non-disabled groups, and between human and non-human actors, are more possible than ever, can the analytic of translation give us insight into the promises and challenges of access work? Who gets to determine when access work is an act of translation, for which audience, to which ends, and across which perceived divides? Who decides what is translated and what is deemed untranslatable? Do some things always get lost in translation? Can there be joy and solidarity in the recognition of this incommensurability, and what creative modes of making access intimacy allow us to name this tension between exclusion and refusal? 

In reflecting on the labor of access-making, the lure of technology is hard to avoid. Disabled people - students in particular - have become a flashpoint in current fights about artificial intelligence, data, and start-up culture. Proponents of these tools advocate for the increased access that is made possible by them, while opponents push back against the instrumentalization of disability for technologies that are directly responsible for environmental, labor, and bodily debilitation. What does an actual engagement with access work, disability community, and crip translation offer to this conversation? Does technology inherently maximize access? How might we think through the inequities embedded in using, buying, or obtaining these tools? Is automated access technology a tool of translation or one of appropriation? 

Historians of disability have long pointed out that disability differs across contexts - what is disabling in one place or time might not be in another. How might a crip awareness of the contingency of disability identity shape approaches to access work and access technology? What does an attachment to disability identity mean when claims to that identity cannot travel across time and place? What forms of solidarity, care, or community can develop across geographic, racial, class, and media disparities? How do people mediate or experience their own individual bodies in relation to virtual worlds, access frictions, and differing understandings of impairment?

Logistics and Deadlines

We look forward to receiving abstract submissions of up to 300 words answering one or more of these questions. We welcome proposals from all people engaging in disability community, disability studies, and crip theory, whether they be traditional scholars, access doulas, practitioners, designers, artists, etc. 

The 6th annual Yale Symposium on Accessibility and Disability will run March 31-April 2, 2027. Wednesday and Thursday will be fully in-person at our campus in New Haven, Connecticut, and Friday will be fully remote. We hope to offer a hybrid format, but virtual participants on in-person days can only listen in.

Submissions can be made using our Google form by November 1st, 2026 by 5:00 pm EST. The form asks submitters to provide their contact information, session title and abstract, and session format for the organizers’ consideration. 

While formats in the form are restricted to individual presentations of around 20 minutes, pre-formed group panels, or workshops, we welcome ideas for “workshops” beyond standard conference models and would consider creative and artistic demonstrations, teach-ins and local advocacy events, roundtables on pedagogy or professionalization, or facilitated community forums (you can tell us on the form what you are envisioning and how you will carry out your plan in the 90 minutes allocated to you or your group).