{"id":1602,"date":"2018-07-23T13:00:41","date_gmt":"2018-07-23T12:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/?p=1602"},"modified":"2018-07-20T16:01:35","modified_gmt":"2018-07-20T15:01:35","slug":"cfp-metaphoric-stammers-and-embodied-speakers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/2018\/07\/23\/cfp-metaphoric-stammers-and-embodied-speakers\/","title":{"rendered":"CFP: Metaphoric Stammers and Embodied Speakers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Metaphoric Stammers and Embodied Speakers: Expanding the Borders of Dysfluency Studies<\/strong>, Humanities Institute, University College Dublin, 12 October, 2018.<\/p>\n

Extended deadline for submissions: 30 July 2018.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Keynote speaker: Chris Eagle<\/a>, Emory University, Centre for the Study of Human Health <\/strong>(Dysfluencies: On Speech Disorders in Modern Literature<\/em><\/a>, 2014; Talking Normal: Literature, Speech Disorders, and Disability<\/em><\/a>, ed. 2013)<\/p>\n

The conference will explore the embodied experience and cultural construction of stammering from the collaborative perspectives of literary\/cultural analysis, speech therapy and neurological research. The aim of the conference is to develop an interface between literary, cultural and clinical practice in the area of speech \u2018disorders\u2019, generating new forms of communication and exchange across these fields.<\/p>\n

Despite the centrality of literary\/cultural studies to the emergence of Dysfluency Studies (Marc Shell, Stutter<\/em> 2005; Chris Eagle Dysfluencies <\/em>2014), the 2017 Oxford Dysfluency Conference had no humanities-based papers. This conference addresses this imbalance, bringing cultural analysis into genuine exchange with scientific and therapeutic practice, and necessarily negotiating the tension between a medically-inflected model of \u2018recovery\u2019 and an emergent challenge to cultural constructions of \u2018normal\u2019 speech. Dysfluency is explored less as a \u2018disorder\u2019 to be treated, than a form of communication that highlights the intricate relationship between speaking and being heard, vocal agency and cultural reception.<\/p>\n

Literary culture has provided a rich and complex store of information about how stammering has been represented and interpreted at different historical junctures, within diverse cultural contexts and in relation to the variables of gender, class and ethnicity. The stammer has also been harnessed as a metaphor for how literary language works, how it operates at the limits of its expressive resources, occupying a territory that circles the paradoxical power of the ineffable. Recent work in the humanities, however, has signalled the need to balance such metaphorical readings with a sense of the corporeal experience of dysfluency, what Jay Dolmage has called \u2018the embodied struggle for expression\u2019 (Disability Rhetoric<\/em> 2014). This renewed focus on embodiment invites diverse, interdisciplinary approaches that serve to accentuate the embodied experience of stammering in its neurological, therapeutic and cultural forms.<\/p>\n

This conference is generously supported by the Humanities Institute, UCD College of Arts and Humanities, and UCD Seed Funding Scheme<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Proposals are welcomed for twenty-minute papers in (but not limited to) the following areas:<\/p>\n