CFP: Disability History and the Life Course

Call for Papers: Disability History and the Life Course
edited by Chelsea Chamberlain and Caroline Lieffers

Life stages including the fetal stage, infancy, childhood, adolescence, “reproductive age,” adulthood, retirement, elderliness, and death are crucial ways of experiencing and making sense of both the bodymind and temporality, but they can also be vectors of power. Life stages shape and are shaped by ideas about disability and (ab)normality, as well as other intersecting systems of power, such as racism, colonialism, and compulsory heterosexuality. Recognizing that disability and the life course are culturally and historically mediated, this volume aims to explore entanglements of disability and life stages in different historical contexts. In doing so, we hope that this volume will advance historical and theoretical understandings of both disability and the life course.

Possible approaches include but are not limited to:

• Disability, (inter)dependency, and care at different stages of life
• Infantilization or precocious sexualization of people with disabilities
• “Poster children” and the image of the disabled child
• Disability in historical children’s toys, games, and media
• Understandings of “maturity” and “capacity to consent” in people with disabilities
• Questions about chronological vs. “mental” or “developmental” age
• The idea of “school-age” or “college-age” and expectations about education for people with disabilities
• Puberty/adolescence as understood by/in people with disabilities
• Disability and queer temporalities/futurities
• “Aging out” of government programs, services, and institutions for disabled people
• Anxieties around “reproductive age,” criminality, and disability
• Pregnancy and concerns about fetuses with prospective disabilities
• Parenting with a disability
• Expectations of productive labor during “working years”
• The concept of the “health span” vs. life span
• Disabled people growing old vs. aging into disability
• “Grey Power” and disability activism among seniors
• Disability after death, including commemoration and cemeteries
• Changes in disability and disabled identity/experience over the life course (e.g. post-polio syndrome, re-evaluation of disabled and/or Deaf identities, psychiatric conditions re-understood in old age)

We are interested in diverse geographical, intersectional, and chronological areas of focus. Interdisciplinary submissions are welcome, but abstracts should pay close attention to historical context and take seriously the potential of age, stage of life, or the life course as analytics in disability history. Reflective and/or narrative pieces and co-authored pieces are also welcome.

Please submit an abstract (300-500 words), a CV, and a short bio to the editors (lieffersc@macewan.ca and chelsea.chamberlain@wilkes.edu) by August 15, 2026.

Initial decisions will be issued by approximately October 15, 2026, and manuscripts will be due by April 2027. Final manuscripts are expected to be approximately 8000 words, including citations.