Affecting, Emoting, and Feeling Disability: Entanglements at the Intersection of Disability Studies and the Sociology of Emotions

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This Research Topic explores theorizing on disability and emotion as one frontier of the Sociology of Emotions as it intersects with Disability Studies. While the Sociology of Emotions has only engaged with disability in limited ways so far, emancipatory knowledge produced about disability within the broad field of Disability Studies (including fields like Mad Studies, Deaf Studies, and Critical Autism Studies) provides a rich archive of emotional first-hand accounts of feelings and affective relations such as joy, pride, shame, disgust, and fear that are often undertheorised. Importantly, the fields of Sociology of Emotions and Disability Studies understand their central topics as primarily social, cultural, political, and ecological phenomena, challenging their conceptualization as natural, individual, or as limited to the realm of the human. By bringing both fields into conversation with one another, this special issue aims to deepen our understanding of emotions, feelings, and affect related to disability.

This Topic welcomes mutual inspiration and cross-fertilization of sociological and disability studies theorizing on emotions and disability, focusing on questions of ontology, epistemology, performativity, and the more-than-human. Questions of ontology ask what disability and disabled emotions, feelings, and affect are. Such questions draw attention to the emotions, feelings, and affect that are triggered by experiences of, encounters with, and discourses about disability. Epistemological questions focus on how we know emotions, feelings, and affect through, with, and about disability. Questions of performativity inquire what emotions, feelings, and affect do, such as tracing the toll of living in a dis/ableist society or the multifaceted ways dis/ableism unfolds via affect, feeling, and emotion. Attending to the material impacts marks emotions, feelings, and affect about, with, on, and through disability as a social, cultural, and political endeavour. Questions of the more-than-human draw attention to the ways emotions, feelings, and affect produce, maintain, alter, or dismantle notions of disability, such as with disabled habitats, infrastructures, animals, and more. This has deep implications for the survival and thriving of disabled people, practices of disability justice, and nuanced engagements with the more-than-human, including disabled animals, ecologies, and environments.

We welcome a range of formats for papers including review articles, conceptual papers, research papers, and contributions that creatively and critically investigate disability and emotion. Interdisciplinary research, co-authored submissions, and submissions from those with lived experience of disability are particularly welcome. Possible themes of accepted papers could include engagement with:

• Ableism/ Disableism;
• Affective politics of disability culture, economies, ecologies;
• Ambivalence;
• Crip, Mad, Neurodivergent, Deaf, Chronic, approaches to affect, emotions, or feelings;
• Disabling emotions (e.g. fear, shame, mourning, pity, inspiration, disgust);
• Disability joy, pride;
• Disability justice;
• Novel epistemological and methodological approaches to knowing emotion, feeling, affect, and disability;
• Cross-fertilizations with feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory, Indigenous thought.

Interested authors are encouraged to submit a manuscript summary of up to 1000 words. This does not need to be the same as the abstract you include with your full article, and is intended to allow the Topic Editors to provide feedback to consider when writing your full article.