ABSTRACT

If there is an element that unites the diverse examinations of disability arts, culture, and media that come together in this collection, it is engagement with the way disability experience is enacted, re-enacted, and re-envisaged in art and media practices. In Part I, Kirsty Johnston, Donna McDonald, Janice Rieger, Megan Strickfaden, Sarah Kanake, Laura Misener, Kerri Bodin, and Nancy Quinn investigate problems with the way disability has been represented in the performing arts, the visual arts, and popular media. In Part II, Andy Kempe, Justin Lee, Shawn Goh, Sarah Meisch Lionetto, Joanne Tay, Alice Fox, Simon Hayhoe, Sue Cheesman, Susan Hogan, and Morgan Batch consider engagement with disability in arts outreach and therapy contexts. In Part III, Matthew Reason, Dave Calvert, Tony McCaffrey, Amanda Cachia, Ann Millett-Gallant, and Ann M. Fox analyse contemporary disability arts practices, their aesthetics, and the way audiences read and respond to these practices. In Part IV, Brian Lobel, Jess Thom, Eddie Paterson, Kath Duncan, Sarah Austin, Gerard Goggin, Lachlan MacDowall, Veronica Pardo, Jori De Coster, Petra Kuppers, and Bronwyn Preece present creative, multivocal, multi-perspectival, and at times pointed reflections on working in disability arts, culture, and media practice and working to open up new ideas about the future through disability arts, culture, and media practice. In Part V, Katie Ellis, Alex Lubet, Sarah Whatley, Akhila Vimal C., and Bree Hadley offer accounts of change, adaptation, and the way disabled people take leadership in responding to the trends, technologies, and cultural phenomena around them. The voices and perspectives are 363diverse, the research methods used to develop accounts of disability experience are diverse, and the resultant reflections are diverse. What all the contributors ultimately share, however, is a desire to offer insight into disabled experience and the way disability art practice and scholarship attempts to challenge, change, or recreate expectations about disabled experience across a range of countries, artforms, and contexts.