Contributors

James Casey

has taught courses on film, media and literature, and critical/cultural disability studies. He has worked as an equality awareness consultant, an editor, and as a reviewer for several international journals. He holds a BA in English and Philosophy, an MA in Film Studies, and a PhD from the National University of Ireland, Galway. His research focuses on how films represent and construct disability and impairments and how these function in the adaptation process. A disabled activist, he is currently working with Independent Living Movement Ireland, the only rights-based Disabled People’s Organization in the Republic of Ireland.

Len Collin

is a screenwriter, director, and academic with a strong interest in disability advocacy and disability studies. As director of the film Sanctuary, Collin has travelled the world and picked up a number of film awards including a Best Director award at the prestigious Newport Beach International Film Festival. His television credits as a screenwriter are extensive and include: Ultimate Force, London’s Burning, Eastenders, and The Bill. Currently he is a senior Lecturer on the Film and Television Production course at Northumbria University in Newcastle where he teaches screenwriting.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

is a disability justice and culture thought leader, bioethicist, teacher, and humanities scholar. Her 2016 editorial, “Becoming Disabled,” was the inaugural article in the ongoing weekly series in the New York Times about disability by people living with disabilities. She is a professor of English and bioethics at Emory University, where she teaches disability studies, bioethics, American literature and culture, and feminist theory. Her work develops the field of Critical Disability Studies in the health humanities to bring forward disability access, inclusion, and identity to a broad range of institutions and communities. She is co-editor of About Us: Essays from the New York Times about Disability by People with Disabilities (2019) and the author of Staring: How We Look (2009) and several other books. Her current project is Embracing Our Humanity: A Bioethics of Disability and Health.

Dan Goodley

is Professor of Disability Studies and Education at the University of Sheffield, UK, and co-director the interdisciplinary research centre iHuman. He has written a number of publications in the field of Critical Disability Studies including Dis/ability Studies (Routledge, 2014) and Disability Studies (second edition, Sage, 2016). He is a proud father to young women, a Sleaford Mods fan, and a long suffering supporter of Nottingham Forest Football Club (who were the best team in Europe forty years ago).

Agnieszka Izdebska

is Associate Professor at the Department of Literary Theory in the Institute of Contemporary Culture, University of Łódź, Poland. She is the author of Forma, ciało i brzemię imperium. O prozie Władysława L. Terleckiego [The Form, Body and Burden of the Empire. Władysław L. Terlecki’s Prose] (2010). Her research interests include: the theory of novel (e.g. historical novel), gender studies, the evolution of the gothic convention, the relations between photography and narrative/language, and popular literature (especially crime fiction).

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska

is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (Poland). Her research interests include alternative theatre, drama by women, theories of trauma and hauntology, as well as disability drama. She is the author of Hauntology and Intertextuality in Contemporary British Drama by Women Playwrights (2013), and co-editor of themed issues of Theoria et Historia Scientiarum (Spectrality and Cognition: Haunted Cultures, Ghostly Communications) (2017) and AVANT. Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies (Haunted Cultures/Haunting Cultures, 2017). She is the Editor-in-Chief of the doctoral students’ academic journal Currents: A Journal of Young English Philology Thought and Review.

Dorota Krzemińska

is Assistant Professor at the Department of Special Education, University of Gdańsk, Poland. Her academic interests oscillate around diverse experiences of disability and, in particular, intellectual disability. In her research, Dorota explores the subjective perceptions of the world of people with ID and examines crucial aspects of their individual and collective lives. She has written a number of articles and three books in Polish: Język i dyskurs codzienny osób z niepełnosprawnością intelektualną [Everyday Language and Discourse of People with Intellectual Disability] (2012), Być parą z niepełnosprawnością intelektualną. Studium mikroetnograficzne w kontekście teorii postkolonialnej Homiego K. Bhabhy [Being a Couple with Intellectual Disability. A Microetnographic Study in the Context of Homi K. Bhabha’s Postcolonial Theory] (2019), and, co-authored by Iwona Lindyberg, Wokół dorosłości z niepełnosprawnością intelektualną. Teksty rozproszone [Adulthood of People with Intellectual Disability. Miscellaneuous Texts] (2012).

Marek Mackiewicz-Ziccardi

is a disabled man who holds a BA in English Philology (State School of Higher Education in Biała Podlaska, Poland) and an MA in Psychology and Education from the University of Sheffield, UK. Before deserting academia, he used to work on a funded PhD project on the cultural representations of disabled people’s sexuality. He is happily married to Caterina – a fellow disabled person – and lives with her and several cats in Lincoln, UK, while looking for employment that would be less likely to feed his raging perfectionism.

David T. Mitchell

is a scholar, editor, history and film exhibition curator, and filmmaker in the field of disability studies. His books include the monographs: Narrative Prosthesis: Discourses of Disability (2000); Cultural Locations of Disability (2005); The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (2015); and the collections The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (1997); A History of Disability in Primary Sources, volume 5 of The Encyclopedia of Disability; The Matter of Disability (2019). He curated The Chicago Disability History Exhibit (Vietnam Veterans Memorial Museum, 2006) and assembled the programmes for the Screening Disability Film Festival (Chicago, 2006) as well as the DisArt Independent Film Festival (Grand Rapids, MI, 2015). His four award-winning films include Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back (1995), A World without Bodies (2002), Self Preservation: The Art of Riva Lehrer (1995), and Disability Takes on the Arts (1996). He is currently working on a new book and feature-length documentary film on disability and the Holocaust tentatively titled Disposable Humanity.

Katarzyna Ojrzyńska

is Assistant Professor at the Department of English Studies in Drama, Theatre, and Film, University of Łódź, Poland. Her research interests focus on cultural disability studies, performance studies, and Irish studies. She is the author of “Dancing as if language no longer existed”: Dance in Contemporary Irish Drama (Reimagining Ireland 61, Peter Lang, 2015). Katarzyna has been promoting cultural disability studies in Poland in collaboration with the Theatre 21 Foundation and the Downtown Centre of Inclusive Art. She has translated Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s book on staring into Polish (2020).

Christian O’Reilly

is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter based in Galway, Ireland. Christian’s plays include: It Just Came Out (Druid Debut Series, 2001), The Good Father (Druid, 2002), Is It about Sex? (Rough Magic, 2007), Here We Are Again Still (Decadent, 2009), Sanctuary (Blue Teapot, 2012), and Chapatti (Northlight/Galway International Arts Festival, 2014). His screen credits include Inside I’m Dancing, a feature film based on his original story (2004). Christian’s screen adaptation of his play Sanctuary won the award for Best First Irish Feature at the 2016 Galway Film Fleadh. Its ensemble cast of actors with intellectual disabilities from Blue Teapot Theatre Company was awarded the Michael Dwyer Discovery Award by the Dublin Critics Circle at the 2017 Dublin Audi International Film Festival.

Jolanta Rzeźnicka-Krupa

is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Gdańsk, Poland. Her research interests cover: subjectivity and identity in the contemporary world, the social construction of disability and its cultural and post-scientific contexts, the human body in the contemporary humanities, as well as art and (dis)ability. She has published extensively in the fields of the ethnography of communication and disability studies. Her academic output includes three books in Polish: Komunikacja, edukacja, społeczeństwo. O dyskursie dzieci z niepełnosprawnością intelektualną [Communication, Education, and Society. The Discourse of Children with Intellectual Disability] (2007), Niepełnosprawność i świat społeczny. Szkice Metodologiczne [Disability and the Social World. Methodological Sketches] (2009), Społeczne ontologie niepełnosprawności [Social Ontologies of Disability] (2019), and several dozen articles on educational, social, cultural, and philosophical aspects of disability.

Murray K. Simpson

is a Reader in the School of Education and Social Work, University of Dundee (UK). Murray has written extensively on the history of the concept of intellectual disability, including a monograph, Modernity and the Appearance of Idiocy (2014). His current work includes a book in preparation on cinema and corporeal variance, disability, and ageing, and a Hegelian analysis of the governance of social work. He is co-editor, with Dr Alison Wilde, of the book series on Disability, Media, Culture with Peter Lang.

Wiktoria Siedlecka-Dorosz

specializes in theatre studies and art therapy. She graduated from the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute in Warsaw and the Maria Grzegorzewska University in Warsaw. She worked at the Department of Pedagogy of the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute and as the director of the Korczak Montessori School in Warsaw. Wiktoria Siedlecka-Dorosz has ran numerous workshops at schools and therapy and care centres. She teaches art therapy courses at the Academy of Special Education in Warsaw and has for many years been collaborating with Warsaw’s Theatre 21.

Sharon L. Snyder’s

career includes a range of work as an author, artist, activist, and filmmaker. Her books include Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2000); Cultural Locations of Disability (2006); and The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (2015). She has also edited 3 collections The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (1997); A History of Disability in Primary Sources, volume 5 of The Encyclopedia of Disability; The Matter of Disability (2019) as well as authored more than thirty-five journal articles and chapters. She has curated a museum exhibit on disability history at the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial Museum, curated disability film and arts programming for festivals and conferences, and created four award-winning documentary films: Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back (1995), A World without Bodies (2002), Self Preservation: The Art of Riva Lehrer (2005), and Disability Takes on the Arts (2006).

Małgorzata Sugiera

is Full Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and the Head of Department of Performativity Studies. She has published twelve single-authored books in Polish, the most recent of which are: Nieludzie. Donosy ze sztucznych natur [Non-humans. Reports from Non-natural Natures] (2015), W pułapce przeciwieństw. Ideologie tożsamości [In the Trap of Opposites. Ideologies of Identity] (co-authored by Mateusz Borowski, 2012), and Sztuczne natury. Performanse technonauki i sztuki [Artificial Natures: Performances of Technoscience and Arts] (2017). She co-edited volumes in English and German, and lectured and ran seminars at universities in Germany, France, Switzerland, and Brazil. Her main research fields are theories of performativity, and cultural and decolonial studies. She has translated a number of academic books and theatre plays into Polish.

Maria Tsakiri

is a Lecturer at the European University Cyprus with fifteen years of experience in teaching and supporting disabled students and children in primary, further and higher education. She lectures on the theoretical perspectives and implications of Disability Studies and Inclusive Education at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Her current research interests lie in inclusive education, body politics and the politics of disability, crip activism, as well as cultural representations of disability and intersectionality. She is an active member of the Disability Research Edinburgh network which is coordinated by the University of Edinburgh. Her current involvement with disability activism and her expertise in critical disability studies has led to new collaborations with Schools of Education and Inclusive Education, Disability Research Fora and autonomous feminist research centres in the UK and Greece.

Maciej Wieczorek

is a doctoral candidate at the Department of English Studies in Drama, Theatre, and Film, University of Łódź, Poland, where he is currently working on a dissertation devoted to British left-wing political drama in the new millennium. His academic interests include theatre theory, political drama, and identity politics. He has published a number of articles on political theatre, and has recently translated “The Fundamental Principles of Disability,” a transcript of the seminal debate between the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation and the Disability Alliance into Polish.