In the third iteration of the Variabilities Series, we will take stock of the academic work done on the “body” in “history”. When we study the “Body” should we restrict ourselves to impaired bodies or make comparisons with sports bodies? Or should a conference discussing the body entertain papers on both impaired and sports bodies? When we consider “history” we must ask ourselves when did history begin, and has it ended? Variabilities III is casting its nets as widely as possible, with no methodological assumptions, beginning or end dates, with as wide a scope for dialogue as possible.

Come and tell us what the “body” in “history” means to you. For accessibility purposes we welcome Skype Presentations Please send your proposal (300 words) by November 30th 2016 to chris.mounsey@winchester.ac.uk and stan.booth@winchester.ac.uk

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Miriam Wallace of New College Florida will be the keynote at Variabilities III.

The Spector of the Singular Body in Frankenstein (1818): Difference and Constructed Community. Bodily impairment reminds us constantly that we are at heart, embodied—not merely a mind imprisoned in a body, but a subject constructed not only in language, but in flesh. Social activist and political approaches to minimizing the impact of impairment on the real lives of persons have been widely successful in ameliorating for instance, encounters with the built landscape and institutional access. But what gets left behind in these approaches? Sometimes the upbeat call to understand disability only in terms of inhospitable physical structures or technological or prosthetic mediation evades the ways that the body itself and impairment too ebb and flow, treating disability as so “constructed” that we can simply construct our way out of it. As effective as it has been, the very useful unifying term “disability community” or even “crip community” has a way of eliding the precise specificity and the loneliness of one’s individual embodied experience and interface with the material and social world.