CfE 46 - Reimagining Access: Crip Media Aesthetics and Infrastructures

2025-05-14

Call for Essays for the thematic section of Cinéma & Cie no. 46, edited by Domenico Napolitano, Annalisa Pellino, and Pooja Rangan. Deadline for abstract proposals: June 30th, 2025.

 

What does it mean to make film and media accessible at a time when access itself is increasingly commodified, manipulated, and surveilled? As generative AI, predictive algorithms, and automated access tools become central to audiovisual production, accessibility is framed as a technological fix—an inclusive feature that erases the labor, activism, and politics from which it emerged. In this context, access becomes a site of struggle: a force that can reimagine media aesthetics—or be weaponised to exclude, debilitate, and control.

This special issue explores two interconnected terrains. First, we consider sensory access as an aesthetic and ethical intervention—a means of cripping cinematic time, space, narrative, and authorship. Dismedia artists like Carolyn Lazard (A Recipe for Disaster, 2018), Jordan Lord (Shared Resources, 2021), and Alison O’Daniel (The Tuba Thieves, 2024), treat access features like captions and audio description not as an afterthought but as creative media that inform the look, feel, and structure of a work from the outset. Their work foregrounds disability as a generative force in media form and theory, challenging ableist assumptions embedded in dominant understandings of perception, representation, and spectatorship.

Second, we examine disability and access within media infrastructures and political economies. From auto-captioning to platform self-branding, accessibility is increasingly marketed as innovation, all the while masking extractive logics that displace crip knowledge, labor, and needs. Furthermore, in the contexts of militarised surveillance, settler occupation, and carceral confinement, access is not merely withheld but strategically denied and brokered, producing forms of infrastructural debility. These dynamics require us to reframe accessibility as a contested terrain shaped by state racism, eugenics, and media control.

These contemporary challenges are rooted in longer media histories. From early cinema’s sensory experiments to the techno-utopian promises of AI, disability has always been entangled with the development of audiovisual form and infrastructure. Yet this history is also shaped by ableist imaginaries and eugenic ideologies that have cast disability as a problem to be fixed or erased. These prejudices persist in media theory and practice today, informing dominant frameworks not only around communication technologies, but also around aesthetics and perception. Recent interventions—such as Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne’s concept of dismediation (2017), work on new disability media by Faye Ginsburg, Lawrence Carter-Long, and B. Ruby Rich (2022) and Neta Alexander’s theory of digital debility (2025) —challenge these legacies by centering disability as foundational to media aesthetics, infrastructures, and epistemologies.

We invite contributions that explore these aesthetic and infrastructural dimensions of access—together or in tension—from a wide range of perspectives, including production, authorship, distribution, exhibition, and spectatorship. We welcome work that bridges critical, historical, and creative approaches, and that traverses disability media studies, film studies, sound studies, infrastructure and platform studies, and decolonial or transnational media theory. We are especially interested in work that moves beyond symbolic inclusion to grapple with the transformative—and at times coercive—force of access in our digital and audiovisual mediascapes.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

  • Crip histories of film and media access (e.g., silent film intertitles as proto audio description)
  • Dismedia archaeologies
  • Critical theories and methods for understanding sensory access in film and media
  • Access features as both accommodation and creative medium
  • Conflicts of linguistic and sensory access
  • Aural and haptic modes of sensory access
  • Interfaces and access infrastructures: opportunities, risks, and restrictions
  • Labour histories of access
  • Access in the context of settler-colonial and carceral regimes
  • Decolonial, postcolonial, and transnational approaches to access and media infrastructures
  • Access monetisation and “cripwashing”
  • Algorithmic bias in auto-captioning
  • AI and its crip discontents

 

Bibliography

Alexander, Neta. 2025. Interface Frictions. How Digital Debility Reshapes Our Bodies. New York: Duke University Press.
Alexander, Neta and Mara Mills. 2022. “Scores: Carolyn Lazard’s Crip Minimalism.” Film Quarterly 76 (2): 39–47.
Ben Ayoun, Emma. 2021. “Toward a Theory of Disability Documentary: Alison O’Daniel’s The Tuba Thieves (2013–Present).” The Velvet Light Trap 88 (1): 4-24.
Bunch, Mary, Julia Chan, and Sean Lee. 2022. “Introduction: Access Aesthetics—Toward a Prefigurative Cultural Politics.” Public 33.66.
Cachia, Amanda. 2023. Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation, London: Routledge.
Chen, Mel Y., Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich. 2023. Crip Genealogies. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Dublon, Amalle. 2018. “Dependency and Improvisation: A Conversation with Park McArthur.” Art Papers 42.
Ellcessor, Elizabeth, and Bill Kirkpatrick. 2017. Disability Media Studies. New York University Press.
Ellis, Katie, et al., eds. 2020. The Routledge Companion to Disability and Media. New York: Routledge.
Ginsburg, Faye, B. Ruby Rich, and Lawrence Carter-Long. 2022. “Dossier: The New Disability Media.” Film Quarterly 76 (2).
Glos, Aleksandra, and Felipe Toro Franco. 2024. “On the Art of Audio Description: Naomi Kawase’s Radiance.” Medical Humanities 50 (2): 392–407.
Hamraie, Aimi, and Kelly Fritsch. 2019. “Crip Technoscience Manifesto.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1): 1–34.
Henry, Kelsey, Anna Hinton, and Sony Coráñez Bolton. 2023. “Origins, Objects, Orientations: New Histories and Theories of Race and Disability.” Disability Studies Quarterly 43 (1).
Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Kleege, Georgina, and Scott Wallin. 2015. “Audio Description as a Pedagogical Tool.” Disability Studies Quarterly, 35 (2).
Lameris, Bregt, and Lesley Verbeek. 2024. “Disability Media Histories.” TMG-Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis 27 (2).
McRuer, Robert. 2019. “In Focus: Cripping Cinema and Media Studies.” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 4:134–69.
McRuer, Robert. 2018. Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance. 1. New York: New York University Press.
Mills, Mara, and Rebecca Sanchez, eds. 2023. Crip Authorship: Disability as a Method. New York: New York University Press.
Mills, Mara, and Jonathan Sterne. 2017. “16. Afterword II: Dismediation—Three Proposals, Six Tactics.” In Disability Media Studies, edited by Elizabeth Ellcessor and Bill Kirkpatrick, 365-78. New York: New York University Press.
Mills, Mara. 2015. “Listening to Images: Audio Description, the Translation Overlay, and Image Retrieval.” The Cine-Files 8: 1–5.
Napolitano, Domenico, and Luigi Maria Sicca. 2024. “Ethopolitical media: Organizing Assistive Technology, Disability and Care in the Platform Society.” Media, Culture & Society 46 (5): 1091–101.
Napolitano, Domenico, David Friedrich and Neta Alexander, eds. 2024. "Media and Disability: Organizing between Bodies and Technologies." puntOorg International Journal 9 (1) (2).
Rangan, Pooja. 2022. “Listening in Crip Time: Toward a Counter Theory of Documentary Access.” Dossier on New Disability Media, edited by Faye Ginsburg, B. Ruby Rich, and Lawrence Carter-Long. Film Quarterly 76 (2).
Sterne, Jonathan 2021. Diminished Faculties. A Political Phenomenology of Impairment. New York: Duke University Press.
Thompson, Hannah. 2018. “Audio Description: Turning Access to Film into Cinema Art.” Disability Studies Quarterly, 38 (3).
Watlington, Emily. 2019. “The Radical Accessibility of Video Art (For Hearing People).” Future Anterior, 16 (1): 111–21.
Weisner, Lucy. 2024. “I Know It When I Hear It: Ekphrasis and Audio Description Pornography.” Afterimage, 51 (3): 50–70.

 

Submission Details

Please send your abstract (from 300 to 500 words, in English or French) and a short biographical note to annalisa.pellino@iulm.it; d.napolitano@ssmeridionale.it; and prangan@amherst.edu by June 30th, 2025.
Authors will be notified of abstract proposal acceptance by July 25th, 2025.
If the proposal is accepted, the author(s) will be asked to submit the full article (in English or French) by November 30th, 2025.
All article submissions should include: 5 keywords, name of author(s), institutional affiliation, contact details and a short bio for each author.
The articles must not exceed 5.000/6.000-words.
Submission of a paper will be taken to imply that it is unpublished and is not being considered for publication elsewhere.
Contributions will be submitted to double blind peer review.
The issue no. 46 of Cinéma & Cie will be published in June 2026.

 

Deadlines

Submission of proposals: June 30th, 2025.
Acceptance of proposals notified by: July 25th, 2025.
Submission of full articles for peer review: November 30th, 2025.
Publication: June 2026.