The Journal of Philosophy of Disability (JPD) is a new journal devoted to the philosophical study of disability.
Disability is central to human life. As the slogan from disability studies goes: “disability is everywhere, once you know how to look for it.” After a steady stream of scholarship from the 1990s onward, work in the field of philosophy of disability has expanded exponentially. Despite this explosion, there has never been a peer-reviewed journal devoted to scholarship in the field of philosophy of disability. Until now.
The JPD is edited by Joel Michael Reynolds (Georgetown University) and Teresa Blankmeyer Burke (Gallaudet University).
Reynolds is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Disability at Georgetown University, a Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, and core faculty in Georgetown’s disability studies program. Burke is a Professor of Philosophy at Gallaudet University, Secretary/Treasurer of the Society for Analytical Feminism, and co-leader of the Disability Ethics Affinity Group of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. Both Burke and Reynolds are members of the board of the Society for Philosophy and Disability, which is a partner of the JPD.
There is a very large audience in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences who focus on or pay attention to research concerning disability. The growth of the interdisciplinary field of disability studies, now over fifty years old, shows no signs of abating, and there is a strong appetite for careful work in philosophy on disability. We believe that a very wide range of philosophers will find pieces in the JPD of interest, as well as those working in a range of non-philosophy fields as well, such as health-related fields.
Call for Submissions
Starting this month, the Journal of Philosophy of Disability (JPD) will begin accepting submissions.
The JPD will publish peer-reviewed articles, book reviews, critical responses, commentaries, and occasional special issues. The editors welcome scholarship from all philosophical perspectives, including analytic, continental, and pragmatist traditions, the history of philosophy, empirically informed philosophy, non-Western philosophy, and other traditions and fields that substantively engage research in philosophy of disability.
We are excited to announce that our inaugural issue will contain a cluster of short pieces on COVID-19 and disability. We hope to regularly run a number of topical clusters as well as special issues, and we are eager to hear from people who have an idea and would like to act as guest editors.
One of our key goals is to expand accessibility for disabled philosophers and other readers. Initially, the JPD will produce optimally accessible PDFs and explore alternative formats, including pre-print Word documents as well as HTML versions of published materials.
In the long term, we hope to explore alternative and more expansive online accessible formats. This might include, for example, adding American Sign Language videos of abstracts or entire papers, having audio-recordings of our published materials, making Braille conversion efficient and easy, producing simple-English versions of articles, and facilitating translation into other languages.
We also hope to make the journal as international in scope as possible, and we are actively seeking out ways to make new connections across the globe.
Lastly, although this is a philosophy journal, we understand that term in a broad manner. We are excited to receive submissions from people working in any field, so long as their work deeply engages and builds upon philosophy of disability. Such intellectual cross-fertilization, we think, can only be a boon.
The JPD is published open-access by the Philosophy Documentation Center under a Creative Commons license, with assistance from Georgetown University. In addition, the JPD supports and is also supported by the Society for Philosophy and Disability.
Please send submissions and any inquiries to: jphildisability@gmail.com. And, of course, follow the Journal of Philosophy of Disability on Facebook and on Twitter so you don’t miss any news, including about our inaugural issue appearing in the fall of 2021. Authors who have committed to submit include Eva Feder Kittay, Havi Carel, Leslie Francis, Kim Q. Hall, Adam Cureton, Andrea Pitts, Desiree Valentine, Joseph Stramondo, Kevin Timpe, David Wasserman, Melinda Hall, Chris Kaposy, Licia Carlson, and Christine Wieseler.
The text presented here was modified from a forthcoming post from the Blog of the American Philosophical Association.
