Global and Intersectional Framings of Disability in Comics & Graphic Narratives
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Global and Intersectional Framings of Disability in Comics & Graphic Narratives
Edited by Crystal Yin Lie (California State University, Long Beach) and Kai Qing Tan (Ghent University; Aachen University)
Comics and graphic narratives have become a powerful medium for representing embodied disability experience. Foundational scholarship in disability and comics studies has largely focused on Anglophone and Euro-American contexts. This special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly seeks to expand the field by foregrounding transnational, multilingual, and Global South perspectives. We invite essays that examine how contemporary comics and graphic narratives engage core concepts from disability studies—such as crip time, interdependence and collective access, disability justice, debility and slow death, crip ecologies, and speculative crip futurities—across diverse cultural and geopolitical contexts.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
Representations of physical, sensory, and/or cognitive disability; neurodiversity; chronic illness; aging; and embodied trauma
Disability as method/embodied knowledge
Resistance to diagnostic and pathological frames
Formal strategies that materialize disability in comics form
Disability networks, care infrastructures, and collective survival
Critiques of social, political, and urban contexts
Structural violence, colonialism, environmental crisis, and debility
(In)accessibility in both content and form
Speculative or futurist imaginaries of disability justice
The place of comedy and humor was in disability narratives
The commodification of disabilities/narrative via social media and how to circumvent it
Ethical obligations in the discourse of disability narratives
Theorizations, critiques, and reimaginings of form and genres
Emergent directions and movements in comics and comics activism
We welcome analyses of transnational and multilingual works, including Japanese manga, South Korean manhwa, Brazilian and Latin American graphic memoir, Indigenous comics, Francophone bandes dessinées from West Africa and the Caribbean, Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, and Eastern European graphic narratives, graphic journalism, autobiographical comics by disabled artists, and webcomics or other digital formats circulating across borders. In line with our commitment to providing space for disability narratives, we also encourage contributions that combine ethnographic research with creative interventions, integrating praxis alongside more theoretical approaches to the topics listed above. This issue aims to develop comparative methodologies for studying disability and graphic narrative across geographies, languages, and traditions. We encourage submissions from scholars at all career stages and from diverse disciplinary backgrounds.
Submission Guidelines:
Please submit a paragraph-length (300-500 words) abstract, a list of 3-5 key words, and a brief bio (100 words) by 30 September 2026 (Wed). Invitations to submit full essays (8,000-12,000 words) as well as shorter works of creative writing will follow. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review in accordance with DSQ guidelines.
Send abstracts and inquiries to:
Crystal Yin Lie, California State University, Long Beach
crystal.lie@csulb.edu
Kai Qing Tan, Research Foundation Flanders; Ghent University
kaiqing.tan@ugent.be
Crystal Lie