*CfP Different Bodies: (Self-)Representation, Disability and the Media* University of Westminster, London, United Kingdom 23 June 2017 * Keynote speaker: Professor Lisa Blackman (Goldsmiths, University of London)* This one-day conference seeks to explore representations of the body as strange, shameful, wrong, impaired, wounded, scarred, disabled, lacking, different or ‘other’ in contemporary media. We encourage interdisciplinary paper presentations of 15 minutes that aim to explore how narratives and images of other bodies are constructed in the media and what their aesthetic, social, cultural, epistemological and political implications are. Possible themes include but are not limited to: - Researching bodies and the media: frameworks and methodologies - Journalism and practices of othering the body - The mediated body as spectacle - Celebrity bodies and the spectacles of transformation - The abject body - Stigma and the body - De-colonizing and de-westernising the mediated body - Neoliberalism, policy and austerity politics - (Dis)Empowerments of the disabled body - The objectification of the disabled body in the media - Contemporary coverage of disability in print/online/television/radio - Reality television and the body - Auto-ethnographic accounts of the body in / through digital media - The medicalised body in the media - Representing wounds and scars - Affective labour of bodies - The body and trauma Invited speakers also include Henrietta Spalding, Head of Advocacy at the UK charity Changing Faces Please send in abstracts of no longer than 500 words to both Jacob Johanssen (j.johanssen@westminster.ac.uk) and Diana Garrisi ( d.garrisi2@westminster.ac.uk) by 28th April 2017. Conference attendance will be free. Registration will open in late May. We seek to provide an open and inclusive space for everyone. https://www.westminster.ac.uk/call-for-papers-different- bodies-self-representation-disability-and-the-media