PerformAbility

The project aims at exploring disability within the field of disability studies and health humanities with a focus on its cultural, discursive, and linguistic dimension, as well as on the performance of disability as both a culturally constructive process and an artistic and heuristic event deeply rooted in our understanding of the human. Building on a broad conception of performance, the project will explore the multiple meanings of disability: disability as ‘performance’ in everyday life, as a metaphor and/or an issue within drama and filmic texts, novels, and poetry and as the work and stage practices of disabled performing artists. The project calls into question conventional understandings of disability through an interdisciplinary, integrated perspective bringing together disability studies/ health humanities, and theatrical, filmic, cognitive, cultural and translation studies, as well as linguistics and philosophy. It thus aims at responding to the challenge represented by the disabled body to theoretical notions of ‘performativity’; to the many alternative strategies and modalities of self-expression and perception/representation of reality; and to reflect upon the central role of performance to the formation of dis/able identities. Strictly connected areas of research include: history of medicine, medicine and theatre, communicative impairment, identification and estrangement through acting, theories of catharsis, empathy, theory of mind, fictional worlds, affect studies and literary and film criticism.