Call for Proposals

Vol. 45: Choreographing Access: Aesthetics of Inclusion

Guest Editors: Akhila Vimal C and Ash Tamara McAskill

Volume 45 Call for Proposals in International Sign Language: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q-uiWrtggV1TMXofDRaMzJ0t8QK5HGru/view?usp=sharing 

About the Issue

This issue of Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies explores how access shapes dance. Access isn’t just logistics—it’s a creative force: small gestures, cues, and choices that shape movement, rhythm, and audience experience.

Deaf and disabled, blind dancers and choreographers, and artists with chronic illness and/or pain, artists that identify as mad and/or neurodivergent, or other invisible disabilities—along with interpreters, captioners, and access workers—create what we call micro-choreographies of access. These subtle acts carry artistic, emotional, and political meaning, forming textures of access that shape an inclusive aesthetic rooted in collaboration and interdependence.

We refer to the collective impact of these practices as the textures of access: the layers, atmospheres, and communicative pathways that shape movement vocabularies, dramaturgy, and visual/sensory landscapes. When held together, these textures form a distinct, powerful aesthetic of inclusion — one rooted in relation, co-presence, and creative negotiation.

We welcome submissions that explore this aesthetic in rehearsal rooms, classrooms, community spaces, digital environments, and performances. We especially encourage contributions from BIPOC, Indigenous, Global South, Asian, Afro-diasporic, migrant, and other underrepresented disabled artists, scholars, and facilitators

Central Question

How does moving with access—as method, relation, and aesthetic—open new possibilities for choreography, collaboration, perception, and thinking within Dance Studies and across the spaces where dance is made and shared?

Potential topics:

• Micro-choreographies and the artistic intelligence within access work
  
  

• The textures of access: captioning, interpretation, description, tactile or sonic scores
  
  

• Access as dramaturgy: shaping pacing, rhythm, and emotional structure
  
  

• Classroom, studio, and workshop contexts: how teachers and facilitators choreograph access
  
  

• Audience experience, multisensorial attention, and perception of access
  
  

• Politics and poetics of inclusion in disabled-led dance practice
  
  

• Cross-cultural, intergenerational, and non-Euro-American approaches to disability aesthetics
  
  

• Embodied interdependence as a creative methodology
  
  

• Access documentation, notation, archiving, and multimodal storytelling
  
  

• Collaborations between dancers and access practitioners as artistic partnerships
  
  

• Accessible pedagogy and education models in dance
  
  

• Community dance, participatory performance, and the ethics of relational access

We welcome proposals from:

• Deaf and disabled dancers, blind dancers and choreographers, and artists with chronic illness and/or pain.

• Artists that identify as mad and/or neurodivergent, as well as those with other visible or invisible disabilities.

• Access practitioners such as interpreters, captioners, audio describers, and access dramaturgs.

• Dance scholars, disability studies scholars, critics, and researchers.

• Teachers, facilitators, and pedagogues working in inclusive or access-centered contexts.

• Community organizers, cultural workers, and interdisciplinary or multisensory artists.

• Audience members—disabled and non-disabled—reflecting on access, perception, and their experience of the choreographies.

Formats

We welcome a wide range of forms, including:

• Essays (2,000–3,500 words) with images or video.
  
  

• Multimedia or photo/video essays.
  
  

• Artist writings, process notes, rehearsal diaries.
  
  

• Interviews, dialogues, or roundtables (audio/video with summaries).
  
  

• Mini-performances (3–6 minutes) with commentary.
  
  

• Choreographic scores, access toolkits, teaching frameworks.
  
  

• Hybrid or experimental forms.

Please note if you submit a video or images, please ensure to include captions, transcripts, and alt text. We will guide contributors through accessibility preparation if needed.

Submission Guidelines

Please include:

1. Name(s) of contributor(s)
   
   

2. Submission format
   
   

3. 500-word maximum proposal or abstract
   
   

4. 100-word maximum biography for each contributor
   
   

5. Any accessibility or translation needs
   
   

6. (Optional) links to previous work

Timeline

• Proposal deadline: December 21, 2025
  
  

• Notification of acceptance: Mid to late January 2026

We also welcome multilingual submissions. If you would like to submit in a language other than English, please write to us first—if we have editors or collaborators fluent in that language, we’re happy to work with you.

Submission Email

Send proposals or questions to:
choreographingaccess@gmail.com by December 21, 2025.

Following the selection of contributors by late January 2026, full submissions will be due by late March 2026. A collaborative editorial process will follow, leading to the publication of Volume 45 in Fall 2026.

Guest Editor Biographies

Dr. Akhila Vimal C is a performance theorist, ecocultural strategist, and disabled mover exploring how bodies think, remember, and reimagine. Her work moves between intercultural performance traditions, tradition-based knowledge, access-centered pedagogy, and ecological justice, asking how movement becomes method and access reshapes the future of performance.

She is an independent scholar and Managing Trustee of Sapta Foundation, where she works across education, community practice, and ecocultural research. She also leads AccesIndia Collective, a practice-based initiative developing access-driven approaches for arts spaces, institutions, and community environments, including access consultancy for diverse public and cultural contexts.

Akhila held a Fulbright–Nehru Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCLA (2022–24), where she worked on accessible dance pedagogy for blind and low-vision performers. Her monograph Performing Disfiguration (Springer, 2025) examines how forms of rupture, erasure, and regenerative practices shape Keralam's intercultural performance.

Across her work, she inquires and explores how access operates not as an afterthought but as a generative artistic logic—one capable of imagining new futures for performance, spectatorship, and collective life.

Ash McAskill is a Montreal-based Canadian ally and academic in the disability arts and theatre community, and a slow theatre practitioner. She completed a PhD in Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec, and a postdoctoral project on slowness and access in art-making at the University of Guelph, Ontario. Ash has worked with disabled artists across Canada to mobilize against ableism in the performing arts and has served as a coordinator for national arts and disability working groups. Her research and creative practice explore how disability, care, and time shape theatre-making, audience experience, and institutional practices.