Disability, Media, and Human Rights: Policy, Practice, Performance

You are invited to the Disability, Media, and Human Rights: Policy, Practice, Performance Conference in Perth, 19 & 20 April 2018.

Event details

This conference is sponsored by Curtin University, the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment, and the Centre for Human Rights Education.

Date

20 April 2018, 5pm

Venue

Building 500, Room 1102AB, Curtin University, Kent Street, Bentley, WA 6102

Cost

Free

The banner image is under a Creative Commons License: Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0). The image titled ‘Disability Rights = Civil Rights’ is available from the Flickr page of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

Register your place

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Article 8, affirms that the global disability community’s access to the media is a human right, as well as the way public attitudes towards people with disability are shaped. However, for people with disability, access to the media can be fraught with technological road-blocks, is punctuated by a lack of functional and reflexive representations, and perpetuates clichés about the creativity and consciousness of people with disability.

This conference is an investigation of three nodes of intersection between disability and the media.

• Policy: Human rights, advocacy and access regarding media.
• Practice: Making media as a person with a disability. Making media for people with disabilities.
• Performance: Representations of disability in the media.

We aim to explore how government, policy makers and advocacy groups can ensure equitable and just access for people with disabilities to the media landscape in all its avenues. We want to discuss this access as a human right. We want you to share your experiences as a media maker who may have a disability or who may make media with a disability consciousness. We want discussion of the protocols and processes of how you create your art, the difficulties and triumphs of your experiences and how you think media can be a site for engagement with disability issues (or not). We want considered explorations of representations of people with disability in the media that critique the tragic/inspirational figure binary. Most of all, we are open to radical, disobedient, transgressive, and critical ways of exploring disability, the media and human rights.

Keynote speakers:

Beth Haller, Co-founder, Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (GADIM) and author of Representing Disability in an Ableist World

Katie Ellis – Curtin University and author of Disability Media Work: Opportunities and Obstacles

Robyn Lambird – Blogger, model, YouTube celebrity, My Trex Life

Angel Dixon – Model, disability advocate, blogger, designer

Shawn Burns – Disability and media researcher and journalism lecturer at University of Wollongong