Call for Papers: Disability Politics and Social Change in Canada

Special Issue for the Canadian Review of Sociology

Submission Deadline: November 30, 2026

Title: Disability Politics and Social Change in Canada
Editors: Kelly Fritsch (Carleton University), Kendal David (Queens University)

Description:
Disability is not a marginal concern of sociology. It is central to understanding how societies organize life, labour, value, care, citizenship, and survival. Across Canada, disabled, Mad, D/deaf, blind, neurodivergent, chronically ill, and debilitated people are governed through shifting arrangements of state power, medicine, markets, families, and institutions. At the same time, disability communities have generated powerful forms of resistance, collective knowledge, cultural expression, mutual aid, and political imagination.

This special issue invites sociological contributions examining disability politics and social change in Canada. We seek work that situates disability, debility, and accessibility within historical and contemporary struggles, foregrounding disability as a dynamic social relation shaped by intersecting systems of governance, inequities, and resistance across social, economic, cultural, and environmental domains.

The issue will bring together contributions that examine how disabled people are both folded into and contest the state, market, medicine, and other institutions; how race, gender, class, sexuality, age, and ecology shape disability social relations and governance; and how grassroots movements and cultural practices generate alternative ways of being, knowing, caring, and organizing. We welcome theoretical, empirical, historical, and diverse methodological contributions grounded in sociology. Contributions may focus on Canada, situate Canadian politics within transnational relations, or challenge the nation-state. Rather than seeking a single account of disability politics, this special issue welcomes friction, contradiction, and situated knowledges. Possible areas of inquiry include:

Genealogies of Disability Politics: transitions and tensions between charity, rights, and justice frameworks; Indigenous and decolonial perspectives; Crip, Mad, D/deaf, blind, neurodivergent, chronically ill, and disability justice lineages; adaptations and adoptions of disability politics and principles within political, social, and cultural institutions.

The State and the Biopolitical: eugenics, institutionalization, incarceration, and transinstitutionalization; healthcare inequities; Medical Assistance in Dying; disability across welfare and carceral systems; citizenship, border regimes, and migration; drug use, toxic drug supply, closures of safe consumption sites; the uneven distribution of state protection and abandonment.

Political Economy: Labour, productivity, poverty, austerity, neoliberalism and disability; care work; food security; homelessness, housing policy, and encampments; mutual aid, informal economies, and other collective practices that contest capitalist measures of value.

Resistance, Movements, and Collective Action: disability rights; disability justice; intersectional activism and coalition building; harm reduction and abolitionist organizing; struggles over access, survival, and redistribution.

Cultural Politics, Representation, and Technology: disability arts, media, and aesthetic interventions; crip affect, joy, grief, and rage; surveillance, algorithmic governance, artificial intelligence, and data justice.

Environmental and Global Crises: climate justice; Long COVID and mass debilitation; disaster, war, displacement, and humanitarian aid; more-than-human disability politics.

Futurities and Otherwise Worlds: utopian and speculative politics; crip futurities; kin-making.

Objective of the Issue:

The objective of this special issue is to deepen sociological analysis of disability as a key social relation shaped by power, inequity, governance, and collective struggle in Canada and beyond. The issue will bring together scholarship that examines how disability is produced and contested across institutions, political economies, cultural formations, and ecological crises. It will also highlight the knowledge, practices, and political imaginations generated by disabled communities. A key aim is to strengthen dialogue across sociology and the rich interdisciplinary world of critical disability studies.

We seek contributions from established and emerging scholars, community-engaged researchers, and researchers whose work is informed by activism, lived experience, and movement knowledge. We particularly encourage submissions from disabled scholars, Indigenous, Black, racialized, queer, trans, migrant, and working-class authors whose perspectives remain underrepresented in Canadian sociology.

The intended audience includes sociologists, interdisciplinary disability studies scholars, students, policy makers, activists, cultural workers, and community organizations. By assembling diverse theoretical, empirical, historical, and methodological approaches, the issue aims to contribute to Canadian disability research, propose directions for further empirical and theoretical work, and demonstrate how disability politics drives and reshapes processes of social change in Canada.

Timeline:

- November 30, 2026 – Deadline to submit abstracts/outline
- December 18, 2026 – Initial editorial feedback
- March 1, 2027 – Full manuscripts due for editorial review
- April 30, 2027 – Editors return feedback to authors
- May 31, 2027 – Full manuscripts due to journal for peer review
- August 30, 2027 – Peer reviews complete and returned to authors
- November 1, 2027 – Revisions due
- If additional review is needed: complete by early January 2028, with revisions due end of February 2028
- Spring 2028 – Production, copy editing
- Fall 2028 – Projected publication