30. Critical Studies in Art, Disability & Access: Visibility, Agency, and Interpretation (FULL DAY)

From Nnena Kalu’s Turner Prize win to Design and Disability (Victoria & Albert) and Christine Sun Kim’s All Day All Night (Whitney Museum), the growing visibility of disabled artists within major exhibitions prompts critical attention to disability in art history and curatorial practice. Yet increased visibility also raises complex questions about agency and interpretation.

The session understands disability in expansive and inclusive terms, encompassing a wide range of lived experiences, including but not limited to physical, learning, sensory, neurodivergent, mental health, and chronic illness. Building on emerging scholarship, it approaches disability not as a marginal identity but as a critical cultural position. Rather than framing access as accommodation, participants consider access as an epistemological framework capable of transforming the infrastructures of art history, curatorial method, and artistic practice.

This session is inspired by the series Critical Studies in Art, Disability & Access (Manchester University Press), co-edited by session co-chairs, foregrounding disability and access as vital frameworks to rethink the field. The session asks: when does a disability-centred lens expand artistic agency, and when might it risk overdetermining interpretation? As institutions increasingly foreground disability and access, how can the art world advocate for disabled artists while resisting interpretive frameworks that can be reductive? How might disability-centred approaches also generate practical and methodological solutions for transforming institutional structures, curatorial practices, and modes of interpretation?

The session seeks to hold such tensions productively open to consider how disability might function not simply as an inclusive category but as a generative force for rethinking agency, interpretation, and the conditions through which art becomes knowable. Through a combination of longer scholarly papers, shorter provocations, and co-produced or collaborative presentations, the session will bring together case studies and forward-looking approaches that explore how art history and curatorial practice might change.

We welcome co-produced papers foregrounding learning disabled voices and collaborative reflections. Contributions might address exhibitions, artists, collections, or institutional practices, while also proposing new methodologies, interpretive strategies, or models of access that can be adapted across the field.

Themes: disability art, access, curatorial practice

Additional format comment: Full day session.

Lead Convenor: Amanda Cachia, Professor of Practice Museum Studies, Arizona State University, USA

Co-convenors: Lisa Slominski,PhD Candidate, School of Creative and Cultural Industries, Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London, UK

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.