25/08/2026
Access as Art, Art as Access: Exploring Multiple Worlds through Disability-led Artistry and Perception in the Performing Arts.
Edited Collection by Devon Healey and Carolina Bergonzoni
Invitation
We invite proposals for chapters for Access as Art, Art as Access: Exploring Multiple Worlds through Disability-led Artistry and Perception in the Performing Arts, an international edited collection being developed with Routledge following a formal invitation to submit a full proposal. The Routledge editorial team has expressed strong enthusiasm for the project.
We welcome contributions from disabled, Blind, D/deaf, MAD, chronically ill, and disability-expansive artists, scholars, educators, activists, and cultural workers working in and through the performing arts.
About the collection
Access is not an afterthought. Access is the impetus to create. Access is the art and the art is access.
Access as Art, Art as Access brings together disabled, Blind, D/deaf, MAD, chronically ill, and disability-expansive artists, scholars, educators, activists, and cultural workers to explore how disability-led creative practices, artistry, and epistemologies are transforming theatre, dance, and the performing arts. The collection understands access as, following Tanya Titchkosky (2011[1]), “an interpretative relation between bodies” (p.3), and asks how meaning is made through sensory and embodied relations, and how multiple worlds of possibility emerge through this meaning making.
Across theatre, dance, and performance, sight, is often assumed to be the governing sense through which performance is structured and interpreted, while other sensory ways of knowing are treated as secondary or supplementary. Accessibility is frequently framed as a technical solution or add on, often applied after artistic creation is complete. These practices can reproduce the idea that sightedness is the benchmark of perception and reflect biomedical framings of disability as lack, limit, or loss. In contrast, this collection foregrounds disability-led creative practices that challenge normative sensory hierarchies and expand what performance can be. Contributors engage in practices such as Creative Audio Description that are led by blind artists, multisensory dramaturgies that foreground vibration, touch, sound, proximity, and temperature, and collective creation models that unsettle hierarchies of authorship and expertise. Access is understood as a generative creative force that opens relational, sensory, and perceptual possibilities beyond normative frames. Disability emerges not as a problem to be managed or solved, but as a creative perspective and perception that reshapes artistic form, process, and experience.
This international volume showcases access as art and art as access through situated, practice based, and theoretically engaged chapters emerging from lived-experience, creative work, and critical reflection. The collection positions disability artistry as a vital site of knowledge production and expands the aesthetic, ethical, and cultural dimensions of live performance. It demonstrates how explorations of access, when led by disabled, Blind, D/deaf, MAD, chronically ill, and disability expansive persons, transform not only who art is for, but what art can be and do.
Structure of the collection
We invite contributions that engage disability-led approaches to theatre, dance, and performance, including but not limited to creative Audio Description, multisensory dramaturgies, collective creation, experimental performance practices, disability-led pedagogy, community-engaged arts practice, and theoretical or conceptual approaches to access as artistic methodology. We also welcome hybrid academic and creative formats, reflective writing, and research based artistic practice. The final structure will emerge from contributors’ work, but the collection is anticipated to include four sections.
Section 1 Foundations and Frameworks explores theoretical, historical, and methodological approaches to access, disability, and performance, including access aesthetics, embodiment, relationality, and sensory knowledge.
Section 2 Creative Practices and Artistic Processes foregrounds practice based research and disability led creative work, including multisensory dramaturgies, Creative Audio Description, collective authorship, and experimental performance approaches.
Section 3 Pedagogies, Education, and Community Engagement focuses on disability centred arts pedagogy, community-based practice, and approaches to learning and collaboration within the performing arts.
Section 4 Futures, Imaginations, and Radical Possibilities explores speculative, experimental, and future oriented practices in disability arts and performance, including new approaches to access, audience experience, and cultural transformation.
Submission guidelines
Please submit an abstract of 300 to 500 words, a short biography of 100 to 150 words, and contact information [email protected] by September 30th, 2026.
Selected contributors will be invited to submit full chapters of approximately 4000 to 6000 words. We welcome alternative formats where appropriate to the work.
If you have any questions, please contact: [email protected]
Timeline
August 15th 2026: Call for contributions issued internationally
September 30th 2026: Abstracts due.
November 2026: Proposals reviewed and acceptance notices sent to contributors
April 2027: Draft chapters due for editorial review
August 2027: Editors return feedback and suggested revisions, engaging collaboratively with authors to ensure both scholarly and artistic work is respected and accessible
October 2027: Final versions of all chapters submitted
Winter 2028: Manuscript prepared for publication, including formatting, final accessibility checks, and coordination with contributors on visual and creative media
Editors
Devon Healey is an Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Grounded in her experience as a blind woman, her work explores blindness and disability as perception and as creative ways of knowing the world. She is the author of Dramatizing Blindness: Disability Studies as Critical Creative Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Her recent work bridges disability studies with theatre and performance studies, to explore how blind perception opens new ways of creating, accessing, and experiencing theatre and dance. Her first play, Rainbow on Mars (Outside the March/National Ballet of Canada/Peripheral Theatre, 2025), is a sensory reclamation of blindness and marks the development of Immersive Descriptive Audio (IDA). Devon is Scholar-in-Residence at Toronto’s Fall for Dance North Festival, and her work has been featured internationally with major ballet and opera companies.
Contact: [email protected]
Carolina Bergonzoni (she/her), Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Cape Breton University. She is a dance artist and arts-based researcher with interests in accessibility, equity, wellbeing, and embodiment in education and academia. Her current work examines technoableism, Audio Description, and embodiment through critical and creative research practices.
Contact: [email protected]
