Joint statement by the organizing committees of the Lancaster and NNDR Disability Conferences

Photo by Ludovic Charlet on UnsplashDue to the Covid-19 pandemic the Lancaster CeDR 2020 and NNDR Reykjavik 2021 conferences are postponed for 12 months.

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

The Disability Studies communities in the UK and the Nordic Countries have been closely connected for many years through social and personal contacts and collaboration in research and publishing. One manifest of these good relations is the way we synchronise our biennial conference to enable as many people as possible to participate and benefit from both.

The Covid-19 pandemic has made it untenable to plan or hold our conferences in the coming months as well as raising new challenges in how we arrange large scale academic events in the future. We are therefore working together and coordinating our efforts to

a) make practical arrangements and contingency plans for our conferences a) support the Disability Studies community and, not least,
b) to draw attention to the ways in which the measures taken to deal with Covid-19 impact the lives of disabled people.

The result of our cooperation is – thus far – as follows:

1) We have decided to postpone both our conferences a full year. The next Lancaster conference is re-scheduled to take place in September 2021, the next NNDR Conference in May 2022, in Reykjavik. We are considering ways to support as many participants as possible to attend both events.
2) We are exploring ways in which we – together – can provide digital spaces to meet, collaborate and support each other while the current situation lasts and would be keen to hear from colleagues who would like to be involved.

There might, of course, be need for further changes but we remain committed to working collaboratively and in solidarity with all our Disability Studies colleagues. For updates, please visit the Lancaster and NNDR Reykjavik webpages

Best regards