Short Abstract

This panel examines how disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence reshape language, communication, and interaction. We explore how embodied difference - pain, fatigue, sensory variation - mediates social and moral polarization around credibility, intelligibility, and wellbeing.

Long Abstract

This panel explores how disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence challenge conventional understandings of language, communication, and interaction. Drawing on linguistic and medical anthropology, as well as adjacent fields concerned with the semiotic mediation of embodied experience and difference, we ask how bodily and affective variation - whether marked by pain, fatigue, sensory sensitivity or limitation, or atypical sociality - shapes and is shaped by diverse ecologies of interaction and expression. These dynamics, in turn, produce frameworks for what is seen as credible, legible, and real for disabled individuals and groups across social, political, and material contexts.

In societies increasingly organised around normative ideals of capability, productivity, and self-management, communicative and embodied frictions often become sites of moral and epistemic polarization - between medical and experiential knowledge, autonomy and co-dependence, or credibility and disbelief. These dialectical relations shape the contours of social coherence and give rise to distinct forms of sociality, each producing its own genres of wellbeing and intelligibility. Yet within the prevailing social climate, only some of these forms are recognized as legible and credible, while others are relegated to the margins, rendered obscure and unintelligible.

We invite contributions that examine how language and communicative practice mediate bodily difference across social, clinical, and digital settings. Possible topics include the pragmatics of institutional and diagnostic encounters, neurodiverse or alternative communicative repertoires, the moral and political framing of embodied variation in public discourse, and the interactional schemata through which disabled communicative experience becomes polarized across diverse contexts.

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
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