Understanding Disability in Central and East Europe Performing Inbetweenness

Introduction: Understanding Disability in Central and East Europe

Ina Dimitrova, Monika Kwaśniewska-Mikuła, Magdalena Zdrodowska

Imagined Futures and Politics of Disability Studies in Central and East Europe: Discussion with Kamila Albin, Kateřina Kolářová, Gabor Petri, Magda(lena) Szarota, and Darja Zaviršek

Chaired and edited by Natalia Pamuła, Agnieszka Król

Part I. Disability Histories

1. Children and Youth with Visual Disabilities and Institutional Practices in Early Socialism in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1947–1959) 

Jelena Seferović

2. Constructing a Social Field: The Deaf Community and State Power in Communist Poland 

Magdalena Dunaj

3. From the Wave of Human Rights to Illiberal Disablement: Changing Political Opportunities for the Disability Movement in Post-Socialist Hungary

Gabor Petri and Erika Hruskó

Part II. Activism and (Autho)biographies

4. Spaces for Messiness: Neurokvíring Activist Research in Czechia

Hana Drštičková

5. Experiencing Time in Academia: A Personal Narrative by a Woman with Asperger's Syndrome 

Eva Kašparová

6. From Rebellion to Silent Work: How Women with Disabilities in Poland Interpret Their Activism

Kamila Albin

7. Between Experience and Expectations of Life with Intellectual Disabilities in Bulgaria: Visions of Disabled People and Parental Narratives

Gergana Mircheva and Galina Goncharova

Part III. Art and Technology

8. Disability and Nation in Subject: Julek

José Alaniz

9. Cripped Ecorelationality in the Polish Performing Arts of the 2020s 

Katarzyna Ojrzyńska

10. Striving Towards Accessibility in Contemporary Art: A Case Study of the International Contemporary Art Festival Survival Kit in Latvia

Agnese Zviedre

11. How Translation Supports the Empowerment of People with Disabilities: The Case of the Community of Blind Polish Podcasters

Wojciech Figiel

Afterword

Monika Baar

Biography

Magdalena Zdrodowska is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Audiovisual Arts, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. She is an anthropologist, and film and media scholar, working at the crossroads of deaf studies, disability studies, and history of cinema. She is an author of Television on the Borderlands (2013) and Telephone, Cinema and Cyborgs: The Mutual Relations between Deafness and Technology (2021), both published in Polish. She is working on her third book Deaf Cinema. She is a co-founder of Disability Studies in East Europe: Reconfigurations research platform.

Ina Dimitrova is Associate Professor of social philosophy and bioethics at University of Plovdiv “Paisii Hilendarski”, Bulgaria. Her research lies at the intersection of disability studies, science and technology studies, and history of medicine, with a particular focus on disability activism, disability history, and the history of psychiatry in socialist Bulgaria. She has participated in research projects examining patterns of care for people with disabilities in Bulgaria, as well as in participatory initiatives exploring barriers to independent living in the postsocialist region.

Monika Kwaśniewska-Mikuła is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Theatre and Drama. She is an author of books Od wstrętu do sublimacji. Teatr Krzysztofa Warlikowskiego w świetle teorii Julii Kristevej (2009), Pytanie o wspólnotę. Jerzy Grzegorzewski i Jan Klata (2016), Między hierarchią a anarchią. Teatr –Instytucja – Krytyka (2019) and #MeToo na rzecz przyszłości teatru. Projekty artystyczne o przemocy (seksualnej) w teatrze (2025). She is co-editor of the books Zła pamięć. Przeciw-historia w polskim teatrze i dramacie (2012), Teatr brzydkich uczuć (2021) Autocenzura i cenzura. Nowe ujęcia (2024) and Polish theatre after #MeToo: new discourses and (un)doings (2026, in preparation). Currently, she focuses on contemporary performance acting, disability in theater and performance (with a particular emphasis on mental health and neurodiversity).

“This book provides a much-needed boost to the field of postsocialist disability studies - the region has been woefully invisible in mainstream disability scholarship. The editors answer the call with panache, bringing together leading scholars and activists to reflect on disability from the unique perspective of the postsocialist experience.”

-Teodor Mladenov, University of Dundee, United Kingdom.

 

“From the perspective of the European Disability Forum, this volume is an important and timely contribution because it brings Central and Eastern Europe into disability studies not as a periphery, but as a place of knowledge, resistance, and new concepts. Its framing of “inbetweenness,” together with the sections on disability histories, activism, art and technology, and its attention to war, illiberalism, and structural invisibility, makes it especially powerful and relevant for today’s Europe.”

-Gunta Anča, President of the European Disability Forum.

 

“In a major contribution to global, critical, and emancipatory disability studies, established and emerging scholars and activists from Central and Eastern Europe apply cutting-edge theories and new methods to explore the generative notion of “inbetweenness.” Intersectional frameworks deftly connect the inbetweenness of disability with the inbetweenness of gender identities, experiences of migration and refuge, academic and activist spaces, and more. A must-read for otherwise approaches to disability studies in the twenty-first century.”

-Sarah D. Phillips, Indiana University, United States.