Call for Abstracts: Philosophy, Access and the Performing Arts: a one-day symposium

Supported by the British Society of Aesthetics and jointly hosted by Guildford School of Acting and the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Surrey.

Strategies to make performing arts events accessible to disabled audiences have been developed and increasingly deployed in recent decades: these include audio description for blind and partially sighted audiences and the use of captioning and sign language interpreting for those who are deaf and hard-of-hearing. These intermedial practices raise many interesting philosophical questions and pose challenges for theorizing in aesthetics and philosophy of art. In exploring audience engagement (actual or ideal), philosophy has tended to focus on normative spectators/listeners without considering how a person’s degree of sight and/or hearing impacts access to, appreciation and evaluation of performance in its many forms, as well as theorizing about such phenomena.

This symposium seeks to address these questions and challenges, promoting dialogue between philosophers, performing artists, access practitioners and audiences. We invite abstracts for presentations on topics related to our central theme, including but not limited to the following:

• Cross-modal perception and meaning-making in the performing arts
• Artistic medium, meaning and aesthetic impact in the practice and reception of intermedial translation
• Implications of access practices such as audio description for debates about aesthetic testimony, the acquaintance principle and aesthetic evaluation
• Implications of access practices for thinking about (the heresy of) paraphrase and ineffability
• Aesthetic community, engagement and participation for disabled and non-disabled people
• Accessibility and aesthetic justice, including connections with disability justice
• How to (best) conceptualise access practices: as translation, remediation, re-performance, or in some other way?
• Aesthetic and/or ontological implications of creative approaches to integrating audio description, sign language interpreting and captioning into performance
• Philosophies of blindness, deafness and disability and their potential to illuminate the performing arts

Invited speakers: Amelia Lander-Cavallo (Quiplash), Josefa MacKinnon (Royal Shakespeare Company), Jenny Stewart-Cosgrove (Audio Describer), Rebecca Wallbank (Uppsala University) and Ken Wilder (University of the Arts, London).

We invite submission of abstracts / proposals of 300-500 words by email to ku520uy@surrey.ac.uk (to which address any queries about the event can also be directed). The deadline for proposals is Friday 30^th January 2026. Those submitting will be notified of decisions by 25^th February. There will be no conference fees.

Conference organizers / programme committee: Robert Shaughnessy (GSA/University of Surrey), Anna Pakes (University of Roehampton), Sabine Braun (CTS, University of Surrey) and Hetty Blades (Falmouth University).