At the start of the year, I won the Universitas 21 Travel Prize to support a visit to the University of Melbourne.  Some six months later, (nearly) everything’s booked, and I fly out next week.  This will be a great opportunity to access an otherwise distant research community.  Fingers crossed I’ll return with new insights, and hopefully a chapter or two of my Thesis under my belt.  Expect images and sounds posted as soon as I have them…

I’ll be back in the UK for the 4th Disability Studies Conference in Lancaster, which I’m also looking forward to.  As with the ALT-C, the conference programme has been recently announced.  Several presentations have caught my eye: Nicholas Cimini’s ‘Struggles online over the meaning of disability‘, promises to open a window on Dialogic perspectives of Disability and Technology, a window that I’m increasingly seeking to climb through. The Sheffield Hallam Disability Research Forum is well represented, and it’s hard not to eye other titles with anticipation.  I’m already looking forward to Michael Shamash’s paper ‘Anything Can Happen in the Next Half Hour‘.  Can Michael convince us of the place of Captain Scarlet in the lexicon of the Social Model?!