Several factors contributed to the creation of this magazine. First and foremost, we wanted to give disability studies students a voice; an outlet through which to express ourselves creatively. As students so much of our time is spent on academic writing for classes, exams, conferences, publications, and hopefully dissertations. This magazine is intended for the other stuff… for those ideas that seem silly, bizarre, or half-baked but are still informed by a disability studies perspective. We believe that such diversions deserve to be shared too. So while our content is intended to be entertaining, we hope that you find it thought provoking as well.

Further, in bringing together our collective voices we hope to strengthen this burgeoning community of scholars, artists, and advocates. This is not just our magazine… this is your magazine.

Collective Voices will start out in bi-monthly syndication (every other month). Each issue will have a theme released the preceding month. We not only welcome and encourage submissions from viewers like you… we depend on them! Each issue will also have a contest of sorts. Now bear in mind that being students ourselves we don’t have any $$$ so the prize will be our esteem and a place of honor in the next issue. You can find the contest for this month below. Each issue will also feature a poll that can be found on the bottom, right-hand side of the webpage.

If you would like to get involved in the magazine click here for a list of open positions.

Wanderlust! – Let’s face it, December is depressing and often you want to be anywhere but sitting in front of a computer screen reading articles on the social construction of or theoretical approaches to disability related whatchemacallits. For this reason we have dedicated December’s issue to wanderlust. If you have an idea for an article relating to disability studies in other cultures or “Tales of Student Travels” check out our submissions page! We look forward to hearing from you.

Photo Contest – We would like to put together a cross-cultural slideshow of people with disabilities in many different countries. So if you have any pictures from home or vacation photos depicting this please send them our way!

OMG Zombiez! – You may have noticed that we have chosen a zombie theme for this first issue. What began as an inside joke morphed into a kind of obsession as we found applying various theories of disability to zombies challenging. For example: how would you apply a social model to alleviate the oppression of a zombie population? How would zombies find themselves positioned in the political economy? Discussions have also led us to question how and why we have constructed the zombie as we have and what similarities exist given how disability has been socially constructed. Further, what does that say about our culture? We attempt to address these topics in the following articles, and realize that we are only starting the conversation...