Call for Papers

Guest Editors

• Anthony Beudaert (University Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, France);
• Jean-Philippe Nau (University of Lorraine, France);
• Anna Schneider-Kamp (Syddansk Universitet, Denmark);
• Søren Askegaard (Syddansk Universitet, Denmark).

Motivation & Scope of the Special Issue

Disability is an increasingly central dimension of contemporary markets and consumption – and scholarship is catching up fast. An estimated one billion people worldwide live with some form of disability (WHO and World Bank, 2011), and a growing body of research is now taking seriously how disability shapes, and is shaped by, market life.

Over the past decades, the field has moved with remarkable momentum: from foundational studies of marketplace exclusion (e.g., Baker et al., 2001; Kaufman, 1995) and disability studies’ own theoretical revolutions – the social model, crip theory, and critical disability studies – to the landmark JMM special issue on the disabling marketplace (Higgins et al., 2024), the “Cripped Marketing Manifesto” (Higgins & O’Leary, 2026), and the first dedicated volume on digital marketing and disability (Södergren & Vallström, 2025). The bi-annual Interdisciplinary Conference on Disability and Consumption (ICDC) has played an increasingly important role in sustaining this community and in expanding its theoretical horizons (e.g., Beudaert et al., 2024) – and its most generative conversations are still ahead.

This special issue does not retrace that ground – it builds from it. We ask what remains unsaid, unseen, and undone – in theories, methods, and practices. What happens when we attend to the embodied, temporal, and affective textures of disabled market life, beyond infrastructural critique alone? What can disability scholarship learn from the study of markets? And how do consumers with disabilities, caregivers, and communities not only navigate exclusion but also resist, reimagine, and sometimes co-produce market life on their own terms?

This special issue encourages submissions from papers presented at the ICDC2026 (Odense, Denmark, April 9-10, 2026), but is equally open to contributions from the broader scholarly community, across a wide range of disciplines – sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies, marketing and business history, human geography, design studies, political economy, and philosophy, to name but a few. We understand consumption broadly – not merely the purchase and use of goods and services, but access to spaces, digital infrastructures, symbolic systems, care relationships, and civic life (e.g., Salomonson & Echeverri, 2024; Schneider-Kamp & Askegaard, 2022).

We explicitly welcome the full range of approaches. Qualitative and interpretive work – ethnography, phenomenology, autoethnography, historical and archival research, arts-based and crip methodologies – sits alongside quantitative, experimental, survey-based, policy-evaluation, and design-science approaches. Researchers working in any of these traditions have much to contribute to this conversation. We also encourage research addressing the full spectrum of impairments: motor, sensory, cognitive, psychosocial, neurodivergent, chronic, and age-related.

We particularly welcome work that:

1. Engages seriously with embodied, phenomenological, and affective dimensions of disabled consumption, beyond structural critique alone;
2. Draws on theoretical frameworks with untapped potential here – crip theory, mad studies, neurodiversity scholarship, new materialisms, postcolonial and decolonial approaches;
3. Attends to impairments, populations, and geographies that remain underrepresented – cognitive and psychosocial impairments, neurodivergence, chronic illness and pain, aging, and Global South perspectives;
4. Experiments with participatory, arts-based, or otherwise methodologically innovative approaches that place people with disabilities as co-producers of knowledge;
5. Interrogates the very categories that organise both markets and market research – ability, normalcy, agency, value, and the consumer subject itself.

Successful submissions should make a clear contribution to marketing and market studies by showing how disability changes how we understand markets, not only how markets affect consumers with disabilities. Even work on contexts that may seem tangentially connected – platform governance, algorithmic discrimination, care technologies, ageing, social imaginaries – is particularly welcome, provided it actively engages with disability, ableism, or market normalcy as theoretical categories.

Themes & Potential Topics of Interest

We welcome empirical articles alongside conceptual papers, historical and genealogical studies, systematic reviews, methodological papers, and critical essays. Arts-based and alternative-format contributions are also encouraged – JMM has an established tradition of publishing work in non-standard formats (see the journal’s “Presenting Marketing Differently” guidelines). Authors wishing to submit in such formats are invited to contact the editors prior to submission to discuss fit with the journal’s review conventions.

The following themes are indicative rather than exhaustive. Wide-ranging as they are, they share a common thread: each invites contributors to ask what shifts – theoretically, methodologically, politically – when disability, impairment, access, and ableism are treated not as specialist concerns but as central to how markets work. Contributions may cut across these areas, challenge their boundaries, or open new ones entirely; we ask only that they keep this organising question in view.

Living and Consuming with a Disabled Body

• Phenomenological and embodied accounts of impairment in consumption: what does it mean to shop, eat, travel, or care for oneself from a body that does not fit the market’s assumptions?
• Chronic illness, pain, and fatigue as market experiences: the hidden costs and adaptations of consuming with a body in distress.
• Time, rhythm, and slowness: how disabled temporalities unsettle the speed imperatives of consumer culture and the pace of market exchange.
• Invisible impairments and misrecognition: the market encounters of those whose impairment is not immediately legible to service providers, brands, or fellow consumers.
• Caregivers, support networks, and the distributed nature of consumption: who consumes, with whom, and on whose behalf – and what does this reveal about the myth of the sovereign consumer?
• Tensions between autonomy, dependence, and interdependence: rethinking the foundational values of market participation in light of disabled lives.
• Disability, aging, and the continuum of embodied vulnerability: how the market experiences of consumers with disabilities illuminate – and are illuminated by – the growing literature on ageing, frailty, and the body in decline; what these overlapping trajectories reveal about the limits of independence as a market value.
• Markets for ageing bodies and assistive technologies: the commercial infrastructures that arise at the intersection of disability and age – from mobility aids to care services – and the ambivalent promise of consumer solutions to embodied need.
• The temporality of impairment across the life course: acquired impairments, progressive conditions, and the ways market participation shifts as bodies change over time.
• Disability in the Anthropocene: how environmental degradation, climate change, and ecological crisis compound disabling conditions – through toxic exposure, extreme heat, the destruction of accessible infrastructures; what the disability experience contributes to broader debates on environmental justice and the ethics of ecological transition.

Markets as Disabling Forces

• Disability and the critique of capitalist ableism: how market logics produce, reproduce, and profit from the norm of the able body.
• (In)accessibility in retail, design, tourism, transport, and digital services: mapping the material and symbolic barriers that disable market participation.
• Dis/abling infrastructures: from built environments to platform architectures, how do market infrastructures encode and enforce ableness?
• Algorithmic discrimination, datafication, and the platform economy: when digital markets see – or refuse to see – users, workers, and producers with disabilities.
• Artificial intelligence and the double-edged promise of automation: how AI-powered tools open new possibilities for consumers with disabilities while simultaneously encoding new forms of discrimination, surveillance, and exclusion.
• Representation and commodification of disability in advertising, media, and digital culture: from inspiration porn and tokenism to more complex and contested aesthetics of inclusion.
• Market activism, disability justice movements, and consumer advocacy: how disabled communities contest, negotiate, refuse, and remake market norms.
• Policy, regulation, and the governance of accessible markets: national and supranational frameworks, their promises and their limits.
• Historical and genealogical studies of accessible markets, assistive industries, disability representation in advertising, retail design, consumer citizenship, welfare-state restructuring, and the commercialisation of care
• The medico-social sector as a market: the institutionalization of disability care, the commodification of support services, and the tensions between market rationalities and the logic of care; user pathways, administrative violence, and the experience of navigating bureaucratic and commercial infrastructures as individuals with disabilities.

Conceptual Frontiers in Disability and Consumption

• Crip theory as a lens for consumer research: what does this framework – which reframes disability not as individual deficit but as a critical position from which to challenge market norms – make visible that mainstream marketing theory cannot?
• Neurodiversity, diagnosis, and the market: the expanding landscape of diagnostic categories (autism spectrum, ADHD, sensory processing conditions…) and their ambivalent market effects – from the pathologisation of difference and the pharmaceutical economy of attention, to emerging forms of neurodivergent consumer identity, community, and advocacy.
• The critique of normative consumer agency: how do disability, vulnerability, and precarity expose the fiction of the rational, able-bodied consumer subject?
• Intersectionality in disability and consumption: how race, class, gender, age, and sexuality compound – and sometimes contest – market disadvantage.
• Postcolonial and decolonial approaches: how Western frameworks of impairment, care, and market participation travel – or fail to travel – across cultural contexts.
• Posthumanism, transhumanism, and bodily augmentation: dis/abled critiques of enhancement, normalisation, and the promise of the optimised body – questioning who defines the boundaries between ability, disability, and technological augmentation.
• New materialisms and assemblage approaches: attending to bodies, technologies, spaces, and market relations as entangled, co-constitutive formations – rather than as separate entities acting upon one another.

Methods, Activism, and Epistemic Justice

• The limits and conditions of participatory research in disability contexts: the practical, institutional, and ethical challenges of deploying co-productive methods – from access and communication barriers to power asymmetries between researchers and participants, funding constraints, and the risk of tokenism; what genuine methodological inclusion requires in practice.
• Cripistemology as methodology: the epistemological standpoint that centres disabled lived experience as a generative source of knowledge about markets – not merely as an object of study.
• Experimental and alternative formats: arts-based, crip poetics, visual essays, flash fiction, autoethnography, and other forms of knowledge-making that exceed – and sometimes subvert – the conventions of the academic paper.
• Ethics, positionality, and the politics of knowledge production: who gets to research disability, how, for whom, and with what consequences?
• Market activism and disability justice as research practice: the productive tensions between scholarly rigour and political commitment.
• Accessible dissemination and knowledge translation: the responsibilities of researchers toward the communities they study, including the obligation to do no harm.

Submission Guidelines

Authors should submit manuscripts of between 8,000–10,000 words (excluding tables, references, captions, footnotes and endnotes). All submissions must strictly follow the guidelines for the Journal of Marketing Management. These are available at
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?show=instructions&journalCode=rjmm20
Submissions which do not follow these guidelines will be returned to authors for correction prior to being passed to the SI Editors.

Please note the requirements to include a Summary Statement of Contribution, and to place figures and tables at their correct location within the text. Please also read the following guidelines prior to submitting your manuscript:

• Use of images: https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/editorial-policies/images-and-figures/
• Use of third-party material: https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/publishing-your-research/writing-your-paper/using-third-party-material/
• Ethical guidelines: https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/editorial-policies/research-ethics-guidelines-for-arts-humanities-and-social-sciences-journals/
• T&F AI Policy https://taylorandfrancis.com/our-policies/ai-policy/

Manuscripts should be submitted online using the T&F Submission Portal for Journal of Marketing Management:
https://rp.tandfonline.com/submission/create?journalCode=RJMM
Authors should prepare and upload two versions of their manuscript (only use alpha-numeric characters or underscores in the filename). One should be a complete text, while in the second all document information identifying the author should be removed from the files to allow them to be sent anonymously to referees.

When uploading files authors will be able to define the non-anonymous version as “Manuscript – with author details”, and the anonymous version as “Manuscript – Anonymous”. To submit your manuscript to the Special Issue choose “Research Article” from the Manuscript Type list in the Submission Portal. On the next screen (Manuscript Details), answer ‘yes’ to the question ‘Are you submitting your paper for a specific special issue or article collection?’. A drop down menu will then appear and you should select the Special Issue Title from this list.

Informal queries regarding guest editors’ expectations or the suitability of specific research topics should be directed to the Special Issue Editors via:

Guest Editor Contact Details

• Anthony Beudaert, anthony.beudaert@univ-tlse2.fr
• Jean-Philippe Nau, jean-philippe.nau@univ-lorraine.fr
• Anna Schneider-Kamp, anna@sam.sdu.dk
• Søren Askegaard, aske@sam.sdu.dk

Key Dates

• The online system will be open for submissions to this issue from 17 April 2027.
• The closing date for submissions is 17 May 2027.

Technical queries about submissions can be referred to the Editorial Office: rjmmeditorial@westburn.co.uk

References

Askegaard, S., El-Jurdi, H., & Ourahmoune, N. (2025). Réflexions sur l’imaginaire social et les technologies du corps [Reflections on the social imagination and technologies of the body]. Recherche et Applications en Marketing, 2025, 32–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/07673701251342447

Baker, S. M., Stephens, D. L., & Hill, R. P. (2001). Marketplace experiences of consumers with visual impairments: Beyond the Americans with Disabilities Act. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 20(2), 215–224. https://doi.org/10.1509/jppm.20.2.215.17369

Beudaert, A., Mason, M. J., & Nau, J.-P. (2024). The social model and consumers with disabilities: Contributions, criticisms, and call for new perspectives. Journal of Marketing Management, 40(5-6), 481–511. https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2023.2289379

Higgins, L., & O’Leary, K. (2026). A cripped marketing manifesto: In conversation with Carol Kaufman-Scarborough and Stacey Menzel Baker. Journal of Marketing Management, 42(3–4), 212–261. https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2025.2555435

Higgins, L., Husemann, K. C., & Zeyen, A. (2024). The disabling marketplace: Towards a conceptualisation. Journal of Marketing Management, 40(5–6). https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2024.2328961

Kaufman, C. (1995). Shop ’til you drop: Tales from a physically challenged shopper. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 12(3), 39–55. https://doi.org/10.1108/07363769510090455

Salomonson, N., & Echeverri, P. (2024). Embodied interaction: A turn to better understand disabling marketplaces and consumer vulnerability. Journal of Marketing Management, 40(5–6), 378–417. https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2024.2303108

Schneider-Kamp, A. & Askegaard, S. (2022). Reassembling the elderly consumption ensemble: retaining independence through smart assisted living technologies. Journal of Marketing Management 38(17–18), 2011–2034. https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2022.2078862

Södergren, J., & Vallström, N. (2025). Disability and Digital Marketing. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032691664

WHO and World Bank. (2011). World Report on Disability. World Health Organization.