6. Socionatural Bodyminds: Imagining an Environmental Disability Studies
Rebecca Monteleone, University of Toledo; Jennifer Lai, University of Vermont;
In the age of the Chthulucene (Haraway 2016), we need new epistemic and ontological resources to make sense of the entanglements between our bodyminds and our worlds. This panel seeks innovations at the intersection of disability studies, environmental sociology, and STS. We invite submissions that contextualize disability as embodied experiences derived from interactions with material environments, and likewise, seek to strengthen underdeveloped relationships between disability studies and areas of study that grapple with materiality, knowledge production, and power. Our intention is to (re)ignite discussions regarding the complexity, challenges, and exciting possibilities concurrent with interdisciplinary knowledge production, with environmental disability studies representing one iteration of such projects. Through this panel, we seek to disrupt disciplinary boundaries and naturalized assumptions about our bodyminds, our environments, and our futures in order to open up possibilities for futures that reimagine justice expansively. We explicitly invite innovative and artistic abstracts, in addition to more traditional scholarly presentations.
Potential topics could include:
Models of understanding disability rooted in material relationships between human and nonhuman actors;
Labor, capitalism, colonialism, and environmental injury;
The inequitable distribution of environmental harms;
The environment as a site of political, social, and cultural interventions on 'deviant' bodyminds;
Disablement through climate change;
Ableism and other forms of oppression in environmental activism;
Critical innovations on method and praxis in disability studies and environmental sociology;
Environmental rhetorics that deploy disability as metaphor;
Climate futures that draw on crip wisdom;
Embodied environmental harms as indicators of environmental injustice
