Eco-Crip Theory bridges disability and environmental studies. This is a growing list of resources about eco-crip theory, eco-crip politics, eco-ableism, environmental justice, and other ecological and place-based resources that center Disabled experiences.
Books
Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory
edited and with an introduction by Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara. Designed as a reader for undergraduate and graduate courses, Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities employs interdisciplinary perspectives to examine such issues as slow violence, imperialism, race, toxicity, eco-sickness, the body in environmental justice, ableism, and other topics.
by Alison Kafer. Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a pre-determined limit. She juxtaposes theories, movements, and identities such as environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability that are typically discussed in isolation and envisions new possibilities for crip futures and feminist/queer/crip alliances.
Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation
by Eli Clare explores environmental destruction and capitalism, sexuality and institutional violence, gender and the body politic. Essays weave together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanings and experiences of home.
Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation
by Sunaura Taylor. Beasts of Burden suggests that issues of disability and animal justice—which have heretofore primarily been presented in opposition—are in fact deeply entangled. Fusing philosophy, memoir, science, and the radical truths these disciplines can bring—whether about factory farming, disability oppression, or our assumptions of human superiority over animals—Taylor draws attention to new worlds of experience and empathy that can open up important avenues of solidarity across species and ability.
Academic Articles
Risking Bodies in the Wild: The “Corporeal Unconscious” of American Adventure Culture
by Sarah Jaquette Ray, appears in Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities. By examining adventure culture through disability studies, this article exposes the relationship between environmentalism and ableism. It argues that disability is the category of “otherness” against which both environmentalism and adventure have been shaped and revises environmental
thought to include all kinds of bodies.
Bodies in Nature: The Environmental Politics of Disability
By Alison Kafer, appears in Feminist, Queer, Crip. PDF shared with permission of the author. This article explores how might we begin to read disability into formations of “nature” and “wilderness” and how compulsorily able-bodiedness/able-mindedness shaped not only the environments of our lives—both buildings and parks—but our very understandings of the environment itself? The author explores a cripped environmentalism that looks to disabled bodies/minds as a resource in thinking about future nature differently.
(De)constructing Nature and Disability Through Place: Towards an Eco-Crip Politic
by Jenne Schmidt. PDF shared with permission of the author. This dissertation project examines the intersections of environmental and critical disability studies, to imagine new ways of understanding disability and environmentalism as coalitional.
Disabling Bodies of/and Land: Reframing Disability Justice in Conversation with Indigenous Theory and Activism
by Kelsey Dale John and Laura J Jaffee. A central claim of this paper is that the disablement of the Earth-through practices of settler colonialism largely ignored within disability studies-is disabling to Indigenous’ ontology and, concomitantly, Indigenous communities. [The authors] suggest that Indigenous ontology -specifically relationships to land – challenges disability theory at the epistemological level by rejecting the taken-for-granted dualism between the environment and (dis/abled) humans within (settler) disability studies.
Articles, Blogs, Poetry
by Syren Nagakyrie. Syren discusses the role of ableism in conservation, how access to the outdoors is intentionally limited, and why reclaiming limitations can shift perspectives on disability and the environment.
Crip Ecologies: Complicate the Conversation to Reclaim Power
by Naomi Ortiz. This article muses on Crip ecologies as the messy, diverse, and profoundly beautiful ecosystems which exist for disabled people.
Journals, Magazines, and Zines
Orion Magazine, Bodies of Nature
Winter 2021. This issue gathers a selection of writers and artists whose experiences broaden our understanding of sickness and disability, to foster a conversation among them about how the body informs our perception of and engagement with our surroundings.
Videos and Presentations
Claiming Connection: Cultivating Relationship with Place as Disabled Artists
This panel discussion between Syren Nagakyrie, Naomi Ortiz, Galadriel Mozee, and Denise Vasquez crips the conversation about art, landscape, and connection with place.