CfP: Journal Issue: Disability Studies and Ecocriticism: Critical and Creative Intersections
This
CFP calls for critical essays and creative works that address the
intersection of disability studies and ecocriticism, or disability and
the environment. In terms of critical essays, we will consider analyses
of novels, poetry, comics, dance, art, and movies. We will also consider
creative works (including creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction)
that center on an exploration of the relationship(s) between disability
and the environment.
We
are particularly interested in works that address the following broad
questions in specific ways: What can be gained by investigating
ecological issues through the lens of disability studies? What can be
gained by investigating disability through the lens of ecocriticism? How
can these two viewpoints be joined?
In
disability studies the environment is already an issue as the social
model situates the impaired, and possibly disabled, body in the world.
It is the social environment that disables after all. To state the
obvious, this emphasis on the environment substantiates, to a degree,
the major concern of ecocritics. However, there are also problems. As
Tom Shakespeare points out, the social model is limited: Not every
environment, human or not, can be made fully accessible. Can, truly, a
mountainous terrain be made accessible to everyone? From the perspective
of ecocriticism, making an environment accessible for humans, disabled
or nondisabled, could be seen as anthropocentric and, hence, oppressive
to nature: The social model in its attempt to eradicate one area of
oppression has reinforced the objectification of nature. What would it
take to be just to both humans and nature? What is lost or gained by
those within the disability community by exercising this “deep social
model” that respects all parties within an environmental context?
Consider this brief example (though please do not be limited by its example):
In Pixar’s 2008 film Wall-E
the world is trashed by humans who are isolated from their environment
by technology and consumption; nondisabled humans create a seamless,
bordered world of privileged access for themselves, commit ecocide, and
then escape into space. Ironically, the world has been reconstructed--so
as to provide access—by
nondisabled people to such a degree that nondisabled people have become
physically impaired. As their environment changes so do, ever so
slowly, the bodies of the typical human. Humans are for the most part
oblivious to these naturalized processes grounded in environment
context. The nondisabled, however, are not oblivious to difference, or
any impairment, that disrupts their socially constructed world.
The question lingering at the end of Wall-E
might be: How might humans remain open to difference (nature and
disability)? It is such a difference that opens a hole in our
representations, allowing for vulnerability and a more relational
understanding of who we are in the world.
Wall-E
shows how the dual use of disability studies and ecocriticism is
productive for both theoretical paradigms: Impairment is shown to be a
product of environment even while a disability that is out of sync with a
socially constructed environment is valorized as a means of knowledge
that cuts through an instrumentalized world, revealing the larger
environment. On the other hand, the film also mounts a critique of the
limits of the ‘social model’: it is after all the excessive
rearrangement of the world in human terms that causes so much
environmental harm in the first place. After the (un)conscious
arrangement of the world to suit the nondisabled and the conscious
(attempt) to arrange the world to suit people with disability, the film
prompts us to ask: Can the social model (that is, an awareness of
ecological relation) be used in a way that is truly relational, that is,
profoundly aware of humans and nature?
Questions that might be considered:
- How does disability allow for a rethinking of ‘natural’ spaces?
- How does ecology allow for a rethinking of “ability’ or ‘disability,’ of who we are as humans?
- How is the social model revised through an intense look at how nature “disables” all of us in the end?
- What might the study of ability and disability teach us about the ethics of living in the world?
- How does disability allow for an opening out of an ableist humanity and into a way of being that embraces our animality?
- How do cultural representations of disability rhetorically connect disability with animality?
- How does the disabled or nondisabled posthuman interact with nature?
This double issue is expected to be published in 2019.
Contact Info:
Please
send 300-500 word proposals to Dr. Christine Junker (Wright State
University) and Dr. Todd Comer (Defiance College) by this deadline:
March 1, 2018. If your submission is creative, please contact Dr. Junker
with any questions. Final critical essays should be around 6,000 words
in length. Emails: tcomer@defiance.edu and christine.wilson@wright.edu.
Contact Email: