Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities

Although scholars in the environmental humanities have been exploring the dichotomy between “wild” and “built” environments for several years, few have focused on the field of disability studies, a discipline that enlists the contingency between environments and bodies as a foundation of its scholarship. On the other hand, scholars in disability studies have demonstrated the ways in which the built environment privileges some bodies and minds over others, yet they have rarely examined the ways in which toxic environments engender chronic illness and disability or how environmental illnesses disrupt dominant paradigms for scrutinizing “disability.”

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. With a historical scope spanning the seventeenth century to the present, this collection not only presents the foundational documents informing this intersection of fields but also showcases the most current work, making it an indispensable reference.

Sarah Jaquette Ray is an associate professor of environmental studies and program leader of the Environmental Studies Program at Humboldt State University. She is the author of The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture. Jay Sibara is an assistant professor of English at Colby College and a member of the Access Initiative of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. Stacy Alaimo is a distinguished teaching professor of English at the University of Texas at Arlington and the author of Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self and Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times.