Thinking with Sunaura Taylor’s disabled ecologies

About the event (online only):
This interdisciplinary roundtable discussion brings together academic and practice-based reflections on reproductive, environmental, and disability (in)justice in Colombia. The critical underpinnings of these three arenas help understand how injustices touch human and more-than-human bodies and suggest potential solutions. However, there are points of friction between them that pose challenges for a coalitional politics. Action or inaction by the state on matters affecting the environment or reproduction (re)produces disability among humans, more-than-humans, and ecologies/environments. Among a range of theoretical concepts across the social sciences and advocacy arenas – reparations, loss and damage, embodied inequality (Segata et al., 2023), debilitation (Puar, 2017), bio- and necropolitics (Mbembe, 2006; Foucault, 2010 [1979]), the dysgenic state (Bridges, 2022) – we have taken Sunaura Taylor’s notion of ‘disabled ecologies’ as a provocation to delve deeper into the question of how different forms of injustice mediate what constitutes an environment worth living with, a culture worth living in, and a life worth living.

This event is part of the Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene seminar series.

Image credit: Dan Meyers