CRUNCH: Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire

Mel Y. Chen discusses their new book, Intoxicated (Duke University Press Books), which explores the ongoing imperial relationship between race, sexuality, and disability. They focus on nineteenth-century biopolitical archives in England and Australia to show how mutual entanglements of race and disability take form through toxicity. 

Examining English scientist John Langdon Down’s characterisation of white intellectual disability as Asian interiority, and Queensland’s racialisation and targeting of Aboriginal peoples through its ostensible concern with black opium, Chen explores how the colonial administration of race and disability gives rise to “intoxicated” subjects often shadowed by slowness. Chen charts the ongoing reverberations of these chemical entanglements in art and contemporary moments of political and economic conflict or agitation. Although intoxicated subjects may be affected by ongoing pollution or discredited as agents of failure, Chen affirmatively identifies queer/crip forms of unlearning and worldmaking under imperialism. Exemplifying an undisciplined thinking that resists linear or accretive methods of inquiry, Chen unsettles conventional understandings of slowness and agitation, intellectual method, and the toxic ordinary. 

This event is part of the flagship CRUNCH Series at The Bartlett School of Architecture, replacing the International Lecture Series.

Please note this event is first-come, first-served and is limited capacity. 

Speaker biographies

Mel Y. Chen (they/them+) is Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture at the University of California, Berkeley as well as Director of the Disability Studies Minor. Mel is also an affiliate of the Center for Race and Gender, the Institute for Cognitive and Behavioral Science, the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society, and the Haas Disability Studies and LGBTQ Citizenship Research Clusters. Previously, they served as Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History at Williams College, and the Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. Their training spans the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, with a doctorate degree in linguistics that they transitioned to from computer engineering. 

Nerea Calvillo (she/her) is an architect and scholar, based at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (University of Warwick, UK), director of spatial design office C+ arquitectas and funder of In the Air, an ongoing collaborative project to sense air(pollution). She works at the intersection between spatial design, feminist technoscience, queer and environmental studies, and her current research is on toxic politics, pollen, atmospheres and queer urban political ecologies. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Royal Academy of Arts, Canadian Centre for Architecture or the Shanghai Biennale; and published in Social Studies of Science, Journal of Extreme Events or Public Culture. She is the author of Aeropolis: Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds.

Tim Waterman (he/him) is Professor of Landscape Theory and Inter-Programme Collaboration Director at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is chair of the Landscape Research Group (LRG), a non-executive director of the digital arts collective Furtherfield, and an advisor to the Centre for Landscape Democracy at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He is the author of Fundamentals of Landscape Architecture, now in its second edition and translated into several languages, and, with Ed Wall, Urban Design, also translated into several languages. He has recently edited three collections: Landscape and Agency: Critical Essays with Ed Wall, the Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Food with Joshua Zeunert, and Landscape Citizenships with Jane Wolff and Ed Wall. His most recent book is The Landscape of Utopia: Writings on Everyday Life, Taste, Democracy, and Design (2022). His writing has appeared in a variety of journals including the Journal of Architecture and Landscape Architecture Magazine.

More information

Image: Nerea Calvillo, Yellow Dust ‘Catching the mist’ (author’s photo).