Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities - by Sarah Jaquette Ray & Jay Sibara (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities charts an exciting and urgent new direction in scholarship for environmental literary critics and the environmental humanities more broadly."--Mary Foltz, The Year's Work in English Studies-- (4/9/2019 12:00:00 AM)

"Contributes to multiple fields, responding to growing curricular and scholarly interest in environmental humanities and disability studies. . . . This will be a foundational text in its own right."--Susan Burch, associate professor of American studies at Middlebury College and coeditor of At the Intersections: Deaf Meets Disability Studies-- (9/12/2016 12:00:00 AM)

"The most significant disability studies anthology to emerge in years. It is extremely important that these particular branches of academic and political work rub against each other."--Susan M. Schweik, professor of English at the University of California-Berkeley and author of The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public
-- (9/12/2016 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

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.