This blog post was written by FEELed Lab Member Emma Carey, a Master’s student in UBCO’s Interdisciplinary Sustainability program, who is also working on the Enhancing Access and Inclusion in Environmental Humanities Research Practice Project
When I first joined the access and inclusion project, way back in September 2023, the first task Astrida gave me was to look through and familiarize myself with the books, articles, and blog posts relevant to our project.
My starting point was a whopping 91 resources! No, I did not read every single word of each one. There was a great deal of skimming. Some of those readings resonated more than others; some I have found myself returning to frequently.
As a person who loves to read, think through new ideas, and hear new stories, this has been one of my favorite parts of the project. This is not intended to be a “best of” type of list. It’s more a sharing of my personal selection of three texts, in the hopes that you might also connect with them.
DisAppearing: Encounters in Disability Studies (2022) edited by Tanya Titchkosky, Elaine Cagulada, and Madeleine DeWelles with Efrat Gold
As one of the first texts I read for this project, this edited collection has a special resonance for me. It’s full of personal, professional, poetic, and theoretical stories written largely by scholars with lived experience being disabled.
It was one of the first to teach me about the concept of ableism beyond a definition (which can only do so much!). Storytelling can be a more illustrative method of teaching, as we’ve been exploring in our storytelling workshops as another facet of our access and inclusion project. Read my blog post about this here!
This book looks at the ways in which more complex ideas of disability are made to disappear from society. Like how disability can demonstrate alternate ways of being in the world. For example, Hanna Herdegen explores how autism can open up what it means to hold a conversation that “decenters meaning in a neurotypical sense” (p.41). A conversation can be handing someone a phone with a dog sticker on it.
Disability is complex, yet portrayals of it are often simplified to disability as “calamity, loss, danger, and dysfunction” (p.1). This normalizes an ideal “Normal Man”, who is able bodied, individualistic, and usually white. Anyone who falls outside these boundaries is othered and made to seem less than. Yes, there can be difficulties that stem from having disability, but it is the way that other people react that can form disabling environments (this is ableism!).
Underflows by Cleo Wölfle Hazard
I only recently delved into this amazing book about multispecies relations of rivers like humans and salmon. With lyrical intensity, Hazard’s work gripped me from the beginning.
Using a variety of approaches, he discusses the issues of mainstream academia that emphasizes “speed to completion or volume of papers produced”, ignoring crip time and feminist situated knowledge that is “a proliferation of circumstantial, located, embodied, meandering ways of thinking” (p.99).
Using riverine metaphors, Cleo explores alternatives to channelized work that creates too much stress and rush, like working as a river with oxbows that meanders and get what needs to be done in its own time. As a master’s student that feels frequently overworked by institutional deadlines, I can heavily relate to this.
I wish there were more river eddies that would afford me time to absorb the many complicated and fascinating ideas I’ve been exposed to. As it is, I’ve been forced to rush much more than is healthy for me. I’ve been sick eight times since starting my degree!
Mia Mingus (2022). “You Are Not Entitled To Our Deaths: COVID, Abled Supremacy & Interdependence.” Leaving Evidence.
Five years from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, people are still being infected. But, many have returned to “normal life”, in the process forgetting or ignoring the burden they placed and continue to place on more vulnerable people with compromised immune systems.
I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t fully realized this until I read Mia Mingus’ essay on her blog Leaving Evidence. Writing in 2022, Mingus deplores the tendency to travel internationally while it is still risky to do so: “I need you to care about disabled people’s lives more than you care about a vacation, a party or a celebration.”
Her justified anger connected me to the selfishness of my forgetting. Community care requires that we think of more than just ourselves. Acts like getting vaccinated or continuing to mask contribute to community immunity and care, so that those who are at a higher risk aren’t forced to isolate themselves.
I hope you can find time pick up one or many of these great texts! Happy reading.
The FEELed lab 