Grossman, Sara J. “Disabilities.” Environmental Humanities 11, no. 1 (2019): 242-46. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-7349532.
When environmental humanities scholars pay attention to the ways self-identifying disabled communities view, interact with, experience, imagine, and theorize environments, we elevate narratives that point not to “rehabilitating disabled people’s experiences within normative social contexts,” but rather ones that highlight the “emergence of alternative strategies of nonnormative living” as they relate to nature itself.8Positioning disabilities as a keyword within the environmental humanities is an invitation to give power to narratives of differing access, mourning, partnership, and affection that outline the alternative strategies of historically underrepresented communities. Emerging scholarship that attends to these intersections includes work by disability scholar Eli Clare, who narrates the complex history and lived experience of disability and cure culture. Clare brings discussions of disability and cure into conversation with environmental keywords such as natural and normal, disrupting the distance between studies of disability and the environment. (Text from article)
© Sara J. Grossman 2019. Environmental Humanities is available online only and is published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).