Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Erin Clancy, University of Wisconsin - Madison

; Stepha Velednitsky, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Description:

In the 1990s and early 2000s, a proliferation of geographic work called attention to the lack of scholarship on disability in the field and developed literature on the spatial realities of disabled people (e.g., Gleeson, 1999; Butler & Parr, 1999; Moss and Dyck 2002; Chouinard, Hall, & Wilton, 2010). While this important work continues in small pockets of geography, it rarely addresses the material politics of the production of disability (e.g. Erevelles, 2011), discusses how (dis)ability is co-constituted with race, gender, and sex (e.g. Kafer, 2013; Schalk, 2018), or engages the fields of disability studies or crip theory. Further, disability and ableism remain acutely absent from the central concerns of critical geographers. Nonetheless, we contend that much of feminist geographic work already constellates around issues of (dis)ability without explicitly engaging the concepts and theories of disability studies scholars. For example, feminist political geographers have theorized the spatial politics of emotions, corporeality, affect, relationality, and standpoint in the contexts of war, state violence, labor, migration, and settler violence (de Leeuw, 2016; Fluri, 2009; Mountz & Hyndman, 2006; Pain & Staeheli, 2014; Pratt & Rosner, 2012).

These approaches investigate how geographic phenomena touch on and are constituted through peoples' bodies in ways that are differentiated by corporeality, capital, and legal status. Disability studies approaches can help extend these analyses by examining how spatial relations can, on the one hand, produce disabling effects, and, on the other, shape perceptions of and claims to disability as a social category. Building on readings of disability in the context of racialized transnational capitalism (Erevelles, 2011; Minich, 2014), settler colonialism (Jaffee and John, 2018; Hutcheon and Lashewicz, 2019; Soldatic, 2015), and mass incarceration (Ben-Moshe, Chapman, Carey, 2014; Ben-Moshe, 2020), geographers can offer valuable insights into peoples' bodyminds as sites in continuous relationships with geographical phenomena. Accordingly, this session raises the questions: In what ways can we imagine and build feminist disability geographies? What work is already being done and where might we go in the future?

Following feminist geographers, this session refuses a clear distinction between "the field" and "the everyday", "the researcher" and "the subject". Understanding knowledge and embodiment as mutually constitutive, we invite geographical approaches to disability and examinations of ableism in geography. We know from personal experience, academic accounts, and activist critiques alike that the university (and academic conferences in particular) are deeply disabling and exclusionary by design (Dolmage, 2017). Further, we recognize that disability studies emerged through disability rights activism and that its intellectual work can never be separated from the material practices and lives of disabled people's bodyminds (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). As such, we strive to prioritize principles of disability justice and universal design (e.g. Hamraie, 2017) in organizing this virtual session and welcome contributions in a range of formats: pre-recorded talks, live performances, written statements, and more.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda