Monday, March 28, 2016

Welcome to Crip Ecologies!


Crip Ecologies April 7th -8th

Crip Ecologies: This symposium seeks to bring together scholars, artists, advocates, and activists working across the fields of ecocriticism, disability, and queer studies. Our goal is to think through the queer interchanges of environments and bodies in more radical ways. As vulnerable embodied beings that interact with our environments, we experience ourselves and others through a defining porosity: we are not only affected by the places we inhabit, but we also leave our imprint on these locations as well. Marginalized subjects, including disabled people, often experience their lives in greater proximity to environmental threats such as toxicity, climate change, generational exposures to unsafe living conditions due to poverty, militarization, body exhausting labors as in the case of migrant workers, etc. Further, we seek to investigate how non-normative bodies/minds can reframe what it has historically meant to be an environmentalist or "nature lover?” Crip Ecologies will draw out these wanted, unwanted, and even unknowable intimacies with our environments as materials for new trans-historical, cross-cultural, and crip/queer research about human, non-human, organic, and inorganic relationships that mark our experiences in the world.

Please stay after the conference for special poetry readings!

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Crip Ecologies 2016 Schedule Now Available!

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Composing Disability 2015-2016

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Thursday 7 April 2016
LaDonna Redmond holding a basket of red tomatoes
LaDonna Redmond
1:00-2:30: KEYNOTE (Jack Morton Auditorium)


LaDonna Redmond:
"Beyond the plate: Using food as a tool to end oppression" 



3:00-4:15: Session: “Environmental Justice” (Jack Morton Auditorium)

Joshua Kupetz (University of Michigan):
“Disability Ecologies, Urban Infrastructures, and Generic Fictions: or Watching the Detectives in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999) and Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (1999)”

Jessica Cowing (College of William and Mary):
“Dis/ability, Indigeneity, and Future Ecologies in Avatar

Maria Junttila Carson (Syracuse University):
“Affects of Bodies, Flowers, and God”

4:45-6:00 Roundtable: “Biopolitics: Law, Life, Land, Love” (Jack Morton Auditorium)

Sponsored by GW MEMSI (Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute)
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Sunaura Taylor headshot
Sunaura Taylor
Susan Antebi headshot
Susan Antebi



Friday 8 
April 2016







9:30-10:45 Session: “Media Ecologies” (Jack Morton Auditorium)

Shannon Wooden (Missouri State University):
“‘Once Big Oil, Always Big Oil’: Disability and Sustainability in Pixar’s Cars 2”

Samuel Yates (GWU):
“Divergent Cripistemologies: Biosocial Assessments of Atypicality”

Kellie White (George Mason University):
“Mormon Sex Lives: Discourses on Disability, Capitalism, and Sexuality”


11:15-12:30 KEYNOTES (Jack Morton Auditorium)

Susan Antebi (University of Toronto):
“Healthy Objects, Hygienic Futures: Medical Inspection and the Built Environment in Mexico”

Sunaura Taylor (NYU):
“Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation”


12:30-2:00 LUNCH (not provided)

2:00-3:00 Student Panel (Jack Morton Auditorium)

Rodrigo Duran (GWU):
“‘You See, I Too Have A Handicap’: Disability and The Doom Patrol

Yona Weissman Fabra (GWU):
“Speaking Up on ‘Autism Speaks’”

Maria Wilhoit (GWU):
“Disabled People and the Holocaust: Reflections on Germany and its T4 Memorial Sites”

Rebecca Hurd, Jacob Ramos, and Peyton Swift (GWU):
“The Hard Worker Conundrum”


3:30-4:45 Breakout session: “Crip Environments, Toxic Ecologies” (Jack Morton Auditorium)

Derek Newman-Stille (Trent University) and Haylie Swenson (GWU):
“Desiring Animal-Mediated Environments: ‘Fake’ Guide Dogs and the Work of the Pet”

Louise Hickman (University of California, San Diego):
“Distributing Crip Sociality”

M.W. Bychowski (GWU):
 “Toxic Environments: the Place and Genre of the Transgender Suicide Note”

3:30-4:45 Breakout session: “Crip/Queer Embodiments” (Media & Public Affairs 132)

Sukshma Vedere (GWU):
“Re-Writing Gender and Madness in Cereus Blooms at Night

Kevin Gotkin (University of Pennsylvania):
“Breathing Techniques”

Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell (GWU):
“Precarity and Cross-Species Identifications: Autism, Crip/Queer Bodies, and the Critique of Normative Cognition”


5:15-6:30 Roundtable: “Digital Amphibians: Parallel Lives and Media Publics” (Jack Morton Auditorium)

Sponsored by the GW Digital Humanities Institute

  • Alexis Lothian (University of Maryland), fandom, social justice, digital media 
  • David Perry (Dominican University), disability journalist and activist/author 
  • Rachel Vorona Cote, freelance writer 
  • Alice Wong (virtually from UCSF), Founder of the Disability Visibility Project

7:00 Poetry Reading (Smith Hall of Art, Gallery 102)

  • Cathy Eisenhower
  • Tolonda Henderson     
  • Mel Nichol