ESPM 262A
Disability Studies and Environmental Scholarship
This course utilizes critical disability studies scholarship to explore the political, social, and cultural stakes of environmental narratives of health. Disabled people are disproportionately affected by climate change and other environmental harms. At the same time, disability and illness are lived experiences that have played significant roles in the emergence of environmental justice and health movements. This course analyzes various lived experiences of disability in relationship to ecology, while also understanding that disability is also a method, a world making concept that impacts not only human bodies but the more than human world.
Topics
- The objectives of the course are to develop an understanding of the key concepts emerging from the fields of disability studies and disability justice; to identify the ways in which cultural beliefs about disability are shaped by social, economic, and political structures; and to develop an understanding of the philosophical and political stakes of thinking critically about disability and ableism in connection to environmental issues and. Here are some objectives: To read critically, carefully, generously, creatively, and playfully; To develop questions of and from course materials; To develop an understanding of the key concepts emerging from the field of disability studies and disability justice. To identify the ways in which cultural beliefs about disability are shaped in relation to other categories of human difference
Official catalogue course objectives and student learning outcomes
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026-2027