Bodies that Matter: Environmental Histories of Disability in the United States

This course places two stories side-by-side: changing experiences and conceptions of disability in the United States and changing experiences and conceptions of the nonhuman environment. Reading scholarship in environmental and disability history and relying on a diverse array of primary sources from memoirs to comic books, this course traces relationships between bodies, minds, and land in the U.S. over the past 200 years. Through histories of slavery, animal labor, wilderness conservation, eugenics, atomic radiation, disability and environmental activism, and COVID-19, we will ask how human and nonhuman bodies were made and unmade in processes of environmental change indoors and out, how the political meanings of disability, incapacity, and productivity were constructed over time, and what a just future for disabled life and the nonhuman world might entail."