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Biology and the environmental movement have a eugenics problem. Eugenics has also been gaining ground in public policy and discourse in many parts of the world lately, with scientists, policymakers, physicians, wellness influencers, and techbros alike increasingly posing it as a solution to intensifying socio-ecological crises. But what do disabled people and others in the crosshairs of this ideology — those of us who are ”unwell to begin with,” according to this logic — have to say about nature and the not-so-natural disasters reverberating across our communities? What lessons do crip knowledge, creativity, joy, and practices of interdependence offer urgently right now? Taking love for crip and allied communities as our starting place, we talk to people with diverse expertise about how they understand socio-ecological problems and challenge eugenic “solutions” in their environmental thinking and politics. This work is funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant of the Canadian government.
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"These shared resonances which are often infantilized and dismissed as 'special interests' or 'infodumping' are actually intensities of knowledge and knowledge creation that we can sort of... refract off each other in ways that I think promote really interesting formations of knowledge."
Welcome to Unwell to Begin With, a podcast about the eugenics problem in biology and the environmental movement, and what disabled people and others at the receiving end of this ideology have to say about it. Or, to put it less bleakly: where we talk to disabled people and others about what crip knowledge and care practices have to offer in this moment of intensifying social and ecological crisis. For this first episode, host Mollie Holmberg (she/her) talks to Audra Mitchell (she/her and they/them) at the Balsillie School of International Affairs about why crip knowledge systems belong in fields like International Relations and environmental studies; uncomfy feelings about the category of disability; how policing gets normalized in classroom spaces and leads to things like students sending selfies from the ER; and why crip politics is about a lot more than just disability.
Audra's latest book is Revenant Ecologies: Defying the Violence of Extinction and Conservation (University of Minnesota Press).
Links to other work and websites discussed in the show:
- Audra's piece on ecolalia, Autistic worlding and alternative eco-political futures in Environment and Planning E (open access)
- Nick Walker's work on neurotypicality, neurodiversity, and neuroqueering
- Jasbir Puar's The Right to Maim
- Mel Chen et al.'s Crip Genealogies
- Sins Invalid's 10 Principles of Disability Justice
- Sami Schalk's Black Disability Politics
- Kathy Absolon's work on Indigenous resurgence
- Devon Price's Laziness Does Not Exist
- Robert McRuer's work on crip theory
- Margaret Price's latest book on being disabled in academia
- adrienne maree brown's writing on abolition
- J. Logan Smilges's Crip Negativity
- Sunaura Taylor's latest book
- Clay Aldern's book on climate change and neurology
- Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's books on crip survival and care strategies
- Emi Koyama's work on "feminism, sexual and domestic violence, sex work/trade and trafficking, queer and trans liberation, intersex and disability issues"
- Lauren Berlant on cruel optimism
- Francesca Albanese's October 2024 report to the UN General Assembly
- gazafunds.com
- Investigative reporting by The Maple on the Canadian settler state's role in the global arms trade (1) (2) (3) (4)
If you have any comments or questions about the show, you can reach us at nomorelawnmowers@proton.me
Transcript by Aadita Chaudhury, PhD Candidate in Science and Technology Studies at York University.
* Correction: This work is funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant, not a SSHRC Insight Development Grant
Theme music for the show is roswell by Fog Lake off the Free Music Archive and licensed under CC BY 4.0.