Enabling and Disabling the Ecosystem
My research group?s focus is ability studies and we are cultural ability expectation and ableism researchers. Anthropologists engage with various ability expectations and ableism, (eg, anthropology of consumption:?Douglas, M and BC Isherwood.?The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. Psychology Press, 1996) and they engage around the ableism experienced by disabled people, however, I submit that an anthropology of ability expectations and ableism where one looks through this lens at societies and cultures is not very visible.
The fields of disability studies and disabled activism were the first to look at cultural dynamics and the cultural impact of ability preferences, coining the term ableism (Various Authors.?Encyclopedia of Disability.?Ed.?Gary L Albrecht. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publisher, 2006, 15 April 2012) as a cultural concept in the process.? The term ableism was coined to question species-typical, normative body ability expectations and the prejudice and discrimination experienced by people whose body ability functioning?s were labelled as impaired and in need of being fixed towards the normative body (Carlson, Licia. ?Cognitive Ableism and Disability Studies: Feminist Reflections on the History of Mental Retardation.??Hypatia 16.4 (2001): 124-46; Fiona A.K.Campbell. ?Inciting Legal Fictions: ?Disability?s? Date with Ontology and the Ableist Body of the Law.??Griffith Law Review 10.1 (2001): 42;?Overboe, James. ?Vitalism: Subjectivity Exceeding Racism, Sexism, and (Psychiatric) Ableism.??Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women?s and Gender Studies 4.2 [2007]: 23-34).
However, ableism is a much broader phenomenon. Every individual, household, community, group, sector, region, and country cherishes and promotes numerous abilities and often these ability expectations (want stage) morph into forms of ableism where one not only desires or expects certain abilities but one perceives a given ability as essential (need stage) (Wolbring, Gregor. ?Expanding Ableism: Taking down the Ghettoization of Impact of Disability Studies Scholar.??Societies 2.3 [2012]: 75-83.; Wolbring, Gregor. ?The Politics of Ableism.??Development 51.2 [2008a]: 252-58; Wolbring, Gregor. ?Why NBIC?? Why Human Performance Enhancement???Innovation; The European Journal of Social Science Research 21.1 [2008b]: 25-40). What abilities one favours and what ableisms one exhibits impacts how one perceives oneself, how one is perceived by others, how one relates to other species, and it also impacts human-nature relationships (Wolbring, Gregor. ?Ableism and energy security and insecurity.??Studies in Ethics, Law, and Technology 5.1 [2011]: Article 3).
My research group? has employed the ability expectation and ableism framework to critically examine issues around energy security and insecurity, climate change discourse, waste and footprints, education for sustainable development, and water discourse, among other topics (to access our work see here www.crds.org/research/faculty/Gregor_Wolbring.shtml).
As to the human-environment relationship, I introduce here the concept of Eco-ableism as a conceptual framework to analyse enabling and disabling human ability desires for the environment. Different cultural understandings of the relationship between humans and nature come with different ability expectations and the exhibition of different forms of ableism (Wolbring, Gregor. ?Ableism and energy security and insecurity.??Studies in Ethics, Law, and Technology 5.1 [2011]: Article 3). Ability expectations and ableism are useful additions to the analysis of ecological dynamics. This framework allows us to anticipate whether various ecological movements are at odds or synergetic with each other (indeed different ecological movements have different ability expectations). Ecological discourse within different cultures or societies varies due to differences in ability expectations within these cultures or societies. Employing the ability expectation lens allows one to ascertain whether different parties in a dispute can come to an ecological agreement.
I submit that ability expectations and ableism, as an analytical lens, can be used in an inter-, trans- and intra- disciplinarily way to generate policies and advance the relationship between humans and their environment. The lens of ability expectation and ableism is one essential aspect for analysing existing and future cultural dynamics of various ecologies, and that lens can seed new discourses, perspectives and paradigms. I see ableism as an essential cultural concept one has to engage with given that the many ecological challenges and solutions societies and individuals face now and in the are driven by ability expectations.
Gregor Wolbring is associate professor in the Faculty of Medicine and Department of Community Health Sciences at University of Calgary.
Please send A&E news and reports to Amelia Moore is contributing editor of the Anthropology and Environment Section?s AN column.
Source: http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2012/09/14/eco-ableism/
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