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Afrofuturism

Misria

Sylvia Wynter (2003) suggests that our current struggles in Western colonized society regarding racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, ethnicism, climate change, environmental destruction, and the unequal distribution of resources are rooted in what she argues is the overrepresentation of the descriptive statement of Man as human, which only recognizes white, wealthy, able-bodied, heterosexual men as "human." As such, just as I argue Black feminist writers and scholars have drawn on speculative methods and Afrofuturism, the use of twentieth-century technology and speculative imagination to address issues within Black and African diasporic communities (see Dery & Dery, 1994), to insist on and explore the full humanity of Black girls, women, and femmes, so too have Black and African diasporic scholars called on Afrofuturism to imagine new ways technology and traditional knowledge practices can address environmental injustice. Suékama (2018) argues that as a form of resistant knowledge building and theorizing, an Afrofuturist approach to environmentalism “integrates speculation with the ecological and scientific, and the spiritual or metaphysical'' to make our environmental justice less European, male, human, (and I would add capitalist) centered. Thus, an Afrofuturist approach to environmental injustice asks us to think about our collective struggle for environmental justice as a part of and connected to other forms of systemic oppression rooted in the rejection of African diasporic and Indigenous people and their knowledge practices through the overrepresentation of Man as human in Western society. In this way, a speculative and Afrofuturist approach to environmental injustice draws on African diasporic knowledge practices in conjunction with modern and traditional technologies to imagine new solutions to environmental injustice that center the needs, values, and traditional practices of African diasporic people.

Peterson-Salahuddin, Chelsea. 2023. "An Afrofuturist Approach to Unsettling Environmental injustice." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

Poetry and scientific text

Johanna Storz

What I find really noteworthy in this text is how Julia Watts Belser takes the poem by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and includes it into a scientific text. In this way, she not only allows an affected person to have her say, the poem also leaves the reader with a very striking image of the connection between the river and the body, in multiple ways, as well as the connection between enviromental harm and disability.

Disability, environmental harm and diagnoses

Johanna Storz

The text was published in 2020 (Vol. 40, No. 4) by The Ohio State University Libraries in their Journal Disability Studies Quarterly (DSQ). It is, as you can read on their Homepage "a multidisciplinary and international journal of interest to social scientists, scholars in the humanities and arts, disability rights advocates, and others concerned with the issues of people with disabilities. It represents the full range of methods, epistemologies, perspectives, and content that the field of disability studies embraces. DSQ is committed to developing theoretical and practical knowledge about disability and to promoting the full and equal participation of persons with disabilities in society."

The author connects disability theories and activism with environmental justice, this approach allows her to show how disability is related to and through environmental harm, she shows how diagnoses are used politically in these cases, and looks critically at how these processes determine how, when and in what favor human and environmental harm is taken into account. The writing is shaped by the consequences of the Anthropocene like environmental harm linked to health isusses, especially affected are communities of color and poor communities in the United States, here pre-existing patters of structural inequality, already known from climate change come into play,  this communities are the most affected and the least responsible.


The intersection of disability studies and environmental justice movement

ATroitzsch

I think what is very striking in this text, is the author puts her perspective of the disability studies and uses it to draw lines from the disability studies, more particular the queer black disability studies, to the environmental justice movement. From reading the text, I think one can see, that Julia Belser is very involved in disability studies and the field of critical medicine/ psychology. The way she describes that we should turn away from always seeking to get (back) the pure nature, the healthy environment, the "healthy" body, she reminded me of the general idea of overcoming pure categories (for example Latour etc.) - and dualisms. Additionally, I think one could locate her in the area of inequality studies and the field analyzing structural violence.