Planning ahead: Toward a critical, environmental, just, and action-oriented planning theory, practice, and journal

The Intersectionality of Critical Animal, Disability, and Environmental Studies:Toward Eco-ability, Justice, and Liberation is an interdisciplinary collection of theoretical writings on the intersectional liberation of nonhuman animals, the environment, and those with disabilities. As animal consumption raises health concerns and global warming causes massive environmental destruction, this book interweaves these issues and more. This important cutting-edge book lends to the rapidly growing movement of eco-ability, a scholarly field and activist movement influenced by environmental studies, disability studies, and critical animal studies, similar to other intersectional fields and movements such as eco-feminism, environmental justice, food justice, and decolonization. Contributors to this book are in the fields of education, philosophy, sociology, criminology, rhetoric, theology, anthropology, and English. If you are interested in social justice, inclusion, environmental protection, disability rights, and animal advocacy this is a must read book.

Critical and communication studies have traditionally neglected the oppression conducted by humans towards other animals. However, our (mis)treatment of other animals is the result of public consent supported by a morally speciesist-anthropocentric system of values. Speciesism or anthroparchy, as much as any other mainstream ideologies, feeds the media and at the same time is perpetuated by them. The goal of this article is to remedy this neglect by introducing the subdiscipline of Critical Animal and Media Studies. Critical Animal and Media Studies takes inspiration both from critical animal studies – which is so far the most consolidated critical field of research in the social sciences addressing our exploitation of other animals – and from the normative-moral stance rooted in the cornerstones of traditional critical media studies. The authors argue that the Critical Animal and Media Studies approach is an unavoidable step forward for critical media and communication studies to engage with the expanded circle of concerns of contemporary ethical thinking.

In this chapter I examine conversations within critical animal studies that claim agency for animals exhibited in the zoo and circus and conversations within critical disability studies that claim agency for disabled humans exhibited in the freak show. This cross-movement analysis reveals commonalities within critical animal studies and critical disability studies discourse that work to challenge dominant narratives of non-agency and voicelessness that surround these institutions of display. This analysis highlights two distinct models of agency relied upon to assert agency: critical animal studies presents a model of agency associated with the physical resistance of animals, and critical disability studies presents a model of agency associated with the rational decision-making of disabled freak show performers. I argue that these models of agency exclude certain animals and humans from critical claims to agency. A cross-movement analysis exposes these gaps, encouraging us to imagine more nuanced models of agency and ask how those excluded from discussions of agency may have lived as more-than-victim.

Critical disability studies has been accused of preoccupation with cultural, lingual and discursive matters, and in doing so failing to adequately engage with the often-harsh material reality of disability. This has contributed to a circumstance in which disability studies has produced a lack of material focused directly upon economic processes. Concurrently, disabled people have encountered a momentous economic recession that has threatened their basic economic and human rights. This article seeks to address what is evidently a gap in the burgeoning critical disability and disability studies literature. That is, a gap largely uninhabited by attempts to apply a critical disability studies perspective to macro-economic processes. The article focuses predominantly on two facets of critical disability studies as identified by Goodley: the self and other, and intersectionality. The article concludes that critical disability studies has much to offer through the production of new understandings of economic processes.

An essential read for activists, community organizers, and justice scholars Critical Animal Studies and Social Justice: Critical Theory, Dismantling Speciesism, and Total Liberation is a collection that combines scholarship and activism in nine ground-breaking and provocative chapters. The book includes contributions from around the world influenced by critical theory, feminism, social justice, political theory, media studies, environmental justice, food justice, disability studies, and Black liberation. By promoting total liberation and liberatory politics, these essays challenge the reader to think about new approaches to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. The contributors examine and disrupt many of the exclusionary assumptions and behaviors by those working toward justice and liberation, encouraging the reader to reflect on their own thoughts and actions.

An essential read for activists, community organizers, and justice scholars Critical Animal Studies and Social Justice: Critical Theory, Dismantling Speciesism, and Total Liberation is a collection that combines scholarship and activism in nine ground-breaking and provocative chapters. The book includes contributions from around the world influenced by critical theory, feminism, social justice, political theory, media studies, environmental justice, food justice, disability studies, and Black liberation. By promoting total liberation and liberatory politics, these essays challenge the reader to think about new approaches to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. The contributors examine and disrupt many of the exclusionary assumptions and behaviors by those working toward justice and liberation, encouraging the reader to reflect on their own thoughts and actions.

This and the subsequent papers in this special issue set out the contours of Marxian urban political ecology and call for greater research attention to a neglected field of critical research that, given its political importance, requires urgent attention. Notwithstanding the important contributions of other critical perspectives on urban ecology, Marxist urban political ecology provides an integrated and relational approach that helps untangle the interconnected economic, political, social and ecological processes that together go to form highly uneven and deeply unjust urban landscapes. Because the power‐laden socioecological relations that shape the formation of urban environments constantly shift between groups of actors and scales, historical‐geographical insights into these ever‐changing urban configurations are necessary for the sake of considering the future of radical political‐ecological urban strategies. The social production of urban environments is gaining recognition within radical and historical‐materialist geography. The political programme, then, of urban political ecology is to enhance the democratic content of socioenvironmental construction by identifying the strategies through which a more equitable distribution of social power and a more inclusive mode of environmental production can be achieved.

This article examines a debate regarding future orientations for the field of Urban Political Ecology (UPE). Anchored in two UPE discourses toward a more planetary or a more situated UPE, I argue that these discourses present two critical yet independent responses to early UPE scholarship, opening up the possibility for a more synthesising position. Building off of this debate as well as some of UPE's intellectual traditions, I then argue for a rapprochement between UPE and the field of critical logistics, using the 2022 expansion of the IJmuiden sea lock in the Netherlands as an illustrative case for demonstrating how applying the combined theoretical and methodological insights of UPE and critical logistics can turn a seemingly mundane sea lock infrastructure into a key site from which to draw out the political stakes of urban and climate futures as they play out in a city like Amsterdam. A closer engagement with critical logistics can not only extend UPE's existing themes and empirical focal points, but also attend to theoretical tensions regarding the politics of scale and place central to the debate between a more planetary and a more situated UPE. Finally, I argue that this rapprochement is not only theoretical and methodological but also political, as the wealth of work in critical logistics on articulating a counterlogistics can help UPE expand its political project in a time of climate emergency and interlocking capitalist crises.

In what sense might urban political ecology be regarded as an expanded field? In this brief article, I emphasize how urban political ecology has the capacity to build conceptual bridges between the bio-physical sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. I suggest that urban political ecology is uniquely positioned to bring together material insights at different spatial scales, linking intricate local topographies with more distant extractive frontiers and zoonotic transfer zones. If urban political ecology wishes to engage with pluriversal ecologies, however, it will need to adopt a more eclectic and less deterministic conceptual framework. A more embodied vantage point can also develop links between neo-Marxian approaches and newly emerging fields such as critical phenomenology, critical toxicology, and multispecies ethnographies.

Disability Bioethics:From Theory to Practice Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (bio) What has come to be called critical disability studies is an emergent field of academic research, teaching, theory building, public scholarship, and something I'll call "educational advocacy." The critical part of critical disability studies suggests its alignment with areas of intellectual inquiry, sometimes awkwardly called identity studies, rooted in the political and social transformations of the mid-20th century brought forward by the broad civil and human rights movement. These movements pressed both the law and the social order toward an expansion of rights for people previously marginalized or excluded from full participation in exercising the obligations and benefits of equal citizenship. The ideas of equality and equal access for all that propelled the broad U.S. civil rights movement led to the legal desegregation of schools in the mid-20th century and changed the composition of the learning environment; with that came changes in what counted as knowledge in educational settings. In other words, when people excluded from the educational environment were included, knowledge about who we are as a community expanded along with that. Beginning, then, in the U.S. in the early 1970s, new knowledge perspectives and bodies of knowledge began to emerge, first perhaps as women's studies, African-American studies, then as critical race theory, feminist theory, queer theory, and more recently, critical disability studies. So while critical disability studies is a sister to women's and gender studies or critical race studies, it is distinctive in several ways. First, it grew out of a civil rights movement in the United States that was stealth in comparison to the women's movement or the black civil rights movement.1 The social justice that the disability rights movement achieved moved forward largely through desegregation laws and policies carried out through changes in the built environment. For people with disabilities to be integrated into the educational system required not just opening previously closed doors, but retrofitting schools with the technologies that people with disabilities needed to be present and to learn. To be integrated into public transportation, cultural institutions, [End Page 323] spaces of citizen practice, and the marketplace required building and rebuilding sidewalks, buses, train cars, voting booths, paths, businesses, restaurants, not only to ramp public and private space but to develop technology—from curb cuts to software, prosthetics, lifts, automated devices, to signage. Indeed all built and designed material aspects of the world we share and use together were transformed so that people with disabilities entered into places and institutions from which we had been excluded not only through discriminatory attitudes but through the very way that we built that shared world. As with all integration initiatives in modern liberal democracies, when excluded populations enter into previously segregated spaces and institutions, everything changes. The work of critical disability studies, carried out largely as a research- and knowledge-building enterprise in higher education, has been to document that transformation of the social order and communal consciousness through the varied lenses of knowing that are our academic disciplines. The human variations that we call disabilities have always been the target of research and analysis, but until interdisciplinary critical disability studies arose as I have described it above, these ways of being in the world, the people who bear them, and the culture they make have been the objects of narrow focus in medical science and health studies.2 Critical disability studies has in one sense been a corrective to this limited understanding of the enduring human experience of what we think of as disability. By aiming the perspectives and knowledge tools of the humanities and social sciences toward disability in its most pervasive manifestations—from concept to history, data, culture, human experience, narrative, theory, and aesthetic expression—the academic world broadly defined has illuminated disability and in doing so made it new for all of us who have encountered the perspectives and knowledge that is interdisciplinary critical disability studies.3 The tasks and accomplishments of interdisciplinary critical disability studies have been pervasive in the educational environment beyond medical and health sciences and have influenced the attitudes and actions of people introduced to the field as they...

The complexity of dementia has given rise to critical dementia studies, a field that seeks to ‘think dementia differently’. In this chapter, I contend that to think dementia differently, it is important to engage in radical and disruptive collaborations with critical disability studies and other critical fields, recognise convergences between dementia and other social identities and locations, and co-conspire with feminist, anti-racist, postcolonial, queercrip movements. Despite Alison Kafer’s call for political, relational affinities and flexible alliances between disability and other social justice movements, there has been little to no collusion or coalition-building between critical disability studies and critical dementia studies. I argue that integrating critical disability studies and critical dementia studies is essential and has the radical potential to create crucial coalitions that can change the social, political, and economic landscape for people with dementia and other devalued bodyminds. Building on Julie Avril Minich’s and Sami Schalk and Jina B. Kim’s work framing critical disability studies as a methodology rather than a subject area devoted exclusively to the study of disabled people, I explore the radical potentiality of placing critical disability studies and critical dementia studies in conversation. Specifically, convergences between these critical fields traverse disciplinary boundaries, uncover new critical analyses of dementia, old age, disability, and care, and expand possibilities for radical coalition-building. To illustrate, I consider how critical disability studies theories, perspectives, and frameworks may be applied in new ways to dementia. Specifically, I focus on mental disability, bodymind, debility, and crip-of-colour critique. In doing so, I elucidate how such an intersection furthers our understanding of the lived experiences of people with dementia, illuminates the structural and societal changes needed to work towards the collective liberation, and contributes to the emerging field of critical dementia studies.

Urban political ecology has conceptualized the city as a process of urbanization rather than a bounded site. Yet, in practice, the majority of urban political ecology literature has focused on sites within city limits. This tension in urban political ecology evokes broader conversations in urban geography around city-as-place versus urbanization-as-process. In this paper, I bring an urban political ecology analysis to examine co-constitutive urbanization and ruralization processes, focusing on sites beyond city boundaries in three empirical case studies located within the broader hydrosocial territory of urban Southern California. By focusing on the rural components of hydrosocial territories, I show that each of the three case studies has been shaped in very different ways based on its enrollment within urban Southern California’s hydrosocial territory; in turn, the rural has also shaped the cities through flows of politics and resources. The paper demonstrates how urban political ecology can be usefully applied to understand rural places, illustrating how processes of urbanization can be involved in the production of distinctly rural—and distinctly different—landscapes. The cases demonstrate the utility of urban political ecology as an analytical framework that can examine co-constitutive urbanization/ruralization processes and impacts while maintaining enough groundedness to highlight place-based differences.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Sustainable Development and Environmental Justice in African Cities

Over the last 20 years, urban political ecology has made substantial contributions to the study of urban ‘socionatures’, part of the field's aim of applying political ecology to urban space. At the same time, urban political ecology has been limited by a perspective that tends to confine urbanisation to urban spatial forms; a conflation of process and site. The city is seen to be made by and for urban metabolism, disconnected from both rural and global socionatures. This paper offers a small, empirical corrective, based on a case study of Cambodian re‐urbanisation under the Khmer Rouge. The Cambodian genocide began with the capture of the capital, Phnom Penh, by Khmer Rouge forces in April 1975. According to the standard narrative, the subsequent destruction of urban infrastructure and forced evacuation of residents is a historical case of ‘urbicide’ and reflects a broader interpretation of the Khmer Rouge as ideologically ‘anti‐urban’. Using documentary evidence, this paper reconstructs the functional role of Cambodia's network of cities under the Khmer Rouge. Contrary to the narrative, we find that cities were not destroyed. Rather, urban sociospatial practices, forms and rural–urban relations were reorganised to support the demands of rice production for foreign exchange and facilitate the administration of violence. This pragmatic reconstruction challenges claims of urbicide and contradicts the narrative of ‘dead cities’ and ‘ghost towns’. Most importantly, it challenges urban political ecology's city‐centrism: the processes that reanimated Cambodia's cities were the same ones that transformed rural space and motivated the evacuation of cities in the first place. Cambodian re‐urbanisation accompanied re‐ruralisation, a dialectic propelled by the transition to state capitalism. In this light, we encourage an urban political ecology that looks beyond the city's cadastral limits and engages those political ecologies within which the urban is situated.

In this chapter, we analyse the torture scene in King Lear, arguing that metaphors of animality and enslavement attach to Cornwall’s unnamed servant in order to mitigate his attempts to intervene and stop the violence. Though a minor character, the servant’s fate reveals a wider map of power than the play is invested in representing. Furthermore, the insults hurled at him by Regan and Cornwall symbolically link animals with enslaved people and both with precarity and superfluity. Called both a dog and a slave by Regan and Cornwall, killed and tossed on a dunghill outside of Gloucester’s home, Cornwall’s servant’s death provides a useful opportunity to connect recent scholarship in premodern critical race studies with critical animal studies and critical disability studies.