Sociology

Over the past several years, we have been engaged in human-rights/disabilityrights activism and organizing with disabled and/or traumatized survivors who have been victims of the state violence (e.g., war, incarceration, forced migration). As we interviewed them, documented their narratives, and/or read their prison memoirs, we re-lived our own past experiences with state violence as two racialized Middle Eastern women who have experienced political arrest in Turkey and Iran. Additionally, we realized that these experiences are common in disabled/traumatized political prisoners across cultures, nationalities, and ethnicities. Given our experiences, and being Disability Studies (DS) scholars, we have developed a new model/theory to approach disability and disablement (especially) in the global southern/”third world” contexts. We have named our approach Transnational Disability Model (TDM) and have talked about it elsewhere (Kazemi, 2017). DS is an interdisciplinary field, which engages with social justice issues concerning disabled people and their participation in society, but rarely engages with disabling processes/relations that render people disabled. From the onset, it is important to clarify two features relevant to the discussion on the prevailing state of DS. First, the biggest players right now in this field are social constructionist theorists (those affiliated with the approach known as the social model of disability) employing either a cultural or material lens. Second, currently the most disputed DS model is the medical theory/model. The social model of disability and many other dominant perspectives in the field oppose the medical model or any type of rehabilitation model as they consider them part of a “normalizing” ideology (Goodley 2013). On the other hand, racialized people in the global north are rarely the topic of discussion in dominant DS, never mind the marginalized racialized peoples in the global south such as Kurdish political prisoners. This paper is a politically-necessary intervention in dominant theorization of disability as a western and global north problem in order to transform it toward a more inclusive, transnational, and politicized approach to damaged/injured human body, disablement, and disability.

Link: https://bit.ly/animaanimalia Los trabajos editados y compilados en el libro "Anima animalia: el animalismo o el coraje de devenir otro", por Anahí Gabriela González, Cassiana Lopes Stephan y Nahid Steingress-Carballa, constituyen una cartografía posible sobre los estudios de animalidad. En la primera sección, denominada "El animal, la carne y su mercantilización", se presentan los textos de Matthew Calarco, Eliza littleton, Taylor ford y David Nibert. En la segunda sección, titulada "Experiencias posthumanas entre filosofía, literatura y educación", encontramos los artículos de Maria Esther Maciel, Lauren Corman e Iván Darío Ávila Gaitán. Por último, en la sección "Formas jurídicas de una cartografía animalista: entre continuidades y rupturas ético-políticas", aparecen los trabajos de Isis Velez, Silvina Pezzetta y Corine Pelluchon. El prólogo del libro está a cargo de Andrea Torrano.

This paper bridges critical conversations regarding animal exploitation and racialized violence that have been occurring throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. We apply Claire Jean Kim’s analysis of taxonomies of power to help make sense of the interwoven multispecies catastrophes of racialized animalization and animalized racialization, such as the violence experienced by various species of nonhuman animals, as well as East Asians and other People of Colour in the West, whether in public spaces, in media, on farms, or inside industrial animal slaughterhouses or meatpacking plants. We conclude by arguing that Kim’s ethics of mutual avowal provides a productive way for social movements to recognize the connectedness of our struggles; thus, Kim’s scholarship helps us challenge the multiple dimensions of oppressive powers that have been expressed and experienced in the COVID-19 crisis.

This paper engages with Ghassan Hage's concepts of 'ungovernable waste' and 'generalized domestication' to think critically about the sociopolitical position and futures of farmed animals in the context of ongoing climate and ecological crises. Against the erasure of farmed animal subjectivities, we posit that there is much to learn by turning to farmed animals as sources of wisdom, as unique knowers with lessons to teach us about extinction. We consider how Andil Gosine's radical suggestion to embrace animality as a refusal of the civilizing discourses of colonialism, and as an act of solidarity with nonhuman animals, constitutes a critical step towards realizing multispecies justice and a move towards interspecies solidarity with farmed animals. Here Gosine provokes us to reconsider our attitudes towards animals facing extinction in varying contexts under colonial-capitalism.