Culture as Ability: Organizing Enabling Educative Spaces for Humans and Animals

Abstract

Drawing on a multispecies ethnographic encounter with a physically disabled feral kitten, Whiskey, I take an intersectional theoretical approach to place disability studies in conversation with ecofeminist perspectives. In so doing I ask: How does a culture that produces disabled and unwanted humans render animals deserving of the same label? And how might we reconfigure this culture through "retying knots" in educational spaces so as to divest animals of these labels? To conclude, I draw on a vignette from my own ethnographic research and teaching at the university level to offer possibilities for "enabling" cultural work in educational settings that explicitly draws on and engages ecofeminist and disability studies paradigms.