Onto-epistemic entanglements and ecological grief: Toward a Theory of Crip Posthumanism


Kim Collins, University of Toronto

Climate change is a systemic set of issues challenging humans to rethink relationality and emotionality. The unrelenting urgency of these systemic issues can elicit emotional, embodied, and affective reactions. While there is an ever-growing lexicon of ecological emotions, experiences of loss and grief are central. This presentation posits that entangling crip theory and critical posthumanism offers a generative framework for rethinking ecological grief and radical relationality in the wake of environmental degradation and climate change. Grounded in a politics of location, a rejection of compulsory able-bodiedness/able-mindedness, crip posthumanism, offers possibilities for interdependent and relational ways of being and knowing in the world together. Emerging from the convergence of these theoretical traditions, crip posthumanism challenges humanistic traditions, is attentive to difference and understands the dynamic co-constituted emotion of relationality. Through this framing, crip posthumanism enables a consideration of the felt aspect of becoming as a needed and necessary disruption rather than a medicalized, pathologized, or disenfranchised emotional state. This argument is made in three parts: first a discussion of politicization and medicalization of grief is offered followed by linkages to ecological grief. Next, cartographies of critical posthumanism and crip theory are entangled and applied as a generative theoretical framework for rethinking ecological grief. Lastly, crip posthumanism is employed to offer a reframing–or a cripping–of ecological grief. As we–humans and more-than-humans–are currently living through and are differentially implicated in the climate crisis, research on ecological grief as an emotional and affective response to climate change requires attention to emotionality without defaulting to pathologization or medicalization. Crip posthumanism offers a novel approach through which to explore emotional and affective responses to climate change. In sum, applying crip posthumanism as a framework for understanding ecological grief works across scales and offers possibilities for engaging with human-more-than-human relationality through the generative disruption that affective intra-actions engender.

This paper will be presented at the following session: