Crippin' Empire and (Special) Education: Disability, Eco-(In)Justice, and Transnational Solidarity

• In Event: South Asians in/and America: Engaging Solidarities, Specificities, and Intersections in Educational Research in Troubled Times

Abstract

Objectives
In this paper, I use a relational analysis to analyze the eco(in)justices that unfolded in two cities – Bhopal, India, and Flint, USA. Separated by space (continents) and time (30 years), Bhopal and Flint experienced environmental disasters that have had long-term embodied effects on their citizens. On December 2, 1984, the Union Carbide Plant that manufactured pesticides in Bhopal leaked 40 tons of deadly methyl isocynate gas into the night air killing thousands of people while thousands of others acquired cancers, illnesses, as well as physical and intellectual impairments (Kim, 2014). Around April 2014, the brackish water from the faucets in Flint was producing dangerous illnesses, allergic reactions, and high levels of lead in their children’s bloodstreams (Hannah Attisha, 2018) The focus of this paper is to map out the continuities and discontinuities at the intersection of race, class, caste, and disability that mark the eco(in)justices incurred and discuss the implications of these findings for radical curriculum/pedagogy.

Theoretical Framework
I utilize a transnational materialist disability studies perspective (Erevelles, 2011) to explain how eco(in)justice is tied to anti-black, anti-poor, casteist and ableist “histories of segregation, abandonment, and the relationships among people, property and capital” (Ranganathan, 2016).

Modes of Inquiry
Drawing on fiction, non-fiction, and mass media, I first describe the political economy of Empire that both separates and connects these two disasters and then utilize an intersectional lens to discuss the implications of this analysis for the embodied subjectivities of the survivors in both cities.

Data/Materials
The primary texts analyzed are: The Poisoned City (Clark 2018), What the Eyes Don’t See (Hanna-Attishaa, 2018), Bhopal: Anatomy of a Crisis (Shrivastava, 1992), and Animal’s People (Sinha, 2007).

Arguments
In Bhopal, more than 130,000 Dalits and Muslims living in the slums abutting the Union Carbide plant were at the epicenter of that disaster (Shrivastava, 1992). In the economically depressed city of Flint, those most impacted by the poisoned water were those who were black (55% of the city’s population) and poor (more than 40% of the population) (Clark, 2018). In both communities, the lack of adequate health care only exacerbated their precarity and, as a result, impairments resulting in disability proliferated. But much of the published literature recognizes disability only as a pathological condition for medical experimentation rather than as a historical category deployed in the service of Empire and mutually constitutive of race, class, and caste (Erevelles, 2011). By foregrounding disability, the analytical practices of “crippin’” (McRuer, 2006) not only map the oppressive workings of Empire but also envision alternative ways of be-ing and be-coming that refuse normative constructions of the human. This forging of solidarities across time and space enable the articulation of transformative curriculum/pedagogy.

Significance
The analytical practice of “crippin’” through its centering of disability opens up possibilities to build coalitions between communities (US & South Asia); both separated and connected by time and space as a result of the violence of Empire.

Author

• Nirmala Erevelles, The University of Alabama