Toward a Cripistemology of Eco-Anxiety

Abstract

The article proposes a cripistemology of eco-anxiety that critiques a white, cis-heteronormative, ableist form of ignorance that characterizes mainstream concerns about eco-anxious youth, including what the article suggests are the ecofascist tendencies of this ignorance. Rather than deny the debilitating effects that anxiety can have, the focus here is on an individualized and depoliticized mainstream approach to eco-anxiety that operates as a form of epistemic injustice even as it expresses care and concern for the well-being of those who are eco-anxious. Furthermore, the article critiques the ableist assumption that because it can be debilitating, eco-anxiety cannot also be lived in ways that generate important insights for learning to live otherwise in a context of climate change—or, put differently, the ableist assumption that disabled body-minds are only epistemic objects and never epistemic subjects. The suggestion is that a cripistemology of eco-anxiety attends to the possibility of this queer-crip wisdom.