This book brings together insights from critical disability studies, environmental sociology, and related fields to argue for a reimagining of disability grounded in material relationships between humans, the environment, and nonhuman actors. Through the proposed Environmental Disability Studies, it offers an innovative framework for understanding disability as a socionatural condition shaped by ecological, political and technological forces—ultimately calling for embracing disabled knowledge for more just futures.

Responding to urgent calls for post-disciplinary tools that advance social and environmental justice, the collection situates embodiment as an epistemic resource and interrogates how materiality, knowledge production, and power co-constitute one another. It moves beyond anthropocentric models that cast disabled bodyminds as deviant, instead foregrounding the entanglements of bodies, environments, infrastructures and toxicities. Through this lens, contributors of the collection explore justice, vulnerability, interdependence, and crip imaginaries as resources for rethinking the socionatural world. A thought-provoking contribution to contemporary debates on disability, environment, and justice, this book offers a conceptual foothold for scholars and students in disability studies, environmental sociology, STS, feminist inquiry, and related fields seeking new ways to understand embodiment, materiality, and power.

Jennifer Lai is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Vermont, USA. Her research leverages her background in agricultural engineering and feminist science studies to examine scientific knowledge production in environmental, health, and rural community settings. Her recent publications have appeared in Agriculture and Human Values and Rural Sociology.

Rebecca Monteleone is Associate Professor of disability studies at the University of Toledo and works at the intersection of critical disability studies and feminist science and technology studies. She is the author of The Double Bind of Disability: How Medical Technology Shapes Bodily Authority (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) and co-editor of Disability and Social Justice in Kenya: Scholars, Policymakers, and Activists in Conversation (University of Michigan Press, 2022).