October 23, 2026
11th Annual Ecoability Conference
Building a global ecoability movement intersecting disability, animals, and the environment for justice, advocacy, peace, and liberation.
Family Friendly – Zoom – Free – Public
Register Here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/OnAhl8AKSPiDFfs909Th2w
Chair:
Jennifer Salerno
Introduction and Welcoming Remarks – 1:00 pm EST
Jennifer Salerno
Biography: Dr. Jennifer Salerno is an early childhood educator, scholar, and scholar-activist whose work centers autocritical disability studies and critical, transformative autoethnography. Based in Baltimore, Maryland, her scholarship bridges theory, lived experience, and justice-oriented praxis, examining disability as relational, ecological, and politically situated. Her research integrates Critical Disability Studies, ecoability, posthumanist theory, and transformative learning theory to interrogate ableism, embodiment, interdependence, and relationships with nature. Through critical and transformative autoethnography, Jennifer positions narrative as both method and analytic tool, exploring how lived experience can challenge dominant epistemologies and generate new ways of understanding disability, education, and relational life. Jennifer’s work takes a transdisciplinary approach to disability, education, and ecology, examining how relationships between humans and nature shape experiences of ability and belonging. Across her scholarship, teaching, and advocacy, she is committed to advancing pedagogies and research practices grounded in interdependence and social and environmental justice.
Presenter One
Title: “No Score in the Snow: Whistles, Warning, and Schizodemocrazy Poetics through Cage, Agamben, and Deleuze in Minneapolis”
Presenter: Lucas Alan Dietsche
Abstract: Anti-ICE whistles in the ice-cold air in the winter of Minneapolis, Minnesota needs no practice, no performance, no score, only occurring for listeners, as an “audience” as a warning. This paper discusses anti-ICE whistles as audible clarion events arriving without preface and leaves without decrescendo. The whistles serve as the ongoing collective response to Immigration and Customs Enforcement(ICE) in Operation “Metro Surge” that happened between December 2025 to February 2026. When activated, whistles oscillating and reverberating shrilling noise act without prompt concentrating on the sonic sequence. To give context, Figure 1 is a photograph of the whistle only to show an example of the anti-ICE whistle and discussion of its form or shape is not part of this project (Figure 1). I will describe this whistle’s sound through John Cage’s indeterminacy of sound and the concept of approximation, using Giorgio Agamben pushing sound toward meaning, and Gilles Deleuze as the whistles are further read as a sensational bodily force. Through Cage, the whistle is heard not as art expression but as sound as warning of ICE as an occupying force and then the sound vanishing into the ice-cold air. On the contrary, Agamben pushes sound toward meaning, toward the edge where voice is seized by this alerting signification. To promote this warning in this urban space as cacophony of sound to join in, we use the term “schizodemocrazy” influenced by Deleuze’s “schizoanalyisis” as dispersed mode of coordination without centralized command. In this acoustic commons, listening becomes action, producing a responsive “schizodemocrazic” warning, care, and collective endurance.
Biography: Lucas Alan Dietsche is a poet, writer, artist, educator, and PhD student in Philosophy and Aesthetics whose work explores poetic inquiry, concealment, criminal justice, and transformative justice. Diagnosed with Schizotypal Personality Disorder, he develops Getzner, an experimental poetic movement combining surrealism, absurdity, mysticism, philosophy, and anti-poetry. His work explores the Blur as a space of unstable identities and alternative ways of experiencing the world. Dietsche has taught for over five years through Adams State University’s Prisoner Education Program and has spent more than two decades in activism and organizing. He edits the Transformative Justice Journal and works across poetry, fiction, visual art, and curatorial practice.
Q and A
Presenter Two
Title: Metastable Cognitive Drift: Anomaly and Earth as Recursive Archive
Presenter: Justin Gallant
Abstract: This presentation develops Metastable Cognitive Drift as a way of thinking disability, ecology, and cognition beyond the sovereign individual. Drawing on Simondon, Caillois, crip ecology, and anarchist critiques of hierarchy, I explore how bodies, environments, infrastructures, memory, and other organisms participate in cognition together. Using the Recursive Zero Point field archive, I treat anomaly not as noise to be removed, but as something that can expose the limits of supposedly normal systems. Slime mold, fungi, scars, cities, and rivers become ways of thinking distributed intelligence, environmental mediation, and Earth as a recursive archive that remembers through transformation. For Ecoability, the central claim is that disability is not a metaphor for planetary damage. Rather, disabled and neurodivergent experience can make visible the dependencies, access needs, and interrelations that supposedly autonomous subjects are often allowed to ignore.
Biography: Justin Gallant is a nonbinary philosopher and writer pursuing a PhD in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory at IDSVA. They write about images, post-reality, neurodivergence, and carceral time. They are a Rogue Community College and Adams State University faculty while teaching philosophy in a prison education program, and edit for Transformative Justice Journal. Their writing has appeared in Peace Studies Journal, Monograph Mag, Poetries in English, Re*Mediate, and Transformative Justice Journal, and they have presented at SLSA, TJJ, Temporalities of AI, Anarchist Studies Network, and SECAC. They live in Southern Oregon.
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Presenter Four
Title: From Assumption to Inquiry: A Comparative True Price Analysis of AI and Animal Agriculture
Presenter: Dr. Jesika Keener
Abstract: Drawing on a chapter written for an upcoming Ecoability book, this presentation begins with frustration over calls to boycott artificial intelligence (AI) for environmental reasons while overlooking animal agriculture. That frustration becomes an inquiry into the assumptions behind the comparison through True Price, a humane education framework that examines how everyday choices affect ourselves, other people, fellow animals, and the planet. The presentation explores both systems’ benefits, hidden costs, supporting structures, and possible alternatives, connecting critical inquiry with more humane, inclusive, and ecologically sound choices.
Biography: Grounded in a commitment to total liberation, Jesika (she/her) sees education as a catalyst for cultivating compassion and interconnectedness with all beings. Her work focuses on fostering spaces that reflect these values and empower others to pursue meaningful change. Jesika advances humane education through leadership and scholarship, serving on the Executive Board of Directors for the Institute for Critical Animal Studies and the Board of Directors for the Association of Professional Humane Educators. In addition to these leadership roles, her ongoing work includes writing and presenting on humane education and critical animal studies.
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Presenter Five
Title: “Get Used To Different” ®: Centering Autistic Adults in Environmental and Animal Protection
Presenter: Daniel Salomon
Abstract: Salomon picks-up where he left off in his critique of white autistic adult self-advocate Temple Grandin in Anthony Nocella and Amber George’s Vegans on Speciesism and Ableism: Ecoability Voices for Disability and Animal Justice Vol. 9. In Salomon’s latest chapter, Salomon attempts to offer a non-exploitive alternative to put in place of Grandin’s internalized ableism, speciesism and white supremacy for centering autistic adult self-advocates in the animal and environmental protection movements. Grandin claims that all autistic self-advocates have to offer is that autistic adult self-advocates bring superpowers to the animal and environmental protection movements (Salomon, 2022, pp. 29-32). Salomon is going to claim that autistic adult self-advocates have more to offer than bringing savant abilities to the animal and environmental protection movements.Salomon is going to make the case that autistic adult self-advocates bring an additional disability justice perspective to animal and environmental protection. That including autistic adult self-advocates in animal and environmental protection is the ethically and morally right thing to do.
Biography: Daniel Salomon is a doctoral student at Portland State University (PSU) who is specializing in Environment and Critical Disability with a focus on neurodiverse adults, who passed his comprehensive exams earlier this year and is currently working on his dissertation proposal. Salomon is also a 46-year early diagnosed autistic self-advocate on disability who has a MA in theological research and BS.Cum Laude from Salisbury University. As an autistic person with years of publishing and research expertise in the field, Daniel brings both his lived experience and his academic expertise to his research, work and life. Making connections at the intersection between disability justice, critical autism studies, environmental equity, animal rights, and spirituality.
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Presenter Six
Title: Reclaiming Disability Through Imaginative Acts of Empowerment: Looking at the Conventional Unconventionally
Presenter: Dr. Jennifer Salerno
Abstract: This presentation aims to explore norms of ability and independence based on an ideal of human capacity upheld by society. People with disabilities are considered deficient and marginalized because they deviate from ableist norms (Flynn, 2021). They face significant barriers to establishing and maintaining relationships with nature as the result of ability expectations around how bodies should look and behave in the natural world (Wolbring & Lisitza, 2017). People with disabilities sometimes covet normality and the privileges of the able-bodied majority as a result of deeply embedded meaning perspectives and frames of reference. Through desiring normalcy and sameness, they unconsciously perpetuate the ableist structures that work to maintain their subordination (De Schauwer et al., 2020). Drawing from concepts of ecoability, this presentation calls for exploring pragmatic ways of interrupting long-standing habits of mind and ableist assumptions of normality and independence and developing an ethic of interdependence that encompasses the natural world. Ecoability offers a conceptual framework that speaks to discourses of ableism, contests the notion of an independent ideal, and promotes relationality with nature. It recognizes that no human can live up to a mythic idea of unencumbered, flawless individuality. As such, this presentation demonstrates how ecoability can disrupt ableist norms and expectations that condition one’s mind by acting as the basis of a relational and interdependent pedagogy of life that can transform the lives of people with disabilities and their relationships with the natural world.
Biography: Dr. Jennifer Salerno is an early childhood educator, scholar, and scholar-activist whose work centers autocritical disability studies and critical, transformative autoethnography. Based in Baltimore, Maryland, her scholarship bridges theory, lived experience, and justice-oriented praxis, examining disability as relational, ecological, and politically situated. Her research integrates Critical Disability Studies, ecoability, posthumanist theory, and transformative learning theory to interrogate ableism, embodiment, interdependence, and relationships with nature. Through critical and transformative autoethnography, Jennifer positions narrative as both method and analytic tool, exploring how lived experience can challenge dominant epistemologies and generate new ways of understanding disability, education, and relational life. Jennifer’s work takes a transdisciplinary approach to disability, education, and ecology, examining how relationships between humans and nature shape experiences of ability and belonging. Across her scholarship, teaching, and advocacy, she is committed to advancing pedagogies and research practices grounded in interdependence and social and environmental justice.
Q and A
Presenter Seven
Title: Remembering Right Relations: A Transformative Framework
Presenter: Aimee De Ney
Abstract: In this time of deepening polycrisis, marked by the continued and growing genocide of peoples, Lands, and species, we are called to bring forth radical transformation in our ways of being, knowing, and relating on behalf of future generations. This session turns to the living, agentic Land and all the beings who make up Lands, including waters, humans, animals, trees, plants, fungi, soil, and microbiome, and to the reality that there is far more to life and relationship than the eye can see. The Land is shaped by memory and holds the memory of the ancestors of the land. How do we remember our interrelatedness and our responsibilities to Lands as descendants of our own ancestors, and of all they have endured and all they have inflicted upon others? And how do those of us from the legacy of settler colonialism remember our interrelatedness with all life without continuing the legacies of colonialism, extraction, and theft from Indigenous peoples and Lands? Drawing on the work of Indigenous and decolonial scholars, along with direct collaboration with Lands, we will discuss a framework for remembering our kinship with Lands, ancestors, and life.
Biography: Aimee de Ney, EdD, is a decolonial scholar/researcher, land-centered teacher educator, and student of the land who is keenly aware that our liberation is intimately interwoven with the liberation of the lands and her peoples, just as our work raising future generations is tied in with our own healing, and that of our ancestors. Aimee’s ancestors hail from Poland, Germany, and Ireland, and she resides on the Coast Salish Lands who are her primary teachers.
Q and A
Presenter Eight
Title: Metabolic Intimacy: A Creative yet Pragmatic Approach to Building Community
Presenter: Scott Hurley & Charlotte A. Kunkel
Abstract: How do we create the community we long for? How do we build relationships when we
are seemingly so disconnected? Employing Machado de Oliveira's notion of
metabolism, we build upon permaculture principles to envision the processes of
community building. Metabolism captures how nested living entities are engaged in
nonlinear movement, in nonlinear time. These systems and entities operate in rhythms
and cycles that insist we recognize and embrace the constant exchange and processing
of energy and matter. Permaculture principles such as integration, diversity, marginality
and adaptability reinforce these rhythms. A radical community is not static or fixed, but
a fluid system of “human and non-human, seen and unseen, known and unknowable”
that through mutual interdependence and an ethic of responsibility can guide the work
required to nurture, process, digest and expunge the toxic effects of capitalist praxis that
centers individualism, misogyny, white supremacy, and anthropocentrism. Neither
massive accumulation and overabundance nor starvation and poverty are life
sustaining. Using what Oliveira refers to as metabolic intimacies, we discuss how the
building of radical community requires utilizing practical approaches to create, measure,
and monitor processes that allow for regenerative ends and necessitates the
establishment of interactive systems that are adaptable, diverse, interconnected and
overlapping, decentered, and beautifully messy.
Biography:
Dr. Charlotte Kunkel:
Dr. Charlotte A. Kunkel is Professor of Sociology and Identity Studies at Luther College,
Decorah, IA. Her research and teaching interests center around stratification and systems of
oppression, including the sociology of gender, racialization, visual sociology, and social
psychology. Kunkel has also taught international travel courses on women’s social change in
India, on women in Islam in Morocco, and gender and reconciliation in Cambodia. She serves as
Director of Identity Studies and Chair of the Sociology Program at Luther. Kunkel has published
in the journals Deviant Behavior, Contemporary Sociology, The Minnesota Review, The
Sociological Quarterly, and Peace Studies Journal, as well as several chapters in books. She is a
sometimes blogger on the Luther College Ideas and Creations blog. Her current research focus is
on institutional change and social justice. Dr. Kunkel is a resident of Rochester, MN and is
actively involved in the volunteer community; she is an established diversity workshop
facilitator, served as Vice President of the Diversity Council Board of Directors, founded The
Minnesota Group, and is committed to the movement to end domestic violence.
Dr. Scott Hurley:
Dr. Scott Hurley is Associate Professor of Identity Studies and Religion at Luther college with
interests in Chinese Buddhist and Daoist ideology and praxis from the nineteenth century to the
present, Black and Asian American Buddhism, and the critical analysis of power particularly in
the contexts of race, gender, disability, and species. He has also written about and presented on
the work of Buddhist teacher, Master Yinshun, focusing particularly on his interpretation of the
Tathāgatagarbha and his notion of “using the Buddha Dharma to study the Buddha Dharma.”
Most recently, he has centered his research and writing in the areas of Martial Arts Studies,
focusing on the intersections of martial arts, religion, and identity, and Critical Animal Studies.
He teaches courses on identity and power in US schools and mental health institutions; East,
South, and Southeast
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