Working with toxicity: Disability, pace, and anti-productivism
Monday, January 19, 2026 from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
- In-person event
- 2017, Dunton Tower, Carleton University
- 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6
- Contact
- Kelly Fritsch, kellyfritsch@cunet.carleton.ca
Join the Carleton Disability and Access Studies Hub for a lecture and discussion with Dr. Alexis Shotwell (Department of Sociology and Anthropology).
Working with toxicity: Disability, pace, and anti-productivism
Disability decolonial theorists have richly engaged the production of debility and disability under occupation and racial capitalism; we know that extraction regimes are toxic. There is a complex nexus of metaphors and materialities at the intersection of toxicity and disability, particularly in the ways that people disrupt and contest the production of toxicity through raising fears of disability (think here of the spectre of the disabled kid, victim of toxic environments, medications, or maternal failings; think here of the person disabled by their work; think here of ecologies disabled by chemical pollution). In this talk, I engage the disability-toxicity nexus through thinking about work. Work is toxic, and it distributes toxicity’s effects; toxicity is something we cannot, in the final analysis, evade. Instead, it is something we must work with, and on. I argue that anti-productivism, a commitment to liberatory intoxication, and a disability anti-work politics help us oppose toxicity without replicating anti-disability rhetoric and practices.
More info at: https://carleton.ca/cdash/events/