Dark-dwellers as more-than-human misfits: a new synthesis of disability studies, environmental history and histories of human-animal relations.

这个星球上至少有10亿人拥有“不合适”的身体，因此直接受到残疾的影响。当考虑到家人、朋友和同事时，更多的人会遇到不同的能力。残疾——以及造成残疾的结构——真的很重要。这可能是边缘性的，但绝不是少数人的经历。事实上，当我们花时间观察动物世界时，我们会发现我们周围到处都是“非凡”的身体。有些人通过回声定位的艺术在黑暗中穿行，绘制出世界的地图。还有一些在地下河中繁衍生息，它们通过感官，不用眼睛也能“看见”。英国人和北美人理解这些在世界上生存和发展的方式有一段重要的历史，这段历史揭示了很多关于我们认为是“正常”身体和能力的文化假设的转变。自19世纪初以来，不寻常的非人类身体被想象成各种各样的“缺陷”，“超级”，“消耗品”，最近，在面对环境转变时，高度“脆弱”。这些都是熟悉的标签；我们发现它们处于与人类残疾有关的当代和历史对话的核心。这个前沿研究项目以19世纪和20世纪对黑暗生活生物的想象以及自19世纪中叶以来人类系统和结构对其笼罩的世界的影响的深入案例研究为中心，实际上是关于什么是“正常”的概念，“能干”和“脆弱”已经通过动物的各种身体折射出来，它们的生活方式与我们截然不同。夜行动物是地球上最容易被误解的生物之一，这主要是因为它们活动在我们通常被排除在外的环境中。这促进了对夜行动物身体的各种“不正常”、“非凡”和“缺陷”的想象。最终，对这些超越人类的身体的误解也使它们极易被排斥在它们所适应的环境之外。通过建立这个案例研究并产生一个全新的研究议程，该项目为动物史、环境史和残疾研究等相关领域提供了重要的智力和方法干预。虽然这些领域都在不同程度上关注身份的产生和身份政治对物质世界的影响，但它们尚未以相互生成的方式相互作用。超越人类的历史需要包含残疾研究方法，以便更好地理解构成人类与自然世界关系的广泛参与，以及通过我们动物亲属的身体构建和折射残疾和残疾身份的方式。残疾研究需要转向超越人类的世界，作为围绕残疾本身概念的一种手段；挑战我们对能力和规范性的历史话语的认识，重新激发关于排除和边缘化“不同能力”的条件的停滞对话。这项研究在其他方面也很重要。在揭示人类和超越人类领域的正常、能力、脆弱性和适应话语之间的联系时，有可能产生对共同脆弱性的认识，这种脆弱性超越了人类与非人类之间的鸿沟，这种鸿沟允许生物在现代性进程中被边缘化。参与和影响活动使关键阶段2的儿童、他们的教师、视障人士和视力临床医生受益，突出了创造性地思考多样性和脆弱性的潜力，这些问题将所有生物团结起来，而不是孤立起来。

There are at least a billion people on this planet who possess 'misfitting' bodies and who are consequently directly affected by disability. Many more people encounter different abilities when families, friends, and colleagues are taken into consideration. Disability - and the structures that create it - really matters. It may be marginal, but it is hardly a minority experience. Indeed, when we take time to look at the animal world, we find that 'extraordinary' bodies are all around us. Some dart through the darkness mapping the world through the art of echolocation. Others flourish in underground rivers via senses that allow them to 'see' without eyes. The way in which people in Britain and North America have understood these ways of surviving and thriving in the world have an important history, and that history reveals much about transforming cultural assumptions about what we have thought to be 'normal' bodies and abilities. Since the early nineteenth century, unusual nonhuman bodies have been imagined as variously 'deficient', 'super', 'expendable' and, most recently, highly 'vulnerable' in the face of environmental transformation. These are familiar labels; we find them at the heart of contemporary and historical conversations relating to human disabilityCentred on a deep case study of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century imagination of dark-dwelling creatures and the impact of human systems and structures on their shrouded worlds since the mid-nineteenth century, this cutting-edge research project is really about the ways in which notions of what it means to be 'normal', 'able' and 'vulnerable' have been refracted through the multifarious bodies of animals that live in ways that are radically different from our own. Nocturnal creatures are among the most misunderstood creatures on earth, and that is principally because they are active in an environment from which we are normally excluded. This has facilitated the imagination of nocturnal animal bodies as variously 'abnormal', 'extraordinary', and 'deficient'. Ultimately, misunderstandings of these more-than-human bodies have also rendered them highly vulnerable to exclusion from environments to which they are adapted. By building this case study and generating a brand new research agenda, the project offers an important intellectual and methodological intervention into the allied fields of animal history, environmental history and disability studies. While each of these fields are concerned in varying degrees with the production of identity and the impact of identity politics on the material world, they are yet to interact with each other in mutually generative ways. More-than-human histories need to embrace disability studies approaches in order to better appreciate the wide array of engagements which constitute human relationships with the natural world and the ways in which abled and disabled identities have been constructed and refracted through and via the bodies of our animal kin. Disability studies needs to turn to the more-than-human world as a means of pivoting around the concept of disability itself; to challenge what we think we know about historical discourses of ability and normativity, re-energising a stagnating conversation about the conditions that exclude and marginalise the 'differently-abled'. This research is crucial in other ways, too. In exposing connections between discourses of normalcy, ability, vulnerability and adaptation across the human and more-than-human realms, it may be possible to generate recognition of shared vulnerabilities that transcend the human-nonhuman divide that has permitted the marginalisation of living beings across the course of modernity. Engagement and impact activities benefiting Key Stage 2 children, their teachers, sight-impaired individuals and vision clinicians highlight the potential of thinking creatively about diversity and vulnerability as issues that unite rather than isolate all living beings.