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
Co-Chairs:
Laura Schleifer, Jen Salerno, and Anthony J. Nocella II
Introduction and Welcoming Remarks – 1:00 pm EST
Jennifer Salerno and Laura Schleifer
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.
Biography: Laura Schleifer is a lifelong ‘artivist’, or artist-activist. An NYU Tisch graduate (BFA, Drama), she’s toured the Middle East, performing for Palestinian and Iraqi refugee children with the Boomchucka theater/circus troupe, taught in China, Nicaragua, and at Wesleyan University’s Green Street Arts Center, performed off-Broadway, and arts-mentored NYC homeless/targeted youth. Her original screenplay, The Feral Child, was a Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab finalist. Her essays appear in New Politics Magazine, The Leftist Review, Forca Vegan, The New Engagement, and multiple anthologies, including Kropotkin Now! Life, Freedom and Ethics, published by Black Rose Books, Resisting Neoliberal Schooling; Dismantling the Rubricization and Corporatization of Higher Education and Expanding the Critical Animal Studies Imagination; Essays in Solidarity and Total Liberation both published by Peter Lang Publishing, and Fever Spores; William S. Burroughs and Queer Letters, published by Rebel Satori Press. Laura is also Program Chair at Promoting Enduring Peace (https://pepeace.org/), a historic U.S. peace organization, and co-founder of Plant the Land (www.planttheland.org) , a Palestinian-led vegan food justice/community projects mutual aid team in Gaza.
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 Three
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Presenter: Aimee De Ney
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Presenter Four
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Presenter: Jesika Keener
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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 Solutionary Business Leadership Advisory Council for the Institute for Humane Education, 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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