Confronting today’s environmental and social crises requires more than technological fixes or policy reforms: it calls for deep, systemic transformations in how we live, relate, and imagine ourselves, the environment, and the future. These transformations must be not only ecologically sound but also rooted in justice, care, and emancipation.
Disabled and queer communities are often among those most affected by climate and environmental change. At the same time, both have long been developing transformative alternatives—practices, visions, and forms of resistance that challenge the roots of environmental and social degradation. These communities have long been resisting exclusion, disrupting dominant norms, and reclaiming ways of living that challenge ableism and cisheteronormativity. Yet, disability and queer perspectives continue to be largely invisible in sustainability research and action.
WEIRD opens a research space to redefine what we mean by justice, sustainability, and transformation by centering the knowledge, experiences, and activism of disabled and queer people.
WEIRD explores how disability and queer scholarship and grassroots initiatives contribute to redefine just sustainability transformations. These perspectives challenge the structures and assumptions that underpin mainstream sustainability discourses and offer new ways to understand and pursue change—from reimagining access and mobility in cities, to resisting extractive models of development, to building inclusive and intersectional climate movements. By moving disability and queer perspectives from the margins to the center of attention and conversation, WEIRD will redefine and transform what we mean when we talk about justice, sustainability, and transformations at once.
Overall, WEIRD seeks to create space for new forms of knowledge that challenge dominant norms and support more just and transformative sustainability pathways. We do so by creating a research environment that supports collective reflection, care, and accountability. We foster open dialogue and explore how research practices can become more inclusive, responsive, and grounded in lived experience.
Read more about the WEIRD three main sets of objectives below by opening each section:
This part of the research aims to challenge dominant understandings of sustainability by foregrounding perspectives from disability and queer scholarship. It seeks to surface the diverse ways these perspectives critically articulate justice, transformation, and sustainability, offering alternative starting points for thinking about what sustainability means and how it should be pursued.
Disability and queer studies offer powerful critiques of what is considered "normal". Disability and queer individuals and communities have created space for alternative, life-affirming visions of sustainability grounded in interdependence, plurality, and care.
By clarifying the philosophical foundations of these approaches—including their epistemological, ontological, and ethical commitments—and critically addressing existing works on justice and sustainability transformations, the project builds the groundwork for more inclusive and plural sustainability research.
The goal is to make space for and leverage the knowledge of the disability and queer communities, from local to global, and to explore how they can inform more just and transformative sustainability theories and practices.
This part of our research aims to co-create new theories of just sustainability transformations and develop transformative methodologies rooted in disability and queer experiences.
By involving scholars, practitioners, and activists, we seek to generate new narratives and frameworks that do not rely on the usual ableist and cis/heteronormative social norms. These narratives will illuminate new pathways for emancipatory change, emphasizing relationality, intersectional justice, and the diverse ways people shape sustainable futures.
We also aim to integrate and synthesize these insights to develop a new way of understanding and practicing sustainability research that foregrounds accessibility, representation, and collective agency in redefining environmental justice and transformative processes. We will show how these innovations expand current understandings of sustainability, offering new lenses for imagining, practicing, and evaluating transformative change across disciplines and communities.
WEIRD aims to reimagine the ethical-methodological foundations of environmental and sustainability research by focusing on how disability and queer lived experiences and practices reframe complexity, difference, and power in collaborative research.
Instead of applying universal ethical principles, we take a situated, relational, and capacity-oriented approach—one that recognizes how questions of justice, accountability, and responsibility arise within specific research encounters, especially when working across disability and queer perspectives.
At the same time, we work to develop new transformative methodologies by queering and cripping how research is done. This involves rethinking conventions in sustainability science—such as what counts as evidence, who participates, and how knowledge is shared—so that accessibility, relationality, and anti-normativity are placed at the center.
Together, these theoretical and methodological innovations aim to expand the possibilities for more inclusive, emancipatory, and plural pathways toward sustainable futures.