Zoë Wool

Professor Wool’s work spans anthropology, disability studies, queer theory, and feminist science and technology studies, with a focus on the materialities of post-9/11 warmaking and military harm and the tyrannies of normativity in the contemporary United States. Her current projects include:

• The Significance of Others, a collection of ethnographic essays about experiments and inequities in disability worldmaking and brings together veteran and queer disability communities.
• Toxicity, Infrastructure, and Ecologies of Empire. This project includes: a book project, tentatively titled War and the Logics of Combustion, with Kenneth MacLeish (Vanderbilt University), which focuses on the US military's use of toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan; Project Pleasantville, a community collaborative team project documenting Black civic engagement and toxic exposure in Houston's historic Pleasantville neighborhood; Toxicity, Waste, and Infrastructure Group (TWIG) Research Kitchen at UTM, a convivial and experimental feminist research space launching in 2021.
• Disability + Technology, including a collaborative research project with wearable robotics engineers, and efforts to support the growing field of Crip Technoscience, including the upcoming launch of the Crip Technoscience Network with colleagues Aimie Hamraie and Raquel Vehlo.
• Homunculus Revolts, a biography of the cortical homunculus that speaks to the entanglement of race and disability in neurological instantiations of the brain/body dualism.

Before coming to the University of Toronto, Professor Wool spent five years as assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Rice University, where she was also core faculty member at the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and in the Program in Medical Humanities. Prior to that, Professor Wool held postdoctoral positions in the department of anthropology at Columbia University and at Rutgers University's Center for Research on Health, Health Care and Ageing Policy.

Education:

• Phd, University of Toronto
• MA, University of Toronto
• BA York University

Selected Awards: 

2016 Gregory Bateson Book Prize (Honorable Mention) After War: The weight of life at Walter Reed (Duke UP, 2015)

2018-2020 NSF CAREER Award, Socialities of Care: Informal Caregiving in post-9/11 Veteran and Care Collective Worlds.

2017-2020 VA War Related Illness and Injury Study Center, Perspectives on Burn Pit Exposure: Questions of Diagnosis in Veteran and Caregiver Experience.

2017-2019 Rice Interdisciplinary Excellence Award, Toward Experience­Guided Design of Effective Assistive Devices, Co-PI with Dr. Marcie O'Malley and Dr. Phil Kortum

2014 Best Essay by and Emerging Scholar, Critical Military Studies, Queer Theory, and the Possibilities of Critique: the case of suicide and family caregiving in the U.S. military, Critical Military Studies. 1(1): 1-15.

Selected Publications:

In Progress   Yielding: Lessons in crip refusal, queer failure, and ethical research praxis, in Crip Authorship, Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez, Eds. New York University Press.

Forthcoming  Straight Time: Heteronormativity, Rehabilitation, and the Aftermath of American War American Ethnologist

2020 Project Pleasantville Timeline, Houston Flood Museum

2020  Veteran Therapeutics: The Promise of Military Medicine and the Possibilities of Disability in the Post-9/11 US, Medical Anthropology Quarterly 34(3): 305-323.

2020  On the Possibilities of Open Grief: Mourning, Affect, Attachment, Cultural Anthropology. 35(1): 40–47.

2019  Afterwar Work for Life: “Care” in Veteran Families in War and Health Catherine Lutz and Andrea Mazzarino, ed.s, New York University Press.

2019  Homunculus Revolts: Refiguring the Neurological Subject. 

2018  US Military Burn Pits and the Politics of Health, with Kenneth MacLeish, MAQ's Critical Care blog. 

2018  Check Your Syllabus 101: Disability Access Statements.

2017  In-durable Sociality: Sociality, Solitude, and Forms of Life in the Present at a U.S. Military Hospital, Social Text. 35 (130).

2017 Collateral Afterworlds: An Introduction Co-authored with Julie Livingston, Social Text. 35 (130).

2015   Attachments of Life and Death: Heteronational Masculinity, Genital Injury, and the Soldier’s Body in Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium, Veena Das and Clara Han, eds., University of California Press.

2015 After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed, Duke University Press.

Administrative Service:

2020-current, Co-Chair Grants Committee, Center for Global Disability Studies (CGDS), UTSC

2018-2022, Steering Committee, Disability Research Interest Group (DRIG) of the Society for Medical Anthropology

2016-current, Editorial Board, Medical Anthropology Quarterly