Co-sponsored by The-More-Than-Human(ities) Labaratory
Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies tells the story of this contamination and its ripple effects through the largely Mexican American community living above. Drawing on her own complex relationship to this long-ago injured landscape, Sunaura Taylor takes us with her to follow the site’s disabled ecology—the networks of disability, both human and wild, that are created when ecosystems are corrupted and profoundly altered.
Reaching far beyond the Sonoran Desert, these stories of entanglement tell of debilitating and sometimes life-ending injuries, even as they also map out alternative modes of connection, solidarity, and resistance—an environmentalism of the injured. Through first-person reflection on what disability means in an era of increasing multi-species disablement, Taylor delinates necessary networks of care, treatment, and assistance this age of disability requires.”
Sunaura Taylor is an artist, writer, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (The New Press, 2017), which received the 2018 American Book Award. Taylor has written for a range of popular media outlets and her artworks have been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. She works at the intersection of disability studies, environmental justice, multispecies studies, and art practice. Her latest book is Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert (University of California Press, 2024).
Date | Time
April 18, 2025 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public
Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz