Co-presented by
The Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice, and Ecologies of Social Difference Social Justice, UBC. Part of the GRSJ Noted Scholars Speaker Series.

Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert

an online book reading 

with

Dr. Sunaura Taylor

WHEN & WHERE
Wednesday, February 14, 12:00-1:00pm
Zoom

Please RSVP below in advance

ABSTRACT

Join Dr. Sunaura Taylor for a reading and discussion of her upcoming book “Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert.”

About the book: 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.

What Taylor finds is a story of entanglements that reach far beyond the Sonoran Desert. These stories tell of debilitating and sometimes life-ending injuries, but they also map out alternative modes of connection, solidarity, and resistance—an environmentalism of the injured. An original and deeply personal reflection on what disability means in an era of increasing multispecies disablement, Disabled Ecologies is a powerful call to reflect on the kinds of care, treatment, and assistance this age of disability requires. 

ABOUT Dr. Sunaura Taylor

Sunaura Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Society and Environment, Berkeley. Taylor is a scholar and artist who works at the intersection of disability studies, environmental humanities, animal studies, environmental justice, feminist science studies, and art practice. Her research situates disability and ableism as central forces shaping human relationships to the more-than-human world. Concerned with relationships between altered bodily capacity, vulnerability, and systems of exploitation across species and ecological boundaries,  her works crosses a range of disciplines, mediums, and audiences.

Taylor is author of Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (The New Press, 2017), which received the 2018 American Book Award. Along with academic journals, Taylor has written for a range of popular media outlets. Her artworks have been exhibited at venues such as the CUE Art Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution and is part of the Berkeley Art Museum collection. Among other awards, she has received a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant, two Wynn Newhouse Awards, and an Animals and Culture Grant.

This event is Co-presented by:  Ecologies of Social Difference (ESD) Social Justice, UBC