Book Talk: Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert

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.

Dr. Sunaura Taylor is an artist and writer. 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. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. Her latest book is "Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert" (University of California Press, 2024). She lives in the Bay Area with her daughter Leonora, husband David, and their two cats, Rosie and Pirate.

Co-sponsors: Social Science Dept, EDI Office, Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin

Center for Applied Ethics | Website | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Philosophy Club

Contact the organizers