Join UC Berkeley professor and award-winning author Sunaura Taylor at Books Inc. Berkeley for a discussion and signing of her book Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert.
Sunaura will be joined in conversation by KPFA host Mitch Jeserich.
A powerful analysis and call to action that reveals disability as one of the defining features of environmental devastation and resistance.
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.
Sunaura Taylor is Assistant Professor of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the American Book Award–winning Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation.
Mitch Jeserich is the host of KPFA's Letters and Politics, heard throughout the Pacifica Radio Network. A veteran broadcast journalist, he launched a pilot program called Letters from Washington in 2009, chronicling the first 100 days of the Obama administration, which would later become Letters & Politics—a look at burning political issues and debates and their historical context within the US and the world.
