Book Talk with Sunaura Taylor on "Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert"

Micah Khater is an assistant professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work focuses on how Black women resisted carceral regimes in 19th- and 20th-century United States. Her forthcoming book explores post-bellum fugitivity and the evolving carceral project. Khater earned her Ph.D. from Yale University, where she was awarded the 2022 Prize Teaching Fellowship for excellence in undergraduate education, with her research supported by various prestigious centers.

Rachel Morello-Frosch is a Professor at UC Berkeley in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and the School of Public Health. For over 20 years, her research has focused on social determinants of environmental health, exploring the interaction of inequality, stress, and chemical exposures in producing health inequalities, particularly in the context of climate change and air pollution. Collaborating with communities and scientists, she has developed tools to assess cumulative impacts and advance environmental justice, with her work supported by NIH, NSF, and other foundations.

Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, and activist, and the author of over twenty books on feminism, social change, and hope, including Orwell’s Roses and Men Explain Things to Me. A product of the California public education system, she regularly writes for The Guardian and serves on the board of Oil Change International. Solnit also launched the climate project Not Too Late to advance action on climate change.

Karen Nakamura is the Haas Distinguished Chair of Disability Studies and Professor of Anthropology, specializing in disability, sexuality, and minority social movements in contemporary Japan. Her books include Deaf in Japan and A Disability of the Soul, which explores schizophrenia and mental illness in Japan. Currently, she is working on a project that examines the intersections of disability, gender, and sexuality. Nakamura will moderate this panel.

Sunaura Taylor is an artist and writer, and the author of Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, which won the 2018 American Book Award. Her work intersects disability studies, environmental justice, multi-species studies, and art practice, and she serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. Taylor's art has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally.

 

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.