This event is free and open to the public. No reservations are required.
Pegasus Books Downtown is excited to welcome Bay Area artist, writer, and UC Berkeley scholar Sunaura Taylor on Monday, September 9 at 6 p.m. to celebrate her new book, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert.
Joined in conversation with Yomi Young, Taylor will read from and discuss Disabled Ecologies (University of California Press, 2024) — a powerful analysis and call to action that reveals disability as one of the defining features of environmental devastation and resistance.
Books will be available for signing following reading and discussion. Click here to view the event page on the Pegasus Books website.
Note: Masks are strongly encouraged, as scent-free is requested for this event. If you have any other access needs please reach out to: events@pegasusbookstore.com
More 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.
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.
Sunaura Taylor is a member of OBI's Disability Studies faculty cluster. Click here to view her talk on "Disabled Ecologies: Living with Impaired Landscapes."
"Brimming with insight and wisdom, Sunaura Taylor builds a strong case for her profound central idea: that disabled bodies and environments are fundamentally the same, that they've been harmed by the same forces, and that they can be saved by the same ideals. Disabled Ecologies is a vital work of scholarship and a rousing call for solidarity between ourselves and the natural environments from which we are inseparable."—ED YONG, author of An Immense World
"Taylor's is a unique and generous genius. With breath-catching insight and enveloping compassion, she shares a secret of epochal urgency: people living with injury and impairment have much to teach about how to survive, and perhaps even thrive, on an injured and impaired planet."—NAOMI KLEIN, author of Doppelganger
