#81 Sunaura Taylor on tracing ecologies of multispecies disablement, injury and resistance
“The very capacity to heal that living creatures and entities have only exists because of the capacity to be injured. It’s not something that we can just cut out of our realities - disability and that kind of transformation are just an integral part of reality, are part of our lives. Yet we live in a culture that instead tries to erase those things, that everybody should be independent, healthy, you’re responsible for your own health and can’t be dependent on other people, especially in the US, we’re so independence-focused.
I think there’s these political and ethical values that emerge from the experience of living as a disabled person, living in the disabled community, living with sickness, that really could make our world’s just a kinder place if we thought about what our society looked like if we were building it up from the point of vulnerability and the fact that we all go in and out of vulnerability, that we all need to be cared for sometimes. So these are kinds of politics that emerge from the experience of disability that I think are actually resistant to the very systems that sometimes cause disablement. ”
Whilst living in realities polluted with ableist, colonial and capitalist values of human domination and subordination of the more-than-human, where can we seek inspiration and hope from for manifesting alternative futures of inclusivity, vulnerability and reciprocal care? How can tracing trails of injury and resistance to generational disablement of human and more-than-human communities equip us with the necessary tools for building a disabled future that is grounded in the values of living with and caring for the body and the environment?
This month, we are joined by the wonderful Sunaura Taylor, an artist, writer and author of Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (The New Press, 2017) and Disabled Ecology: Lessons from a Wounded Desert. 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. She lives in the Bay Area with her daughter Leonora, husband David, and their two cats, Rosie and Pirate.
In this heart-felt episode, Sunaura offers us ways of mapping out disabled ecologies by framing our ecological crises as a multispecies disablement that extends out to biotic and abiotic bodies, human and more-than-human life, and across generations. Using the themes of her book Disabled Ecology: Lessons from a Wounded Desert as a grounding, Sunaura sows seeds of hope and radical imagination for a disabled future, which resists ableist and colonial systems of power to foster values of alternative caregiving and meaning-making of the diversity and beauty of our worlds.
What will be covered:
Disabled ecology as a mapping of multi-species disablement resistance, to deepen our understanding of the relationship between human and more-than-human injury in a time of ecological crisis
False framing in western culture of human and multispecies justice being separate and the case study of organising against multispecies injustice in Tuscan
First warning signs to community of Tuscan were failing health and death of wildlife, trees and pets due to polluted drinking water
Organisers from the community would always talk about human health and aquifer health in the same breath
Shifting from ecological doom narrative to one of romantic purity - that we are trying to reach a pure state of the world
Disability politics help us see a third framing of disability as a path that people can have thriving lives on
Extinction and disability - species don’t just disappear, there’s always periods of illness, disease and multispecies injury that we overlook before their extinction
Returning to Tuscan has been most meaningful thing Sunaura has done, “staying with the trouble” (Donna Haraway) giving her a sense of home that she doesn’t feel anywhere else - feeling welcome by the community she wasn’t a part of
Shifting her position as a storyteller of her own history to hearing the stories of environmental injustices, racism but also resistance efforts of the community through her ethnographic research
Tuscan’s longer colonial history of dispossession through gentrification for Mexican American community since 40s (as opposed to the environmental agency narrative of industrial pollution from Hughes Aircraft being the cause of environmental harm in the 50s)
The impacts of chemical contamination expanding further than human lifespan —> affecting generations over time and continue to impact future generations of the land, but people continue to organise and resist violence to their communities and environment
Disability having different meanings and understandings in different communities (negative portrayals of disability in mainstream media perpetuating “othering”)
Disability as an important political lens to environmental injustice for Sunaura and her community, including participants of her study, but also acknowledging that not everyone will want to be labelled in such a way
The difference in people approaching disability when interacting with Sunaura, as a power wheelchair user, as opposed to how they would talk about disability if she wasn’t “visibly” disabled
Paradox of disability: disability as concept and experience/phenomemon which (like race and gender) impacts everyone e.g. everyone will go through some form of disability as they grow old, we go through periods of sickness and unwellness (mentally and physically)
Disability as a part of what it is to be alive, to be matter, to be present in the web of life (injury as part of transformation and evolution)
Our very capacities to heal existing on our capacities to be injured —> not a reality we can cut off from (we all go in and out of vulnerability and we all need care from time to time)
Sowing the seeds of a disabled future which is anti-racist, anti-capitalist, decolonial but also one which fosters caring relationships with each other and the land, water and other abiotic bodies of life to serve to our ongoing needs
Episode resources:
Find out more about Sunaura on her website
Connect with Sunaura on Instagram (@sunaura_taylor), X (Twitter) (@sunaura_taylor) and Bluesky
Discover Sunaura’s book Disabled Ecology: Lessons from a Wounded Desert here
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Mind Full of Everything is a podcast calling for the radical healing of the self and community to outgrow the broken dominant culture of radical individualism and disconnection from our place as interdependent beings, so that we can collectively re-envision a safer, healthier and equitable world. Each episode takes a healing-centric approach to explore the embodied ways in which we can collectively restore and transform our journeys as stewards of community and earth through conversations with writers, researchers, coaches and educators, as well as reflection episodes with the host Agrita Dandriyal on her journey navigating the world as a deeply conscious, culturally-rooted and relational being. Learn more here.
