6:30 p.m.
Over four years disability studies and environmental studies scholar Sunaura Taylor and community historian Alisha Vasquez worked closely with various community听partners to design a commemoration and work of community-engaged听public scholarship in Tucson, Arizona. The project,听Survival & Resistance: Remembering the Southside鈥檚 Environmental Justice听Movement,听ended up being听a yearlong commemoration honoring the environmental justice legacy听of Tucson’s southside community.听The project celebrated the 40th anniversary of the founding of the early听environmental justice movement, Tucsonans for Clean Environment (TCE), a movement that features heavily in Taylor’s 2024 book听Disabled Ecologies: Lessons听From听a Wounded Desert.听The yearlong, multi-venue commemoration involved a museum exhibition, a traveling history exhibit, various public talks and events, a series of clay听tile-making听workshops, and a permanent public memorial.听Survival and Resistance听acted as proof of concept that making space for disability and illness to be a part of the environmental story can be a profound, healing, and politically generative experience for individuals and communities who have faced environmental harm. The project was also an exploration into the ways disability and embodiment inform community-engaged research and ethnographic practice. This talk pulls from our experiences developing, organizing, and implementing this year-long commemoration to examine how disability and embodiment shaped our methodologies and project outcomes.听Specifically, this talk suggests that听incorporating creative and art-based anti-ableist methodologies into community-engaged research and public scholarship (and more broadly into environmental justice conversations), is an important part of healing and political galvanization.
Registration opens March 11, 2027.
Biography:
Sunaura Taylor is an artist and writer. She is the author of “Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert” (University of California Press, 2024), which received a 2025 On the Brinck Book Award, and “Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation” (The New Press, 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award. Taylor has written for a range of popular media听outlets听and her artworks have been听exhibited听widely both nationally and internationally. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Animals and Culture Foundation, among others. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, where she directs the Critical Animal Lab (CAL) and the Disabled Ecologies Initiative (DEI).
Department Sponsors:听The Graduate School, Comparative History of Ideas听Department,听Henry M. Jackson School of听International Studies, Department of English, Department of Disability Studies听