“Award-winning author, artist, and professor pioneering intersections of disability studies, environmental humanities, and animal liberation.”
Sunaura Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Society and Environment. Taylor is a scholar and artist who works at the intersection of disability studies, environmental humanities, animal studies, environmental justice, feminist science studies, and art practice. Her research situates disability and ableism as central forces shaping human relationships to the more-than-human world. Concerned with relationships between altered bodily capacity, vulnerability, and systems of exploitation across species and ecological boundaries, her works crosses a range of disciplines, mediums, and audiences.
Taylor is author of Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (The New Press, 2017), which received the 2018 American Book Award. Along with academic journals, Taylor has written for a range of popular media outlets. Her artworks have been exhibited at venues such as the CUE Art Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution and is part of the Berkeley Art Museum collection. Among other awards, she has received a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant, two Wynn Newhouse Awards, and an Animals and Culture Grant.
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.
How much of what we understand of ourselves as “human” depends on our physical and mental abilities—how we move (or cannot move) in and interact with the world? And how much of our definition of “human” depends on its difference from “animal”?
