Public Program

Keynote Lecture by Sunaura Taylor:
Disabled Ecologies: Living with Impaired Landscapes

Thursday, May 5, 2022 | 7 pm – 8:15 pm

Art + Disability Mini-Symposium in support of the exhibition, Crip Ecologies: Vulnerable Bodies in a Toxic Landscape curated by Amanda Cachia.

This Mini-Symposium is presented by the Art Gallery of Windsor; Tangled Art + Disability; Health Equity and Social Inclusion Interdisciplinary Research Group; School of Disability Studies at X University; and the Disability Studies Program, School of Social Work, University of Windsor.

ASL interpretation and automatic closed-captions will be available during the panel. 

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This discussion will be moderated by Amanda Cachia.

In this talk Sunaura Taylor examines the value of perceiving and thinking with disabled ecologies—her term for the material and cultural ways disability is manifested and produced between and among human and nonhuman entities. Taylor argues that we are living through a period of mass ecological disablement of the more-than-human-world, a disablement that is utterly entangled with the disablement of human beings. Rooting her work in a forty-year-old Superfund waste site in Tucson, Arizona, Taylor asks how we can learn from ill and disabled humans, animals, and ecosystems about how to live in what she calls the age of disability, while also working to dismantle the systems of oppression that so often cause it.

Sunaura Taylor is an artist, writer, activist, academic and mother. She 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 widely both nationally and internationally. Among other awards, she has received a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant, two Wynn Newhouse Awards, and an Animals and Culture Grant. She is currently working on a second book, Disabled Ecologies: Living With Impaired Landscapes. Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Society and Environment, in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Amanda Cachia is a curator, writer, and art historian who specializes in disability art activism and creative access in the art world. Cachia has curated approximately 40 exhibitions, many of which have traveled to cities across the USA, England, Australia, and Canada. Her curatorial focus is representing the art and interests of disabled artists and producers. Dr. Cachia received her PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism from the University of California San Diego in 2017 and is developing a monograph based on her dissertation entitled Revision of the Senses: Disability, Art, Agency (forthcoming, Duke University Press). She currently teaches art history, visual culture, and curatorial and exhibition studies at Otis College of Art and Design, California Institute of the Arts, California State University Long Beach, California State University San Marcos, and San Diego State University.