Broken Worlds, Disabled Kin

A call to remake our world through a new politics of disabled kin-making

We live in a world broken by design: a web of systems that debilitate and kill through racist and ableist infrastructural neglect, socioeconomic abandonment, and ecological negligence. Fixes for these forms of breakage often conceal and amplify harm - but what happens if we refuse to rehabilitate this inhospitable world? In Broken Worlds, Disabled Kin, Kelly Fritsch and Anne McGuire urge an alternative response through abolition, access, care, and interdependence.

Bringing a much-needed disability studies lens to discussions of public policy, legal reform, and social change, Fritsch and McGuire show how hostile social and economic structures such as racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and settler colonialism unevenly target certain populations and environments. As they trace how everyday encounters with broken infrastructures like inaccessible transit, fragmented mental health care, and crumbling educational institutions reflect broader patterns of structural abandonment and slow violence, they pose a radical means of response: the making of disabled kin. Ranging from mundane disruptions to global crises like Covid-19, the genocide in Gaza, and climate collapse, they demonstrate how disabled kin-making nurtures connection and support between people, ecologies, infrastructures, and objects, cultivating a collective "we" that can contest systems broken by design.

Urgent and passionate, Broken Worlds, Disabled Kin asks readers to reexamine conceptions of breakage, maintenance, and repair, viewing them as tools of abolition and justice. Against relentless fragmentation and atomization, this book equips us with a politics of solidarity and collectivity with which to begin making a more life-supporting world.

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