Preface Icebreaker

This book was written hemmed in by what often felt like relentless brokenness. We started in the summer of 2019 while experiencing health setbacks, caring for aging parents and young children, and juggling the intense working conditions of the neoliberal university as junior faculty. For some time, we had been seeking to survive this conjuncture through collaboration, having met in the mid-2000s in graduate school and having supported each other when we both had children in 2012. As we moved into winter 2020 and beyond, we wrote together in fragmented fits and starts through unabated waves of the Covid-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada, where we, as white settlers, are situated on, and benefit from, occupied and stolen Indigenous lands. Throughout the six years it took to complete this book, we confronted brokenness everywhere we turned, whether on the street or while taking public transit, in our workplaces and working conditions, or in our interactions with health care and health insurance systems. Inside, outside, online, offline, among friends, family, colleagues, and kin, we witnessed and experienced broken systems, structures, and social relations at every turn. We lived brokenness through deep personal grief, through losses and funerals, and, most excruciatingly, because of the impossibility of holding a funeral.

When the pandemic closed daycares and playgrounds, as university professors, we taught classes online while entertaining and potty training our preschoolers. When our essential assistive equipment broke down, it was weeks, and in some cases months, before it got repaired or replaced due to supply chain interruptions and labor shortages. At various points in our writing, we found brokenness in the air we were breathing. At one point, diesel fumes stifled the cool winter air as far-right fascists and their convoy of trucks occupied one of our neighborhoods for weeks, and at another point, smoke from wildfires choked the summer breeze. There were tornadoes, hurricanes, and derechos. Blistering heat domes and polar vortices. Fires and floods. A real mood, one of our kids might say. An atmosphere.

While broken might be described as the central theme or topic of this book, it is also its cradle and context, its method and stakes. We wrote this book as our local, provincial, and federal governments passed and enacted brutal and austere policies of social and economic abandonment—divesting from vital social and material infrastructure such as housing, education, health care, and other public amenities—all the while diverting our taxes to fund the expansion of carceral institutions that criminalize, traumatize, confine, disable, and murder those most and multiply affected by the cuts. We have witnessed, and continue to witness, the horrific and relentless abandonment of our varied communities of disabled kin: communities being destroyed by a poisoned drug supply, facing eviction and unaffordable housing and food, forced to live and labor in transinstitutional carceral settings, in unsafe factories, farms, and domestic situations, under debilitating and deadly conditions of war, famine, and genocide. We witness the abandonment of lands, waters, and life-forms as profits are prized and prioritized above all else. Brokenness saturates our feelings, breaking us down in the face of all the atrocities we have been unable to stop, whether in Gaza, in our government’s sanctioned deaths of disabled people assisted to die before being offered robust social supports, or as homes and habitats rapidly disappear because of human-induced climate change.

We wrote this book in broken ways, through grief and unwellness, isolation and loss. Collaborating together, while often a source of connection, motivation, and comradery, was also at times an obligation and responsibility that broke us down. In and through our individual and collective experiences of brokenness, we came to embrace breakage as part of our method. We found solace in situating the relentlessness of what we were witnessing and experiencing as part of a broader conjuncture. As a result, we turned to social theory to deepen our understanding of colonial and imperial infrastructures, transnational supply chains, political ecology and economy, disability culture and justice, and Black, Indigenous, queer, trans, and feminist epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies. We swapped personal stories, news stories, interviews, podcasts, memoirs, photographs, drawings, and memes (see Figure 1). We took up theories and practices of abolition, solidarity, and kinship as we grappled with how anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism alongside other targeted forms of violence and dispossession lay bare the uneven ways communities are variously debilitated, disabled, murdered, and otherwise made to break. We draw attention to some of these violent relations throughout our book as we think with, and write through, material questions of brokenness, repair, and maintenance. In doing so, we highlight how critical disability studies, disability culture, and disability justice prompts us to do the necessary work of breaking that which breaks us: neoliberalism, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy, among other systems and structures of power and oppression.

Writing and thinking together—as well as sharing meals, swapping joys and complaints, witnessing each other’s lives, celebrations, and devastations—helped us to confront our overlapping yet very different experiences of a shattering world. It helped us think and write and organize from the position that our personal experiences of brokenness, while intimate and specific, weren’t ours alone. Counterintuitively, dwelling with brokenness helped us to feel more connected to others in human and more-than-human worlds and to attend to how our different experiences of harm are linked, albeit in highly uneven ways, to the same antisocial capitalist and colonial eugenic ideologies, structures, and practices. By collectivizing loss, suffering, injury, and debilitation, we also found we were better able to contend with our own complicities in these systems and found surprising and life-affirming kinships and political solidarities.

We have written together out of necessity and care and to form community within and against a dominant social order (and neoliberal university system) that often prizes individualism, independence, and profit extraction above all else. We have written together to show up for each other and others. We have written together knowing that our survival is wrapped up with each other’s and in the flourishing of the land, water, air, and many more interdependent kin relations. We have written in complicity with the status quo and as accomplices in social transformation. Even in our solitary “I’s,” we are never singular; even when we are by ourselves, we are never alone. We have written together knowing that you, too, dear reader, may be living some or many of the breakages we trace in this book and may know and feel this territory all too well. We seek to join you in solidarity, to move together, and we invite you to move in relation with us too as we refuse the abandonment of disabled and debilitated people, ecologies, and infrastructures and endeavor to forge disabled kin, fostering collective and interdependent relations of care, access, and abolition.

Kelly and Anne, January 2025