Introduction

The Fix Is Coming

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED 2025a), “to break” is to accidently or deliberately “sever or separate into pieces by force.” It is “to demolish, destroy” and render something “ineffective.” To break is “to fracture or shatter,” to “severely damage,” or “to crush.” Breaking is frequently used in reference to rupture as well as making or producing an opening, such as with the phrases break ground or break and enter. Breaking is also invoked in “to discontinue” or “to deviate or start off abruptly from an established line or course,” such as with break away and break a habit. Breaking can connect us, such as when we break bread or take a coffee break. We can break free, break a leg, breakdance, have a lucky break, a bad break, make a clean break, or even receive a tax break. Breaking as related to use or functionality often leads to disposability (as when electronics break and are rendered junk), but breaking can also reveal, as when a wave breaks, opening a path.

Disabled people and other vulnerabilized populations and environments are very often, in dominant Western culture, characterized as “broken” where brokenness is understood to be not much more than a technical problem: a state of functional disrepair. As notes disability studies scholar Rod Michalko (2002), blindness is not often thought of as a way of being and moving through the world in its own right. More often than not, blindness is treated as if it were a mere technical problem, a breakdown of parts, not unlike a disabled streetcar stuck on the tracks. When a body, mind, or object is framed as broken, the seemingly commonsense response is to attempt to fix it. “Most non-disabled people believe that I need to be repaired,” observes disabled writer and activist Eli Clare (2017, 7). “Strangers ask me, ‘What’s your defect?’ To them, my body-mind just doesn’t work right, defect being a variation of broken, supposedly neutral. But think of the things called defective—the MP3 player that won’t turn on, the car that never ran reliably. They end up in the bottom drawer, dumpster, scrapyard. Defects are disposable and abnormal, body-minds or objects to eradicate” (6). Because of the usual ways we manage brokenness—fix, rehabilitate, innovate, or dispose—many disabled people reject the association between disability and brokenness. As Clare writes, “I still don’t know how to rebuff pity, how to tell . . . the simple truth that I am not broken” (5–6). Clare continues, “I have no idea who I’d be without my tremoring and tense muscles, slurring tongue.” The way disability culture disavows brokenness is connected to beliefs about the desirability of disabled peoples’ perspectives and experiences, the depth of disability knowledge, and the complex beauty of disabled lifeworlds. However, despite the unboundedness of disability, dominant frameworks continue to position disabled bodies and minds as broken, an understanding entangled with fantasies of cure, technoscientific innovation, and disposability.

As a result, the actual or perceived brokenness of bodies, minds, systems, and worlds is routinely met with an ever-expanding range of technical fixes—scientific, bureaucratic, architectural, or economic—that seek to remediate discrete problems while leaving untouched the sociopolitical conditions that produce and give shape to these problems. Our technical solutions are often vital—vaccines in pandemics, ramps at the entrances of buildings. Yet, we must also attend to the social dimensions of these interventions, questioning not only the problems they are designed to solve but also the uneven—raced, classed, gendered—distributions of harm and injury that render such fixes both necessary and insufficient. For example, examining US debates emerging in the 1990s about the persistence of poverty, Daniel Greene (2021) names the “access doctrine” as the common sensibility that social problems are simply problems resulting from a lack of access to technology or a lack of technological skill as signified by popular notions of the “digital divide” or the push for kids to learn to code. Troubling how structural problems such as poverty become transformed into an individualized problem of access to technology, Greene suggests that “access is not a question of whether a skill or technology is present or absent” but is, more pointedly, about generating social “capacities for engagement in public life” (12). Access, here, requires not an individualized or technical solution but rather the building and maintenance of robust social and material infrastructure that supports diverse forms of collective life to better attend to the underlying structural issues.

What is more, under neoliberal racial capitalism, technical approaches may even ensure an endemic state of crisis. After all, innovating from breakage is often profitable: crises might be transformed into opportunities for exploitation, a circular relationship that dangerously promises a cultural commitment to the (re)production of various states of brokenness in perpetuity. Such a commitment was glaringly evident in remarks made by former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at an Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in Finland in 2019. Recasting the ecological devastation brought on by climate change as an opportunity for US economic growth and imperialism, Pompeo announced that “steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade.” “Arctic sea lanes,” he said, “could become the 21st century Suez and Panama Canals” (quoted in Hansler 2019). Former Canadian Minister of Natural Resources and Minister of Finance Joe Oliver (2019) likewise wrote in the Financial Post that climate change will be good for Canada, stating, “Why should Canada fight climate change?” He continues: “Canada is a very large, cold country, with 90 per cent of its population huddled within 100 miles of its southern border and an enormous agricultural potential if the land warms up. There will also be new opportunities for oil, gas and mineral development in the Arctic. And let’s not ignore the greater personal comfort of living in a more hospitable climate. . . . Paradoxically, Canada is imposing burdensome costs and regulations to try to prevent what for us would be beneficial warming.” For Pompeo and Oliver, even catastrophic environmental crises come to represent market opportunities waiting to be seized—a stark reminder that, under neoliberal racial capitalism, a state of brokenness is often incentivized.

A less overt example of the limits of technology as fix can be gleaned from the widespread phenomenon of do-it-yourself (DIY) health care. For example, consider the viral feel-good news story of a disabled two-year-old from Cedartown, Georgia. Images of the child using a walker made from PVC pipes circulated widely online. According to Good Morning America, the child’s family was frustrated by the insurance process to get a walker—wait times were long, and the child had not yet been approved (Pelletier 2019). The family found a YouTube video online with instructions for how to build an assistive device out of readily available and inexpensive materials. While asking for advice at the hardware supply store, Home Depot, employees are said to have sent the family out for ice cream. When the family returned, the employees surprised them with an on-brand orange DIY walker. Home Depot employee Tina Miller Romero told Good Morning America, “That’s what Home Depot is all about—helping others and building our community” (Pelletier 2019). In retelling this story, it is not our intention to dismiss the importance of the material help this family received. Nor do we want to diminish the powerful force that is people helping people navigate insufficient and unjust health-care and insurance systems. Still, we ask: How does the viral reproduction and circulation of feel-good stories of DIY health care work to divert collective attention away from broken-by-design social systems, which, in this case, is a profit-driven insurance system that does not prioritize the accessibility or health-care needs of its users? Moreover, how might the widespread circulation of this story—one of many similar viral disability stories in the media—work to normalize the conditions of an insurance problem that routinely breaks multiply marginalized disabled people and communities? Indeed, Rob Solomon, former CEO of GoFundMe, a popular crowdfunding website, notes that while not the original intended purpose, as of 2019 the site had become a substitute for medical insurance, with one in three fundraisers being directed toward medical expenses, raising over $650 million for health-care costs since its beginnings in 2010 (G. Martinez 2019).

An article from the satire publication The Beaverton (pictured in Figure 3) cuts to the heart of the problem. Referencing the sweeping budget cuts to public education in our home province of Ontario at the hands of the fiscally conservative government and the state of deterioration of the province’s public school buildings (see chapter 5), the headline reads “Budget Cuts: Ontario Unveils DIY School Repair Program for Students” and is accompanied by a picture of a child sporting a hard hat and a pickax (Huntley 2018). “The Ontario PC government is calling on elementary and high school students to learn valuable construction skills since his government recently cut the $100 million school repair fund,” reads the byline. The message here is clear: While technical solutions alone can’t undo the catastrophic conditions under which we are living, the predominant responses to our profoundly social crises stubbornly remain individualized and technologically oriented.

Individual pluckiness, resiliency, and DIY practices will not overcome our broken schools, just as they will not overcome broken-by-design insurance systems or political states, at least not at the structural level. Yet daily we are confronted with an unrelenting and ever-intensifying wellness and recovery culture, a neoliberal push and pull toward personal responsibility and resiliency for mental and physical health, predominantly achieved via individualized acts of self-improvement and upward mobility. Such narratives inaccurately affirm the notion that a person’s good attitude, their positive outlook, or their resourcefulness are the primary drivers to achieving successes—a belief that is not only inaccurate but also damaging. Indeed, our “cultural obsession with uplifting stories of personal wellness vis-à-vis adversity is a trick: it lulls us into a dissatisfaction with ourselves instead of with the systems and structures that unevenly distribute social and material resources and protections,” both creating and exacerbating inequities (Russell and McGuire 2021, 2). In training our focus on the broken as a tragic individual problem in need of a personalized and economically efficient—if not profitable—fix, there is a risk of distorting the profound sociality of our broken worlds. This, in turn, limits our means not only of collectively responding to the brokenness but also of collectively surviving it. As we live with, in, and under the magnitude of individualized collective crises, will we continue to reproduce the same narratives of individualized resilience, fix, and overcoming or, out of our wreckage, can we collectively piece together another way?

“Everything is up in the air,” asserts poet and novelist Dionne Brand in her Toronto Star op-ed penned during the 2020 racial justice uprisings across the United States and Canada. She notes, “All narratives for the moment have been blown open—the statues are falling—all the metrics are off, if only briefly” (Brand 2020). In such a moment of crisis, conflict, and solidarity, Brand identifies a potentially generative break from the smooth operations of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Honoring this break, she suggests, requires repair, but not the kind of repair that rebuilds what was or returns us to the same. “Those in power keep invoking ‘the normal’ as in ‘when we get back to normal’ . . . as if that normal was not in contention.” Instead, she warns, “we should never live the way we lived before.” We routinely find ourselves stuck between the danger of a now “new normal” cultural atmosphere of breakdown and endemic crises and the trap of technoscientific fixes and innovations that fragment, individualize, and silo the problems we unevenly face (see chapter 1). Too often, the idea of breakage problematically calls up this notion of a restorative fix aimed at a return to normal, and, following Brand, it is in this space between danger and its fix that we seek to intervene. That is, in our sociopolitical calls to fix the broken, the transformative potential of addressing the complex social relations of our broken worlds is often displaced in favor of an individualized return to normal. This sidelines, we argue, the crip promise of disability as disruption of, and noncompliance with, neoliberalism, racial capitalism, and other oppressive structures and systems. Building on our knowledge and experiences of living with disability, embracing disability justice and culture, and learning from and moving in solidarity with other transformation-seeking movements, we unpack the importance of centering disability and disabled kin as a force for generative social change. This crip promise of disruption and noncompliance with the broken-by-design status quo enables us to marvel at, and build on, the ways in which we survive, thrive, and live with difference.

Such marveling also pushes us to ask, following Clare, “What might happen if we were to accept, claim, embrace our brokenness?” This is to take broken not as a defect but as a means of assessing entangled relations of damage and harm, refusal, resistance, and care; of making, following Clare, “irrevocable shattering visible” (2017, 160; see chapter 2). Doing so, however, requires resisting the ways others benefit from, recuperate, or seek to maintain our “shattering.” As US Congresswomen Ilhan Omar asserts: “You don’t ever allow people to enjoy your tears. There are so many people invested in our pain, our struggle, seeing us broken” (quoted in Bueckert 2019). Thus, we invoke Unangax̂ Indigenous scholar Eve Tuck’s (2009, 413) call to “suspend damage”—that is, to move beyond “research that operates, even benevolently, from a theory of change that establishes harm or injury in order to achieve reparation.” Instead of enabling policies and practices that overdetermine subjects as singularly “defeated and broken,” Tuck pushes for “desire-based frameworks” that “are concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives” (412, 416). In building on these insights, we embrace brokenness not as an individual or siloed state of harm and injury from which to seek repair but rather as a site of shared risk and collective politics (see chapter 3). At this juncture, we draw again from Mattern (2021, 106), who implores: “What we really need to study is how the world gets put back together, maybe not as it was, but, instead, how we want it to be.” Broadening this insight from a disability culture and justice perspective means rather than only trying to technically solve broken systems or policies through elections, scientific innovation, feats of engineering, and so on, we also, and just as importantly, need to understand the social relations underlying that which is identified as “broken.” And, we argue, centering human and more-than-human disability kin-making relations will better orient us to the transformative solutions and innovations—including technical ones—that can help us to collectively survive our broken worlds and build something better.

Broken by Design: Cripping Infrastructural Neglect and Socioeconomic Abandonment

Throughout the book, we unpack how social and material infrastructure nurtures particular formations of collective life and survival, patterning how we come into relation with one another in ways that are, at once, both frictional and malleable. Material infrastructure, as the basic systems we need to live together, includes everything from power grids, weather forecasting, and supply chains to housing, internet, transportation, and schools. Social infrastructure also sustains collective life by connecting people and things through relations of care, support, coordination, feeling, and affect (McFarlane 2021). Taken together, these forms of social and material infrastructure “can be hostile and destructive—both in their concrete materialities and in the lives that weave through them—and they can be insurgent and liberatory” (Attewell et al. 2023, 14). Drawing on an intersectional critical disability studies analytic, our book examines some of the relations that bind these contradictions together, including how subjugated knowledges shape, resist, and remake contemporary infrastructure.

According to David Alff (2021), the word infrastructure was first used in late nineteenth-century France by engineers describing the gravel ballast that lies beneath railway tracks. In this context, infrastructure was composed of all structures, machinery, and groundwork—bridges, tracks, tunnels, crossings, and so on—that permitted trains to move and function. During the 1900s, the usage of the term expanded to refer to “any large-scale undertaking, from civilian rails and roads to military bases, airfields, and signal networks” that underpin modern life. The contemporary usage of infrastructure has moved far beyond military and engineering circles to mark infrastructure as an expansive relational property (Star and Ruhleder 1996) that entangles diverse “materialities with institutional actors, legal regimes, policies, and knowledge practices that is constantly in formation across space and time” (Appel et al. 2018, 12). Noting infrastructures to be “complex sociotechnical systems, with histories of contingency and change,” Christopher R. Henke and Benjamin Sims (2020, 4) argue that infrastructure has become integral to culture and politics.

Infrastructures both constrain and enable various political possibilities and outcomes, and, as such, they underpin some of the most urgent social and environmental issues of our times (Velho and Ureta 2019). Infrastructures are entangled in multiple temporalities, shaping aspirations, imaginations, and futures, while also being rooted in specific historical, social, and material contexts, constantly requiring maintenance and always in process of decaying, deteriorating, and breaking down (Gupta 2018; Velho and Ureta 2019). As Cymene Howe et al. articulate, “Even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates” (2016, 6), leading Raquel Velho and Sebastián Ureta to comment, “Nowadays, after decades of deregulation and shrinking State power, infrastructural decay has become the norm, rather than the exception” (2019, 432). Indeed, infrastructures “fail everywhere, all the time,” notes Mattern (2021, 106). Highlighting “the sudden collapse of dams and bridges, the slow deterioration of power grids and sewer systems, the failure of health institutions and supply chains necessary to respond to a pandemic, the corrupt police departments, hacked data, and broken treaties,” Mattern draws our attention to differentially experienced forms of infrastructural ruination, decay, and abandonment. Here infrastructure becomes decoupled from its historical roots that tie it to notions of modernity, progress, and innovation.

Decoupling infrastructure in this way allows us to grapple with how infrastructure is not an uncontested social good. Winona LaDuke and Deborah Cowen (2020), for example, highlight the role of settler colonial infrastructure in the transformation of ecologies of the many into systems of circulation and accumulation to serve the few. They focus our attention on how the expansion and reproduction of settler colonial systems of value have been enabled not only by the technical or physical forms of infrastructure but also by social infrastructure, or the ways feelings, ideas, and attitudes form material systems. Here, the social and material construction of settler colonial infrastructure across Turtle Island, the Americas, and beyond, has functioned as a key component of violent state formation and modernization. Velho and Ureta (2019, 430–31) too note how until at least “the late 1970s, state, colonial, and corporate power in Latin America was synonymous with ‘infrastructural power,’” later shifting to “infrastructural inequalities” from the 1980s onward as neoliberal restructuring and the privatization of large-scale infrastructures took hold across Latin America and the globe more generally. These tensions underscore how infrastructures don’t just break down but, in many ways, are also designed to break particular lifeworlds and life-forms.

Building on these insights, throughout this book, we wrest with the notion of unjust and falling-apart infrastructures and systems being broken by design to parse out the specific intentional logics of social abandonment, structural indifference, and other racist, ableist, and sanist practices that break communities, ecosystems, and objects. These kinds of broken-by-design structures often participate in debilitating and targeted slow violence, “forms of harm and destruction that are invisible, intangible, indirect, and that unfold over time” (O’Lear 2021, 1). A wide range of public and private institutions participate in slow violence, furthering what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2015) terms “organized abandonment.” For Gilmore, organized abandonment names the ways public money is mobilized to increase private profit as well as scale up forms of control and policing, extending practices of mass criminalization, pathologization, and surveillance. Avery F. Gordon (2008) similarly formulates this as “socioeconomic abandonment,” denoting how state and capitalist interests capture and extract value and vitality from marginalized people, eliding responsibility and accountability through intensified deregulation and privatization that has lasting effects on everything from transit to housing to access to clean air and water. Elizabeth A. Povinelli (2011, 134) further illuminates how “economies of abandonment” exhaust “alternative social projects by denying them sustenance” and actively dismantle collective structures that impede a market logic. Taking these approaches together, we highlight throughout this book how a targeted and organized socioeconomics of abandonment contributes to disablement, debilitation, and breakdown through the “vampirism of profit extraction that exhausts the body and saturates the architecture of even the most benign and impulsive everyday pleasures” (Berlant 2007, 780). In bringing together these approaches, we argue that systems and structures described as broken by design are not systems and structures that we should endeavor to repair or maintain. Rather, these are systems and structures we need to abolish to make a break for something better.

The implications of slow violence and organized socioeconomic abandonment for our understanding of disability and breakage is further illuminated by the work of Sherene H. Razack (2011, 2015) and Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Adele Perry (2018). In their book Structures of Indifference, McCallum and Perry describe how racist colonial systems seek to evade accountability through disregarding and individualizing social problems to such a degree that Indigenous people end up either targeted outright or else “ignored to death” (12). This was the case, they argue, in the 2008 death of Brian Sinclair, a disabled Indigenous man living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, who died after waiting a staggering thirty-four hours for “basic medical attention in a hospital waiting room” (126). Making resonant observations in the context of Canadian legal and carceral systems, Razack (2011, 374) draws on transcripts from coroners’ inquests into the deaths in custody of three Indigenous men, demonstrating how settler structures of justice and accountability work to transform “the colonial condition into a medical one.” In this process, Indigenous bodies and minds that have been made to break under settler colonial structures are marked as always and already sick, disabled, dying, or disappeared. This marking has everything to do, as Razack points out, with colonial occupation and the naturalization of settlers as the rightful stewards of (stolen) Indigenous land: “It goes without saying,” observes Razack, “that a damaged and dying people cannot be entrusted with self-governance and stewardship over the land” (353). It also and relatedly provides the necessary conditions that render Indigenous people targets for further debilitation and harm, what Razack describes as the settler’s “killing indifference” of Indigenous populations, “legitimizing the violence that is performed at the police station, on the streets and in the hospital” in encounters between settlers and Indigenous people (374). Framing structural indifference—which very often neglects or else intentionally maims, debilitates, or even kills—as “broken” can reinforce, instead of name and challenge, ableism and sanism as they intersect with racism and settler colonialism. Instead, we need to name slow violence, structural indifference, and organized socioeconomic abandonment as practices that break people, communities, ecologies, and lifeworlds.

In Razack’s (2015, 58) account of a Canadian government inquiry into the death of Frank Paul—an Indigenous man who died in police custody—she shows how framing his death as the consequence of being a “homeless chronic alcoholic” rather than of racist and intentional indifference exposes how colonial and ableist logics mutually constitute and reinforce one another. Razack notes that Paul’s death was rendered unexceptional and ungrievable through rhetoric that emphasized his lack of “normal” abilities (47). During the inquiry he was described as “a man on the brink of death anyway,” “a man without mind,” “likely incontinent,” and a man who could “only crawl,” had “gnarled hands,” and an “inability to fully function” (65, 60, 63). Paul’s dehumanization through such descriptions is contingent upon the unquestioned subhumanity of Indigenous and racialized disabled people. Structures of indifference participate in organized socioeconomic abandonment “where rhythms of restriction that might not reveal themselves as such forcefully reduce one’s capacity toward the world” (Stanley 2021, 8). Such abandonment practices “do not simply impact populations but forge such a totalizing power that they radically constrict not only life chances but life itself” (9). While “disability is one of the few social categories that make settler colonial violence and its continuities explicit,” it is often not named as such (Abay and Soldatic 2024, 3). Our book highlights these relations by connecting fragments of debility, disablement, and death to structures, systems, and power relations of abandonment, neglect, and indifference.

Disablement, as described by Mary Jean Hande (2019, 562), refers to a “the process through which people’s bodies and minds are broken down by environmental destruction, never-ending war and exploitation, state violence, extreme precarity, and poorly resourced and rapidly privatising public services and housing.” Jasbir K. Puar (2017), in an effort to articulate violent processes that might not be recognized under an umbrella of disability or disablement, argues in her book The Right to Maim that structural forces of debilitation, while often appearing to be more caring and benevolent in contrast to violent state-sanctioned practices of genocide and killing, often obfuscate the violence of sustaining life within oppressive social conditions. Debility is thus a practice of rendering populations available for injury, a biopolitical circuitry positioning and repositioning bodies through relations of living, dying, and maiming. For example, Puar notes how the targeted debilitation of infrastructure in occupied Palestine—whether damaged hospitals, fuel shortages that ground ambulances, depleted medical supplies, frequent power outages, or destroyed water infrastructure—is all part of the Israeli settler colonial state practice of maiming the Palestinian population without outright killing. “Maiming,” Puar writes, “masquerades as ‘let live’ when in fact it acts as ‘will not let die’” (139). Debilitation is an active and endemic process, tactically deployed to render populations precarious and to sustain that precarity—whether indefinitely, as a means of subduing and controlling, or as a strategy of dehumanization that constructs living people and whole populations as somehow less alive and thus more available to death. Yet, Puar’s work critically demonstrates how death is not the only form of violence and damage to be galvanized by, and those who are debilitated may never be recognized under the administrative, legal, or identity category of “disabled.” For these reasons, throughout this book, we name debility, disablement, and death as related but not identical outcomes of socioeconomic abandonment, structural indifference, and severe ecological destruction.

Povinelli (2011, 152) reminds us that characterizing “lethal conditions within late liberal societies must take into account the topological relationship between forms, modes, and qualities of killing” such as “strong and weak state killing” and the “modes and forms of agency, causality, and eventfulness on which they rely” alongside “the divisions of difference at hand to account for them.” Death is often taken as a metric of breakage, whether it be the astronomical number of ongoing drug toxicity deaths (see chapter 6), medical assistance in dying deaths, deaths at the hand of police violence, or genocide. All these deaths, killings, and forms of social murder need to be named for what they are (see chapter 8). Yet, in addition to the horrors of such deaths, there are relentlessly ongoing practices of debilitation and disablement. The slow violence and organized socioeconomic abandonment of people, infrastructures, and ecologies structure a social and cultural acceptance of death, disablement, and debilitation, which, in turn, normalize the abandonment of populations and environments. Throughout this book we track and unpack such practices, highlighting how contemporary social relations of breakage, maintenance, and repair shape accepted gradients of debilitation, disablement, and killing while also emphasizing the collective power of cultivating disabled kin as a means of confronting and transforming broken worlds. Moving from marking our society as broken to instead considering that our broken society works the way it was designed changes our understanding of what exists as well as what action we can take. A broken system implies a need for fixing, whereas an unjust system working by design demands a different response.

Crumbling Monuments

Although we started this project during the summer of 2019, the Covid-19 pandemic years have since drawn increased attention to the destructive brokenness of racist, colonial, imperial, and capitalist structures of health and governance, further exposing how such structures are routinely broken by design—structures that were created to safeguard and maintain the privilege and dominance of some groups precisely by ensuring the breakage of others. Against this backdrop, we have witnessed in recent years a productive crumbling of colonial monuments (both physical and ideological) and an expansion of abolitionist imaginaries as movements for Black lives, Indigenous sovereignty, and other allied justice movements push for transformative social change across occupied lands. As Jane O’Brien Davis (2022) highlights, colonial monuments sediment and memorialize the colonial legacies of domination, elimination, and erasure of Black and Indigenous peoples on occupied lands, allowing the past “to live on and perpetuate a colonial futurity.” Breaking colonial monuments alters the future. For example, Figure 4 shows an image taken in June 2021 in Tkaronto/Toronto where activists brought down the statue of Egerton Ryerson, a central architect of the Indian residential school system in Canada. The breaking of the Ryerson statue was precipitated by the recovery of the remains of over two hundred children in an unmarked grave at the Kamloops Indian Residential School site in British Columbia. Since the summer of 2021, thousands of gravesites have been uncovered across the Canadian settler state, and as Métis anthropologist Kisha Supernant (2022) reminds us, there are likely many more still unrecovered. In response, Senator Mary Jane McCallum, a survivor of the Canadian residential school system, stated: “Our hearts are broken. Canada is broken” (quoted in Cousins 2021). This somber assessment of broken hearts and a broken nation echoed on July 1, 2021, Canada’s national anniversary of confederation, when two statues, one of Queen Victoria and the other of Queen Elizabeth, were pulled down on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislature during an event to remember Indigenous children who died at residential schools. The statue of Queen Victoria was covered in red handprints symbolizing the violence affecting Indigenous women and girls, and later the head of the statue was thrown into the Assiniboine River. The statue of Queen Elizabeth was left toppled and covered in yellow rope (CBC 2021). Responding on social media to CBC’s “breaking” news coverage of this event, Anishinaabe from Pikwàkanagàn and Indigenous studies professor Veldon Coburn (2021, see Figure 5) challenged this double notion of breaking caught between the news and the toppling of colonial representations of power: “Breaking?” he questioned, “I call that fixing.” Here, we are made to consider how acts of breaking can themselves be generative forms of repair that effectively confront structures broken by design.

Throughout the book, we attend to the different ways breakage, repair, and maintenance are materially and discursively mobilized, and unfurl their implications, to be able to more precisely intervene. For example, while repair and maintenance practices are often celebrated for contributing to more just social conditions such as diverting broken objects from landfills or, as with liberal forms of reconciliation, addressing harms done by settler states against Indigenous peoples, we crip breakage, repair, and maintenance practices to better account for the ways repair and maintenance can buttress unjust systems and structures that themselves need to be broken down and abolished. In seeking to “stay with the breakdown” (Thieme 2021) as one way to break apart and break with that which differentially breaks us, we question, following Mattern (2021), who and what is being maintained, while also asking who and what maintains and repairs. We grapple with what Patricia Stuelke (2021, 5) names “the valorization of repair” as an approach deeply entangled in US (and Canadian) imperialism, structures of neoliberal racial capitalism, and settler colonialism. The repair and maintenance of structures and systems broken by design can perpetuate racial capitalism, empire, and settler colonialism including through the incorporation or depoliticization of radical social movements. In this way, as Stuelke argues, the reparative can “stave off the difficult work of imagining possible worlds that break definitively with this one” (17). Because repair and maintenance can prevent important forms of breakage at times, we must attend to their diverse deployments to foster different kinds of ruptures, continuities, and outcomes.

Throughout this book, we track and travel with the multivalences of breakage, repair, and maintenance to contribute to nuanced ways of denaturalizing and transforming the disabling, debilitating, and deadly structures perpetuating an organized socioeconomics of abandonment and forms of endemic neglect. Part of this work, we contend, is making disabled kin within broken worlds as a strategy for collective survival. A key component of our argument is that systems and structures that are broken by design give rise to multiple broken worlds. Caring for and transforming these broken worlds requires a collective politics that attends to their heterogeneity, recognizing that each bears its own fractures and possibilities. While refusing to ignore or gloss over differentially experienced suffering, ableism, targeted violence, and other social, ecological, political, or economic injustices, we must, following Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands (2005), embrace “the beauty in the wounds” and take “responsibility to care for the world as it is.” Throughout this book, we sit with the beauty in the wounds to parse out the tools we need to live now, to understand what is already available to us in confronting how truly bleak things are, and to disrupt a longing for a future that can overcome the damage of the past or maintain the insufficiency of the present. Doing so is to demand broken worlds where the injured, debilitated, and disabled have supports to thrive while simultaneously challenging the systems and structures that cause and benefit from their harm. This is the work of making disabled kin with the broken, maimed, injured, debilitated, and abandoned. Forging multispecies and more-than-human disabled kin is one way we seek justice for, and endeavor to be in good relation with, those who have been harmed and those we’ve already lost through structures of neglect, indifference, and abandonment.

Collective Survival: Broken as Disabled Kin

Disabled artist and writer Karrie Higgins (2017) describes navigating a mental breakdown triggered by the physical and social isolation of not being able to leave her apartment due to its inaccessibility. Identifying an intimate relationship between the brokenness of a building without an elevator and her own breakdown, Higgins is moved to claim both as kin, as both forms of breakage—the inaccessible building and herself—are effects of structures broken by design. She writes: “I have started to see the staircase outside my door as my backbone. . . . How can I hate this inaccessible apartment, how can I fear those stairs, when they are me? I can forgive this building for being disabled, missing an elevator. (It is disabled like me!) I am it, and it is me.” Higgins’s declaration that “I am it, and it is me” is to recognize that disability is not simply a biological fact of an individual body but rather is a relation of the world, one that is more-than-human, extending beyond our individually bounded bodies to emphasize how we are connected across our ecosystems and environments. “I am it, and it is me” is to name disability as of the world, to name the world as disabled, and to recognize how disability and disablement are shared relational experiences for which we can make interventions and alterations. Far from a static or simple medicalized property of an individual human, disability is a human and more-than-human relation. This is not only because of the ways in which disability tends to involve the more-than-human in order to create access and well-being (e.g., the more-than-human relations of wheelchair and guide-dog users, people who breathe using ventilators, have their kidneys filtered by a dialysis machine, see using glasses, monitor their blood sugar levels using an automatic insulin pump, drink and eat using tubes and straws, or navigate using canes) but also because disability is a shared experience of other species, environments, and ecologies (e.g., disabled nonhuman animals like the New Zealand parrot missing part of their upper beak who improvised their own assistive device for grooming [Corlett 2021]). Disability is also a nonhuman relation because disability is part of our shared planetary ecosystem, appearing everywhere from insects disabled through radiation exposure and lakes poisoned by pollution to crumbling infrastructures and the interdependent web of more-than-human relations that adapt, reorganize, and transform so as to live on in the midst of breakdown, change, and crisis.

Disabled kin relations can be cultivated all around us, from human-discarded plastics that end up being ingested by fish and permanently altering these ecologies (Liboiron 2021; Ah-King and Hayward 2013) to Higgins’s missing elevator. Our use of disabled kin throughout this book is shaped in conversation with Zoe Todd (2025) and Donna J. Haraway (2016), who articulate kinship as extending beyond the human and as emerging through relations of collective solidarity and reciprocity for our interdependent well-being. Kinship, Todd (2025, 1743) emphasizes, means relationality with responsibility, exploding, transforming, and refusing “the white colonial framings of kin predicated on white possession.” Working with approaches that situate kinship beyond the familial, disabled kin-making expands our horizon of solidarity and reciprocity, connecting us with those we may not have otherwise identified or forged political bonds with. As cultivating disabled kin tends to our collective interdependence, “I am it, and it is me” is not about recognizing sameness or likeness through pathologization, but rather it is to recognize how structures broken by design individualize and disable, debilitate, abandon, and kill. Such a recognition can foster solidarity and enable a collective politics of crip maintenance—of tending to infrastructures, objects, and human and more-than-human relations that are at once outside of us yet that remain profoundly interdependent with us—as a means of sustaining disabled life and multispecies flourishing (see chapters 5 and 8). Forging disabled kin, then, becomes a form of social struggle that cultivates radical relations of care, access, and abolition to contest intersecting forms of debilitation, abandonment, and extraction.

“I am it, and it is me” is a way to forge kin relations by parsing out how acts of breakage, maintenance, and repair connect to interdependent relations of care, access, and abolition—namely, how disabled surviving and thriving is linked and sustained through a web of globalized and interdependent human and nonhuman relations, which come with shared responsibilities and obligations. In Higgins’s example of a building without an elevator, disabled surviving and thriving is connected to the economic, material, and labor relations of retrofitting buildings, maintenance practices of keeping the retrofits working, anticarceral relations that enable community living for disabled people, and so on. A breakdown of any one of these entangled relations frequently breaks disabled people because of the social fragility of the infrastructures required to sustain us. Indeed, an inaccessible apartment can harm us if we must find another place to live or force our body that needs an elevator to dangerously navigate the stairs. Or, as Higgins describes, we might remain isolated and trapped in our apartment until the elevator is fixed, potentially risking employment, missing important appointments, relying on others to bring food and other goods, or else navigating the deleterious and sometimes deadly mental health effects of social isolation and segregation. Cultivating the broken building as disabled kin lays bare the deeply globalized and interdependent relations required to sustain disabled people, communities, ecologies, infrastructures, and things. Attending to the resources and labor needed to sustain disabled kin highlights, for example, the plural entanglements of responsibility, obligation, collective survival, and well-being embedded in interdependent relations of care, access, and abolition (see chapters 4 and 8).

While the human largely remains at the center of our work throughout this book, humans are always already enmeshed in a transnational world of multispecies interdependent relations, and the category of the human is inclusive of the nonhuman (Yong 2016; Bratton 2021). Throughout this book, and informed by feminist science and technology studies, Indigenous studies, and decolonial disability justice approaches, we contribute to unpacking some of these interdependent relations to forge bonds of solidarity and collective risk mitigation, embracing broken worlds by thinking with disabled kin, including disabled objects, animals, infrastructures, environments, and the planet itself. In so doing, we build on the work of Sunaura Taylor (2024, 7), who names “disabled ecologies” as constituted by webs of injury affecting many species—webs that can become connected when ecosystems and other life-forms and lifeworlds are “profoundly altered.”

The profound alteration of people, communities, diverse ecologies, ecosystems, and the planet is intimately linked to settler colonial practices of land theft, resource extraction, and environmental degradation. As such, the making of disabled kin “is inextricable from the disablement of Indigenous ontology, peoples, and communities” (Jaffee and John 2018, 1407). As the Women’s Earth Alliance and Native Youth Sexual Health Network (2016) makes clear, “violence on the land is violence on our bodies.” Because of this disabling and debilitating social context, how we make disabled kin and theorize breakage, repair, and maintenance must confront the racist debilitation of land and people and center Indigenous sovereignty struggles as essential to disability justice. For, as Laura Jaffee and Kelsey John (2018, 1424) write, “there is no disability justice without decolonization.” Decolonial disability justice, they argue, “points to the urgency of simultaneous and coalitional struggle toward a future in which disabled and Indigenous peoples can exercise self-determination within or independent of a state that recognizes, respects, and supports their sovereignty,” especially because of the ways disability “gives rise to new ways of knowing, thinking, being, and doing that inform struggles toward a more just future” (1420, 1424). Framing settler coloniality as “disabling land” positions settler colonialism as fundamentally opposed to disability justice, whereas the colonial disablement of humans is always linked to land theft, extraction, and degradation. Justice for disabled, Indigenous, and disabled Indigenous peoples and communities thus requires the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination.

Red River Métis scholar M. Murphy (2017, 497) too reminds us in their look at the impacts of industrially produced chemicals on the Great Lakes water basin that “what happens to the water is what happens to its relations.” “We are part of the water,” Murphy writes, “We are part of its tributaries. And, since the mid-twentieth century, we have become a part of PCBs [polychlorinated biphenyls] too” (495). In the context of such noninnocent chemical entanglements, Murphy names alterlife as a way of orienting toward decolonial futures that figures “life and responsibilities beyond the individualized body” and acknowledges “being in the contradictions of existing in worlds that demand chemical exposures as the conditions for eating, drinking, breathing” (497). Embracing “impure and damaged forms of life,” alterlife “acknowledges that one cannot simply get out” (500). Neither can we simply wait for something better. Instead, Murphy argues that an “openness to alteration” may enable the “potential to become something else, to defend and persist, to recompose relation to water and land” (500). Throughout this book, and in conversation with decolonial disability justice approaches, we show how building transnational, multispecies, more-than-human relations of disabled kin creates openings to work with what we have—a “refusal to abandon those who have been harmed, and an insistence on staying with the trouble of a troubled landscape”—while simultaneously striving to prevent further disablement, debilitation, and death (Taylor 2024, 6). By critically embracing alteration, we seek to name and break apart relations that harm us and our kin so as to collectively mitigate risk and expand practices of solidarity.

A core premise of this book is that disability knowledges, wisdoms, and cultural practices are essential to this work. Drawing attention to the relations that constitute our own disabled bodies, as well as those of our disabled kin, is not intended to flatten or homogenize the difference of disability or to suggest that disability is somehow universally experienced across human and nonhuman registers. Quite the opposite, we suggest that parsing out some of the many relations that come to concretize broken worlds and disabled kin enables a reckoning: rendering us complicit, accountable, and more specific in our understandings of, and calls for, transformation. This is important because of the exacting way disability is too often flattened through the ubiquitous notion of the broken. That is, all too often diverse human and more-than-human disabled kin are named as broken to repudiate and abandon debilitated bodies, altered ecologies, broken infrastructure. This is the case even with liberationist social movements that use “disability as the raw material against which the imagined future world is formed” (McRuer 2006, 72), such as with environmental justice movements that ground their resistance to ecological damage by situating disability as a “cautionary tale” (Taylor 2024, 25).

Broken Worlds, Disabled Kin: Strategies for Collective Survival illuminates how broken functions discursively to discount, abandon, punish, and disqualify many species, environments, and forms of animate and inanimate life. We do so to challenge the material and immaterial effects of such mobilizations, not to rehabilitate or fix our engagement with disability and brokenness but rather to “stay with the trouble” of alteration and alterlife (Haraway 2016). Naming and rendering perceptible some of the inequitable relations that come to constitute our broken worlds and disabled kin is one way to call to account, to specify how particular biopolitical relations of ableism, debilitation, maiming, slow violence, settler colonialism, neoliberal racial capitalism, ecological destruction, and more have caused and continue to cause harm. In doing so, we also seek to highlight how our engagement with breakage and expansive notions of disability kin can spark transformations that enable more than just individual survival in disabled worlds but also provide entry points to dismantle harmful relations and build otherwise. For if, as Judith Butler (2006) notes, we are not only constituted by our relations but dispossessed by them as well, attention to relational harms as well as relational flourishing demands that we must learn to navigate broken worlds with human and more-than-human disability. Taking our cue from alterlife, and as we show throughout this book, it is frequently not brokenness itself that is the problem but rather the ways structures of neglect, intentional indifference, and a socioeconomics of abandonment seek to foreclose alternative infrastructures of collective survival.

The notion of collective survival foregrounds the material well-being and flourishing of individual disabled and debilitated people while also insisting on a framework of survival that extends beyond the individual. Collective survival demands a politics of solidarity: It means protecting and caring for ourselves and each other—showing up for one another and working together in defense of those most and multiply affected by state neglect, targeted abandonment, and by broken-by-design systems. Collective survival is thus a response not only to spectacular crises like climate disasters, wars, or genocides but also to the ongoing, everyday crises endemic to disabled, racialized, and marginalized communities. Protecting, caring, and fighting for disabled and debilitated life and survival means engaging in the noninnocent project of tending to the material objects, infrastructures, ecologies, and care relations that sustain us. The work of collective survival pushes us to confront the ways individual and mere survival is not enough. We want more than basic survival for ourselves and our kin. We want collective flourishing, agency, comradery, creativity, pleasure, and joy.

Engaging in collective survival is both a political and an imaginative act. It involves noticing and resisting the structural forces that constrain disabled and debilitated life while also making room for the generative, life-sustaining practices through which disabled people and kin live on, make home, and take care. Interdependent and collective survival practices are essential to sustain neglected, abandoned, and marginalized communities, and disabled and debilitated people have long protected and nurtured one another in the absence of state support and against a world that is often hostile to our mere existence. Throughout this book, we search for, document, and learn from transhistorical crip modes of survival—both spectacular and quotidian—as practices of worldmaking that persist even and especially under conditions that deny the possibility of life.

Collective survival presses us to reconfigure what it means to survive by insisting that our world-building projects contend with embodied vulnerability and material limits. Living on, in, and against our broken-by-design worlds, individual survival alone is neither a sufficient nor a sustainable political aim. Rooted in a politics of disabled kinship that stretches across time, space, and relation, collective survival is a call to fight for survival beyond the self. It is about making and sustaining life and possibility for those who come after us—our disabled kin, known and unknown, who will inherit what we build, break, maintain, and repair in the present. The work we do and the skills, practices, and care we nurture are not only for us or this moment but for futures beyond us—for disabled life and kin yet to come.

Moving Together: Breaking, Maintaining, and Repairing for Collective Survival

The “world is always breaking; it’s in its nature to break,” Steven J. Jackson (2014, 223) suggests. “And it is always being recuperated and reconstituted through repair.” All too often, however, the relationship between practices of breakage, repair, and maintenance function in the service of dominant social structures like neoliberal racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy. Critically engaging with brokenness, therefore, also requires an understanding of how practices of repair and maintenance can prop up and sustain structural and systemic oppression to enable us to better intervene toward more liberatory ends.

In her book Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World, philosopher Elizabeth V. Spelman (2002) calls attention to how, in a world of ongoing breakdown, repair is crucial. Repair is the “creative destruction of brokenness,” she writes, noting that “states of disrepair are as subject to destruction as are states of repair” (134). For Spelman, repair tries to “preserve some kind of continuity with the past, with objects or relationships that already exist and have fallen prey to damage or decay,” regularly seeking “to pick up a thread with the past” in the wake of ruin (127, 5). In this way, she suggests that repair is both conservative and interventionist, making possible “what has existed in the past to continue into and beyond the present” by doing “something about those breakdowns, ruptures, and collapses” (124). However, Stuelke’s (2021) genealogical accounting of reparative activist mobilizations within structures of neoliberal racial capitalism and empire shows how, in this conservative orientation to the past, repair can also enact harm. Stuelke’s critical account crucially alerts us to how reparation “has historically been implicated in short-circuiting rather than successfully realizing attempts to break with the world as it is” (29). In the contemporary context of the settler colonial systems and structures that continue to perpetuate harm, it is therefore important to trace the troubling valences of repair.

As Indigenous, Black, and disabled artists, academics, and activists demonstrate, there are countless examples of how repair work has been used in the service of colonial, racist, and ableist structures of normalization and violence. Indeed, in the summer of 2021 in Toronto, restoration was the word chosen by the city to describe an almost twenty-hour operation that sent 150 police officers armed with assault rifles, horses, and pepper spray, together with multiple corporate security details and a surveillance drone, to brutally evict an estimated thirty-three houseless people from their tent encampment in Trinity Bellwoods, a downtown park. The encampment eviction cost the city over $400,000 and was justified as a way to restore the park as a public resource “intended to be available and used by everyone.” The city referred to the encampment as an “encroachment” and residents’ belongings as “litter.” More than one-third of the violently evicted encampment residents were Indigenous, and as part of their eviction, their sacred fire was extinguished, representing just “one expression of the colonial power relation that has turned ancestral Indigenous territories into zones of extraction, exploitation, impoverishment and death” (Kanji and Withers 2021). The day before the encampment eviction, former Toronto mayor John Tory celebrated National Indigenous Peoples Day by stating that “the City of Toronto is committed to advancing truth and reconciliation and justice”; however, the violent eviction went ahead despite internal reservations made by the director of the City of Toronto’s Indigenous Affairs Office, who noted that it is “important that the City not take a homogenous approach to all people living on the land” (Withers and Hatlem 2022).

The usage of restoration by the City of Toronto names a deeply problematic return to the colonial idea of land as commodity. This challenges us to search for forms of restoration and repair that do not seek to rebuild the same but rather embrace the opportunity to break definitively with this neoliberal racial capitalist and settler colonial world and to operate instead within “a web of relationships and responsibility” (Kanji and Withers 2021). As we strive to make a definitive break from colonial forms of repair that return, what other kinds of restoration become possible? Azeezah Kanji and AJ Withers (2021) write that, according to Indigenous histories, Toronto/Tkaronto—a name “believed to be derived from a Mohawk, Seneca and/or Wendat word meaning ‘trees standing in water’”—was once “known as a place of gathering and abundance, instead of division and scarcity: a reminder that beautiful worlds existed before the settler-colonial present, and can exist in the future after it.” If to restore literally means, etymologically speaking, to “give back,” we must also attend, following queer and Indigenous studies scholar Joseph M. Pierce (2021), to how “the ‘back’ of land back is not simply about ‘return,’ or even restoration, but rather relations” of collective interdependence, reciprocity, responsibility, and obligation.

Just as some examples of repair can and do work to break some of our bodies, minds, and environments, we can likewise read some acts of breaking as powerful and generative gestures of repair. Here we recall Figure 4, the striking image of the toppled statue of Egerton Ryerson, architect of so much premature debility and death, broken, in our view, in the maintenance of good relations and conditions of life and collective survival. We also think about the land defenders’ railway blockade erected in the early months of 2020 as a means of disrupting the ecologically disastrous expansion of the Coastal GasLink pipeline through Wet’suwet’en territory on the northwest coast of British Columbia, Canada. The disruption of railway infrastructure—rendering inoperative what is often described as the “backbone” or “spine” of settler economies—served to actively block certain kinds of passage while simultaneously facilitating other decolonial kinds of movement possibilities; dreaming, living, and relating otherwise. Unist’ot’en (2020) land defenders called for international “solidarity actions from Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities who uphold Indigenous sovereignty and recognize the urgency of stopping resource extraction projects that threaten the lives of future generations,” specifically requesting solidarity actions that would “#ShutDownCanada.” In Belleville, Ontario, solidarity actions stopped railway traffic along one of the busiest routes, causing carrier VIA Rail to cancel train travel between Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. Following this action, further blockade actions took place across Canada in provinces such as Ontario, Quebec, and Manitoba, including on Tyendinaga Mohawk and Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory, and interfered with national supply chains so severely that CN Rail was forced to shut down its operations in eastern Canada altogether, while in British Columbia, the Secwepemc Nation blocked Canadian Pacific tracks repeatedly (Scott 2021).

“Blockades,” writes Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2021, 56), “are both refusal and affirmation. An affirmation of a different political economy. A world built upon a different set of relationships and ethics. An affirmation of life.” If settler colonialism is, as Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Sean Coulthard (2014, 152) writes, “territorially acquisitive in perpetuity,” and is acquisitive without Indigenous consent, blockades are, in Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg culture, “beaver infrastructure” (Simpson 2021, 19), a generative, Indigenous life-affirming refusal. Indigenous blockades, for Simpson, are at once “a refusal to accept erasure, banishment, disappearance, and death from our homelands,” “an amplification and centering of Indigenous political economies,” and “a resurgence of [Indigenous] social and political practices, ethics, and knowledge systems” (10). Blockades as generative refusal function to break capitalist and settler colonial infrastructure and also to repair and maintain practices of consent that can allow “for different worlds to exist beside each other” (55). “Our current world is on fire, warming and melting at an unprecedented rate,” Simpson writes (58). “The whole world should be standing behind the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and their clans, paying attention to the world they are refusing, observing how life behind the blockades renews a different vision.”

Repair is a risky concept and practice, as it can function to normalize and reinforce the settler colonial and racial capitalist status quo. Stuelke (2021, 17) importantly warns of how the repair framework can create an “allegiance to the methods people use to survive things as they are,” thereby staving off “the difficult work of imagining possible worlds that break definitively with this one.” She cautions that when racial capitalism, colonialism, and empire are viewed merely as structures in need of repair or remediation, we fail to confront them as dynamic, violent structures that must be dismantled. Linked to the risk of repair is the equally risky concept and practice of maintenance—the everyday labor of tending to and sustaining environs, infrastructures, and relations. Like repair, maintenance operates across many scales and carries multiple valences, prompting us not only to examine how, when, and under what conditions maintenance work is performed but also to question who and what is being preserved, sustained, or prolonged (Mattern 2021). Actions like #ShutDownCanada and the toppling of the Ryerson statue alongside Nishnaabeg teachings of beaver infrastructure expand our understanding of breakage, repair, and maintenance, underscoring the crucial point that repair and maintenance cannot be a return to, or maintenance of, the political same. Repair often refers to returning something to a functioning state, while maintenance aims to preserve that state through ongoing, durational upkeep. Yet, a functioning state may be a deviation from a return to the same; a functioning state may not mean functioning in all ways. Spelman gives the example of a car repair, where one may repair a car in such a way as to restore its particular vintage or may repair a car to simply have it drive again. Repairing or maintaining oneself to function in a workplace is different from doing so to function as a citizen. While such forms of repair “might not be incompatible” writes Spelman (2002, 38), “we cannot assume that one repair suits all functions.” Orienting toward alteration and a differently functioning future means remaining open to a world we cannot yet foresee or fully understand. And, as Stuelke (2021, 35) notes, “there is a difference between wanting to repair the world so that one’s current desires can flourish, and remaining open to the possibility that making a different world might mean one’s current desires have no place—that in such a new world, one might, in fact, want something else.” Part of the work of anticipating and making room for as-yet-unknown futures in which more of us can flourish is to recognize brokenness, maintenance, and repair as deeply social and political practices that are open to collective intervention.

In The Right to Repair: Reclaiming the Things We Own, Aaron Perzanowski (2022) draws attention to the many relations repair makes visible, from being attuned to the ecological, economic, and legal relations needed to sustain an object to the technical skills needed to enact repair practices. Repair and maintenance not only demand skills and resources to sustain objects; these practices also reshape how we inhabit time, linking past, present, and future. From the irreplaceable batteries in Apple’s AirPods to the intellectual property regimes that restrict the reparability of everything from smart home devices to farming equipment, acts of repair and maintenance may be conservative in their orientation to preserve but they also threaten business models based on infinite resources and possibilities for economic growth. Indeed, such practices “can undo damage and extend the useful lives of the things that surround us,” saving consumers money and fostering secondary markets, as well as lessening the environmental impact of consumerism and the extraction of natural resources (15). “Repair can stanch the flow of electronic waste that is clogging landfills, tainting soil, and poisoning water around the globe,” as well as slow extraction and production (29; see chapter 1). Likewise, maintenance can preserve and strengthen our vital infrastructures to ensure they are resilient as they age or as they are threatened by erratic weather and environmental changes brought on by climate change. Both repair and maintenance can promote the collaborative distribution of knowledge and skills and coordination to achieve shared goals (Mattern 2021; Perzanowski 2022). “Successful repair,” writes Perzanowski, “can work a kind of magic” (15).

Mattern (2021, 116), too, reminds us that while “outsiders sometimes make the mistake of focusing on the rusty bridges and broken pipes—the ‘defective objects’ themselves . . . local fixers are more concerned with the social and political relationships in which [those objects are] embedded.” Like attending to the sociality of access, attending to the sociality of repair and maintenance opens up critical questions about individual and collective responsibility, stewardship, caretaking, conservation, and sustainability. “To repair is an act on the world,” writes Francisco Martínez (2019, 2), “to engage in mending and fixing entails a relational world-building that materialises affective formations.” Indeed, continues Martínez, one of the things that makes “repair relevant is not that things break, but that we care if they do” (4). That is, care is often necessary for repair to take place. Maintenance itself can be seen as a form of care, and for both maintenance and repair, such care relations require labor. As Mattern (2021, 138) comments, “even if we build an army of repair robots (a longtime sci-fi dream) and maintenance AIs, their hardware and software will still require upkeep. They’ll still depend upon well-maintained, interoperable technical infrastructures. They’ll still require cleaning staff—‘industrial hygienists’—to maintain pristine conditions for their manufacture. We’ll need curators to clean the data and supervisors for the robot cleaning crew. Labor is essential to maintenance.” And yet, much of this care and labor has been downloaded unsustainably onto individuals, and for this reason, we must push for structural forms of care that are attentive to the maintenance and repair of our interdependent environments. The crip repair and maintenance work we invoke throughout this book is not a simple trade—brokenness for wholeness—nor is it about restoring what once was or overcoming through technology. Rather, we crip repair and maintenance practices to foster “dynamic interdependencies” that might bring us toward a more habitable, livable, and sustainable future (Clare 2017, 15). This requires us to attend not only to the object or person marked as broken but also to the environs and relationships surrounding them. Such attention is a form of care, jointly focused on the maintenance of relationships, bodies, and ecologies. Moving with the generative possibilities of disability culture, we understand this work to be reworlding.

Constellating these expansive and frictional meanings and usages of breakage, repair, and maintenance and placing them in conversation with the knowledge and practices of disability culture and scholarship can help us to both make sense of our broken worlds and imagine and articulate others into being. As Julietta Singh (2021, 39) writes, breaks can be an occasion “for reorientation, for producing necessary and new ways of living . . . to become a more promising form of our collective selves.” If to break is to be separated into parts, we must address this fracturing while also tending to the inherent transformations embedded within our differential states of brokenness and concomitant relations of repair and maintenance. Sticking with this friction, and drawing insight from disabled scholars, artists, and activists, we take up the collective politics of broken worlds to show that breaking the systems, structures, and processes that break us does not mean repudiating brokenness itself. Rather, it demands confronting and disrupting the deadly and debilitating workings of neglect and socioeconomic abandonment while drawing on the tools available to us. So much of the work of critical disability studies, disability culture, and disability justice is for collective survival: building community so that we are not in it alone, so that we are not isolated and neither are our present and future disabled kin, so that disability does not remain a siloed problem to be solved but instead emerges as a relation we are accountable for, even if differentially. Such community is full of friction and is often fragile. But our relational ties are crucial, and no matter the state of our bodies, minds, or environments, we need to find ways to move together in and with alteration.

“Kin,” Ruha Benjamin (2018, 65) explains, emerges “as an effect of social struggle.” We center this social struggle for disabled kin in our broken worlds as we confront the uneven distribution of damage, harm, and care. In doing so, we learn from Lee (2016a) who defines wastelands as the effect of unjust social relations. Wastelands, she writes, are bodies and spaces “deemed unworthy of healing because of the scale and amount of devastation that has occurred there,” and wastelands, she continues, are always “named wastelands by the ones responsible for their devastation.” Yet, as Lee shows us, there is always more than devastation that lives on and germinates in (disabled) wastelands, and, she writes, “our freedom comes from falling in love with the beauty in lands, places, and people where others have been taught to see only weeds and devastation.” Lee practices this politics of antiabandonment by making home and kin: “When we make a home in lands and bodies considered wastelands, we attest that these places are worthy of healing and that we are worthy of life beyond survival.” Like Lee, we make home and struggle for kin in our broken worlds because we want more than individual or mere survival—more than the normalization of disability and more than the ongoing, violent debilitation of people and populations; we want to embrace disability justice in all that we do, design, make, break, maintain, repair, and imagine. If there is anything that can be gleaned from several decades of critical disability studies scholarship and even longer genealogies of disabled activism and resistance, it may be clear articulations of what is needed to thrive as disabled people and kin in an ableist world. To this end, we call for activists and scholars to anticipate, welcome, and expand possible futures for disabled people and kin as a collective, messy, experimental, frictional, and generative endeavor that requires our interdependence. In the aftermath of “informed refusals” that combine “a critique of what is” with “a vision of what can and should be,” we must care for one another and repair, build, and maintain accessible infrastructures that break down broken-by-design structures and enable us to show up and be together (Benjamin 2016, 970). “The habit of showing up makes us less willing to inhabit a world where we don’t show up, and where whole systems fail to show up,” writes trans scholar Hil Malatino (2020, 72). Engaging more expansive understandings of what broken is and might do highlights the social and political relationships of moving together for collective survival amid broken worlds.

Broken: A Theory in Pieces

By building on broken-world thinking that probes “what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points,” across our multimodal chapters, we consider breakage within our contemporary context of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and neoliberal racial capitalism (S. Jackson 2014, 221). Engaging theorizations of infrastructural neglect, socioeconomic abandonment, and ecological destruction alongside disability justice and disability culture, we trace how capitalist, imperialist, ableist, and eugenicist social relations, as well as racist and settler colonial structures of intentional indifference, extract profit from communities in ways that differentially break us and the many human and more-than-human entities that form our shared environments and ecologies. We ask how breakage, repair, and maintenance practices function, fail, and prevail and who and what is served and severed by these relations. We follow discourses, individual and collective experiences, and other forms of claiming brokenness, mobilizing a disability lens to parse out the different implications of these notions. Throughout this book, we trace overt forms of breakage while also attending to the specificities of more covert relations of brokenness, emphasizing the often obscured and indirect links connecting human and more-than-human disability and debilitation and the attendant individualized and collective responses to this breakage. Some of the indirect relations taken up in this book include connections mediated through the spread of Covid-19, labor conditions, transnational supply chains, accessible and adaptive clothing, assisted reproduction, university policy, mental wellness initiatives and mental health institutions, drug use, congregate care facilities, inaccessible public transportation, crumbling social and material infrastructure, climate change, and more. We write with and against institutions, from the settler state to the university to group homes. We track and travel with the multivalences of breakage, repair, and maintenance to create a broken analytic that can help illuminate the insufficiency of the present and parse out our terrain of struggle and the tools and strategies at our disposal toward better relations. We claim brokenness as disabled kin and name transformative forms of breakdown, drawing on examples throughout the book that guide our commitment to breaking, maintaining, and repairing the conditions of our collective survival and shared flourishing.

We sit with breakage to articulate the indirect, often obscured, and outrageous forms of brokenness that saturate our everyday lives, linking these breakages and their repair and maintenance to more overt forms of violence, harm, decay, and wreckage, as well as the attendant practices of resistance, refusal, and alteration. We also sit with breakage because, as critical disability studies scholars and disabled people engaged with disabled kin, including human and more-than-human communities, ecologies, objects, and infrastructures, we sit in friction with dominant approaches to fixing, curing, and innovating the broken. We are uneasy, for example, with the way calls to cure the broken or recover from brokenness are problematically entangled in dominant and oppressive ableist notions of normal and natural, as well as neoliberal racial capitalist, imperial, and settler colonial attachments to expansion, profiteering, and innovation, where inoperative and failing social and physical infrastructures as well as people deemed broken and unproductive are either targeted for economic extraction or else are disposed of and abandoned. Throughout the book, we disrupt notions of cure, rehabilitation, and recovery as solutions to the problem of breakage and engage expansive disability cultural and justice practices of breaking, maintaining, and repairing grounded in interdependent forms of care, access, and abolition.

Across this book, our theory in pieces constellates the everyday ways we are differentially made to break, mobilizing a crip method and politics that refuses to abandon people, places, and things deemed disposable. Our theory does the novel work of bringing together disparate fragments of broken social and material conditions to illuminate the structural forces that contribute to what can often feel like individual problems or banal everyday annoyances such as a broken elevator at a transit station. By tracing these disparate fragments across time and space, we highlight the patterns that emerge. Attending to such patterns enables us to amplify the relationship between individual experiences of damage and harm and intentional systems and structures of dominance, oppression, elimination, and control. Naming these forces can enable much-needed interventions to subvert the disproportionate power afforded to certain social forces over our everyday living conditions. Our broken analytic illuminates some of the many social relations and structures that contribute to global human and more-than-human disablement, debilitation, and death, tracing how breakage, repair, and maintenance at once reproduce unjust relations while also inducing creative manifestations of refusal, resistance, and alteration.

Our theory in pieces makes connections across contemporary media, disabled, sick, and mad people’s memoirs and life writing, our own encounters with breakage in our everyday lives, epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies drawn from Black, Indigenous, feminist, queer, and trans theory, as well as scholarship in critical disability and mad studies, science and technology studies, political economy, sociology and anthropology, criminology, geography, cultural studies, and social movement studies. Our form of theorizing in pieces and fragments is a crip method of argumentation that is focused on continuities and breaks across partial knowledge. We do not claim that our fragments of analysis are the only pieces to draw upon, but the fragments we assemble are what led us through this work, and they are illustrative of a dynamic of forces we seek to understand, attend to, and disrupt. As the fragments accumulate, we show how breakage, maintenance, and repair at once buttress one another while also sit in friction with each other. In drawing together fragmented strands of what so often feels like relentless brokenness, it becomes clear that the ways that things hang together are not inevitable or foreclosed, opening a terrain of possible intervention and engagement. In this way, our theory in pieces creates space to build and bring other worlds into being. We argue that responding to conditions of socioeconomic abandonment, infrastructural neglect, and severe ecological destruction and extraction requires an antiabandonment politics that is already underway through nascent forms of alteration and disabled kin-making that forges interdependent relations of care, access, and abolition grounded in disability culture, justice, and knowledge.

The overwhelming atmosphere of brokenness that our book attends to means that there is an unceasing intensity to the ways broken-by-design structures affect targeted communities. Our theory in pieces intentionally seeks to reflect this relentlessness and builds its argument through the unevenness with which it is possible to confront and contend with all sites and structures of brokenness. Throughout the book, our theory in pieces takes several different forms to express this unevenness. In some chapters we curate a set of objects to attend to patterns emerging at different registers, whether hyperlocal or further afield. Our theory in pieces is also expressed through breaks in the book itself, with some shorter chapters functioning to break up longer chapters. Several of these shorter chapters also incorporate drawings, photographs, and ethnographic observations to invite other modes of engagement with the ways breakage, repair, and maintenance constrain and compel our relations. Our focus on varied sites of brokenness is at once integral to our argument, but these sites are also moving targets as material discursive struggles shift how, where, and with whom breakages occur. Our fragmented collection of examples, experiences, and brief snapshots thread together with more substantive chapters, inviting further sites of inquiry that can build on and extend our analysis using the strategies and tools we provide to challenge abandonment and cultivate disabled kin-making.

Beyond drawing on our own experiences of breakage, our method has been influenced and informed by the work of queer, trans, and disabled scholar, poet, and activist Eli Clare. In Brilliant Imperfection, Clare (2017, xv, xvii) writes “a mosaic” made up of “fragments and slivers” that form a “fractured wholeness.” Clare’s mosaic unites both form and content; his fractured wholeness draws attention to how brokenness and wholeness are not opposites but rather push us to attend to our environs and the relationships that sustain them. We draw too from political geographers such as Deborah Cowen, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Colin McFarlane. Cowen (2024, 298–302) traces “seemingly distinct realms” of crises to thread an analysis “that cannot be pulled apart” if it is to live up to the “promise . . . derived from reading them together.” Noting the key role of social movements in refusing the exploitation and dispossession at the heart of contemporary crises, Cowen engages abolitionary geographer Gilmore (2018), who argues that “What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities.” Building on what already exists in pieces, McFarlane (2021) turns to urbanism in his book Fragments of the City, tracing how things come apart and hold together. Arguing that the modern city is constantly being made and remade through processes of fragmented relations, McFarlane forges relations through fragmentation that enable modes of knowing and doing that bring “together domains that are rarely connected” to attend to “the situated social and political relations that shape” the ways “life goes on among the pieces” (218).

Our theory in pieces is also indebted to the work of English literature and Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe (2023, 6), whose “ordinary notes multiply” as she weaves a portrait of everyday Black existence through notes of varying length and modality in her book Ordinary Notes. In “Note 21,” for example, Sharpe challenges the notion that “‘we’ are all in the world in the same way, that we experience suffering on the same plane, that we can be ‘repaired’ in the same way” (33). She seeks “acts and accounts of care as shared and distributed risk, as mass refusals of the unbearable life, as total rejections of the dead future” (333). Thus, Sharpe documents “how living happens” when “everything is at stake” (76). Anticipating our need to break the structures and systems that target to break vulnerabilized populations and environments, Sharpe asserts, “You do not have to save the things that kill you” (162). We heed Sharpe in our desire to break that which breaks us and others, as well as in the ways we seek to forge a “we” not through a politics of sameness but through kin-making that emphasizes relations of difference, plural responsibility, and solidarity.

Finally, influenced by cultural studies scholars such as Raymond Williams (1983) and Stuart Hall (1978), our theory in pieces engages the language of breakage, broken, and break to highlight the frictions ingrained in our shared social understanding of these concepts, breaking down the pervasive sense of brokenness that permeates much of contemporary life. That is, this book engages with, and troubles, not only brokenness in the everyday sense of something in need of repair or as something to discard but also the promise of breaking, such as in the abolitionist promise of breaking away from the oppressive conditions, systems, and structures that differentially break us. Our exploration of the diverse ways the concept of brokenness is discursively mobilized reveals the powerful dynamics and tensions of the current conjuncture that we aim to address in order to position disability at the center of our broader struggles for transformative change. Broken Worlds, Disabled Kin: Strategies for Collective Survival constellates fragmented conditions to offer a critical combination of broken and breaking events, states of affairs, and circumstances that can be intervened in and rearranged through collective practices of disabled kin-making.

Building on our broken analytic, chapter 1 examines some of the social relations and structures that contribute to global human and more-than-human disablement, debilitation, and death, with a focus on the socioeconomics of normative disability inclusion through adaptive fashion and abandonment within the global garment industry. In denaturalizing normal, we expose the harmful relations and infrastructures that sustain its violent reproduction. Recognizing that we cannot fully repair, maintain, or even break normalcy, we argue that we must instead denaturalize normalcy and break with the violent structures that sustain it. Disability culture and disabled people’s disruptive, antiassimilationist crip adaptive fashion practices, alongside garment factory workers’ survival and resistance strategies, mark the limits of repairing or maintaining normalcy, instead pushing us toward alteration as a form of social organization rooted in anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and anticolonial transnational solidarity.

Through a series of photographic images and personal reflections, chapter 2 narrates how a broken object—a porcelain figurine—reveals an intergenerational, transnational story of inheritances, harm and healing, complicity and care, illness, resilience, and solidarity. The shattering of the (dis)figure shaped our understanding of how breakage can be a means of assessing entangled relations and genealogies of care, damage, harm, and resistance, pointing us to the beauty of living with and through alteration.

Chapter 3 examines how contemporary risk spectrums simultaneously divide and connect oppositional categories—such as (mental) health and illness, normalcy and abnormalcy—transforming these into unstable continuums of neuro- and biodiversity. Analyzing the public and legal discourse surrounding Xytex Corporation’s sperm donor 9623—initially described as the “perfect” donor but later discovered to have a criminal record and a diagnosis of schizophrenia—we show how, under neoliberal capitalism, spectrums are often mobilized to reinforce individualized risk. Disabled by degree, we are expected to engage in endless reparative acts of self-maintenance that enhance, optimize, and capacitate. Turning to Esmé Weijun Wang (2019) and Stacey Park Milbern’s (2019a) writings on disability inheritances and disabled ancestors, we explore how notions of degree, spectrum, and gradation can also foster disabled kin and expand our collective capacity to break away from structural and environmental inequities as we seek to move together toward more just futures.

Picking up on our engagement with spectrums of risk, inheritances, and kin in the previous chapter, chapter 4 examines how disabled people find and forge kin amid broken infrastructures to collectivize risk and access. Lingering in the doorways of inaccessible workplaces, streetcars, and subways, this chapter offers a collection of stories of how interdependent relations sustain us, shaping both human and more-than-human forms of making life possible. Making disabled kin stays with the trouble of access in the making, cultivating our attention to human, more-than-human, and infrastructural interdependencies as sites of intervention and reworlding.

Building on the social and political implications of making disabled kin, chapter 5 engages with the relationship between broken social infrastructure and public and private investments and divestments in mental health care and support services in Ontario, Canada. Moving across various sites of brokenness and social abandonment—from the leaking hallway of a chronically underfunded public elementary school to a meticulously designed university building shattered by multiple student suicides and, finally, to a ten-foot-tall brick wall built by inmates of a twentieth-century asylum—we confront the colonial, carceral, and neoliberal racial capitalist grounds of social and material infrastructure while also grappling with the trouble of their abandonment. Attending to community practices of care, access, and abolition, we take up examples of debilitated, mad, and unwell people’s creative and generative refusals to comply with carceral logics and neoliberal racial capitalist market-driven rationalities. These practices of kin-making mitigate harm in the present while also dreaming up, and struggling toward, something better.

Chapter 6 expands on the importance of harm reduction by engaging with the politics of the poisoned drug supply and drug regulation in Canada. We trace how decarceration and depathologization are intertwined struggles necessary for moving beyond systems and structures that are intentionally broken by design and toward possibilities for abolition. While the state continues to rely on a constellation of punitive prohibitionist practices that criminalize, pathologize, and impose involuntary rehabilitation on people who use drugs, drug users and activists have creatively innovated ways to care for one another in the face of state neglect, showing us that we do not need to be well to find ways to move together. Though harm reduction alone is insufficient, prioritizing solidarity and collectivity allows us to make room for altered ways of being within and across our communities and to build on the antiabandonment practices that usher in the kinds of noncarceral health care that we all need and deserve.

In chapter 7 we reflect on a lecture we both attended in 2009 delivered by the former chair of the Ontario Human Rights Commission and professor of disability studies Catherine Frazee. In her lecture—titled “Disability in a Dangerous Time”—Frazee grappled with the uneven precarity of disabled life and the social production of vulnerability during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, as well as during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. Engaging with the politics of abandonment and the insufficiencies of repair, Frazee’s lecture was a key moment in the genealogy of this book, even if we didn’t know it at the time. In collaboration with visual artist and illustrator Eduardo Trejos, we depict portions of Frazee’s talk interlaced with our own memories, reactions, and reflections in the style of a graphic novel.

Further drawing out Frazee’s insight that neglect, disablement, and debilitation aren’t just unfortunate personal experiences but are built into systems of power, control, and profit, in chapter 8 we confront the harms of broken social and material infrastructure. Following our theory in pieces, we travel across the United States and Canada—from New York to California, from Texas to Ontario—to examine how disabled and debilitated people become dangerously immobilized by broken, decaying, unmaintained, and missing infrastructure that leads to further disablement, debilitation, and (social) death. We turn to the breakage caused by socioeconomic abandonment and deadly neglect, examining how human and more-than-human lifeworlds are shaped, constrained, and ended by neoliberal and racial capitalist profit imperatives. We unpack the frictions involved in collectively responding to these broken conditions through practices of crip maintenance and disabled kin-making, DIY solutions, solidarity, and mutual aid. By looking at these responses, we explore how communities sustain themselves despite—and against—systems that treat them as disposable.

Chapter 9 grapples with a world marked by political polarization, culture wars, and the unraveling of community and social fabrics amid the global Covid-19 pandemic and Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. Focusing our attention on the social, political, and material tensions arising from these deadly, debilitating, and mass disabling events, we follow threads of solidarity woven between two protective cloths: the medical mask and the keffiyeh. Through this lens, we ask: What insights can be gained about our shared social fabric by attending to the anatomy of its breakdown and fray?

Chapter 10 turns to discourses of risk in relation to disabled ecologies, environmental destruction, and climate change as we navigate life amid Earth’s sixth mass extinction. Driven by human activity, ecosystems are collapsing, temperatures are reaching unprecedented highs, permafrost is melting, oceans are rising, deserts are expanding, coral reefs are boiling, and forests burn out of control. In this context, our chapter asks how we forge disabled kin on a burning planet and cultivate relationships with unfixable and incurable environments in ways that do not depend on either restoring the past or securing a future. Situated between the pleasures of the present, the despair of an uncertain future, and the challenge of imagining collective multispecies flourishing, we consider how anxiety, debilitation, and life-limiting disabilities can orient us differently. Rejecting abandonment and embracing collective risk through interdependent care and access practices of harm reduction and palliation, we argue that tending to multispecies disabled kin enables us to act from where we are, as we are, and in solidarity with who or what we might collectively become.

We conclude, in chapter 11, by contesting a hostile and profoundly exclusionary future that is shaped by racist violence, fascist control, capitalist extraction, and genocide, noting that this is not the only future ahead. Disabled artists, scholars, and activists instead envision a world where disabled people and kin actively shape a more livable future through ongoing practices of interdependent collective survival and alteration. We show how disabled kin-making as a political practice—one that centers care, access, and abolition—is not a simple fix but rather a means of fostering the relations that are needed to face an uncertain future together.