8 Breaking Point

Broken Infrastructure Breaks Bodies: NYC’s Broken Public Transportation System

In New York City, disabled people, parents using strollers, and other advocates have long fought for accessible subway infrastructure. Prior to Goodson’s fall, two class action lawsuits had already been filed against the MTA, citing the agency’s failure to make sufficient progress on accessibility since the enactment of the 1990 American with Disabilities Act (ADA). The first lawsuit, filed in 2017 in New York state court by six disability rights organizations and two wheelchair users, argues that the MTA’s lack of elevators systematically excludes individuals who cannot use stairs, violating NYC’s human rights law (CIDNY v. MTA 2017). The second, filed in 2019 in New York federal court by two individuals with mobility disabilities and five disability rights organizations, contends that the MTA discriminates by renovating subway stations without installing elevators or other stair-free routes (De La Rosa v. MTA 2019). This lawsuit claims violations of the ADA, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and NYC human rights law.

While these lawsuits were being settled in court, the MTA launched their 2020–2024 Capital Program with plans to spend $5.2 billion to make sixty-seven stations newly accessible and to update seventy-eight already-existing subway elevators (MTA 2023b). The Capital Program aims to ensure subway riders are never “more than two stops away from an accessible station,” addressing the current gap of ten or more stations between accessible stops, what some refer to as “ADA transit deserts” (Stringer 2018). Indeed, as of 2020, 62 of the 122 neighborhoods served by the MTA lacked an accessible subway station. In 2023, the lawsuit settlement agreements build on the Capital Program, outlining a plan for the subway system to become 95 percent accessible by 2055. While some view this as a victory, the settlement makes clear that this plan is contingent on securing future funding (MTA 2023a). Furthermore, the 2055 milestone refers not to the completion date of the station renovations but rather to when the contracts to perform the accessibility renovations are advertised. The agreement also allows the MTA to adjust this milestone if the cost of making stations accessible increases by more than 150 percent (MTA 2023a). Beyond funding challenges, the Manhattan Seventh Avenue station—where Goodson fell to her preventable death—is not even included in the current list of stations slated for updates, despite the fact that in 2023, the station ranked as the seventy-fifth busiest (out of 472 stations) in the MTA’s performance metrics, with nearly 3.9 million annual users (MTA 2023b; MTA n.d.).

While scholars from infrastructure studies demonstrate the sheer difficulty of having to rebuild systems as “decisions from the past embed and literally become material in infrastructure, making radical deviations difficult” (Velho 2021, § 5a), disabled people forcefully assert that the cost of accessibility is the cost of undoing ableism (Menard 2021). Radical deviations to ableist infrastructure designed and implemented for the smooth passage of some at the expense of mobility restrictions, debilitation, disablement, and sometimes death of others exclude many from social life. “Infrastructure is how sociality extends itself,” write Winona LaDuke and Deborah Cowen (2020, 264), “it is how life is provisioned or curtailed.” Public transportation in particular plays a key role in social inclusion, especially for those who do not have access to a private vehicle. Data from the United Kingdom, for example, suggests that nondisabled people are twice as likely to have access to a car as compared to disabled people (Velho 2021, § 1).

In its over one-hundred-year history, the MTA’s vision for the future did not include disabled people. Yet, the issue at hand extends beyond the building of accessible infrastructure. Such infrastructure also needs to be maintained and repaired in a timely manner to reliably extend social inclusion to those who have been left out. After all, even when stations are built or retrofitted to meet accessibility codes, failure to maintain accessibility infrastructure on a day-to-day basis leads to profound inaccessibility. For example, elevators in the MTA’s (nominally) accessible stations are chronically out of service: A 2017 study completed by the New York University Rudin Center for Transportation and Policy Management found that New York City’s subway elevators break down fifty-three times a year on average (Kaufman et al. 2017). “These outages often occur unexpectedly (as opposed to planned maintenance), resulting in a lack of reliable travel options for passengers,” the authors write (12). Owing in part to the “ADA transit deserts” across the system, subway users attempting to exit a station often only “learn of a non-working elevator upon arriving at the station, requiring them to ride the train several stations away from their destination to reach a working elevator” (12). What is more, a report by two New York City council members evaluating the reliability of MTA elevators and escalators found that “equipment operated by third parties performed the most poorly” and was the most likely to be out of order (Powers and Sanchez 2023, 1). While third parties are responsible for the maintenance and repair of 16 percent of subway elevators and 18 percent of escalators, the average outage repair time of equipment managed by third parties was 4.4 days versus 1.6 days for equipment managed by the MTA. Furthermore, a 2017 audit by the Office of the New York City Comptroller found that the MTA “did not perform all scheduled preventive maintenance on nearly 80 percent of the sampled escalators and elevators, and that one-third of the MTA’s scheduled preventive maintenance assignments in the sample were completed late—if at all.” Additionally, the audit found that “the MTA does not systematically track whether and how quickly all of the defects found in its elevators and escalators are corrected.” Failing to adhere to its “maintenance schedule and ensure that all defects are promptly corrected can pose safety risks” as well as inflict “extraordinary challenges particularly for seniors and people with disabilities.” The result of this audit serves as a reminder that “behind every broken machine, behind every motionless escalator or elevator, there are people who can’t travel” (Office of the New York City Comptroller 2017). This means people who might lose wages for being late for work or incur fees for being late to pick up their child at daycare. It means people who might miss a class, or a job interview, or a vital doctor’s appointment. When people can’t get to where they need to go because of a broken elevator or escalator, they become mobility disabled too.

“By prying open the worlds of maintenance and repair,” write Julia E. Corwin and Vinay Gidwani (2025, 1687), “we begin to fathom the banal violence of our neglect of people and things but also the everyday virtuosity of practices that renew the conditions of possibility for life.” Practices of maintenance and repair are more than practical techniques or “mindless mechanical” procedures (F. Martínez 2019, 11). Repair and maintenance practices are political, making visible not only what is required to sustain collective life but also the priorities and commitments of our contemporary social relations. These relations are highlighted in the work of writer Ellis Avery (2015) in an essay entitled “What Sign of the MTA Elevator Zodiac Are You?” Avery, a mobility scooter user, calls attention to the dismal state of accessibility within the MTA system, assigning the twelve signs of the zodiac to different subway stations across New York City. Of “Taurus: 42nd Street,” Avery highlights a narrow ramp that is decidedly tight for two-way traffic. This ramp, however, doesn’t “require electricity” and never breaks down, in contrast to “Cancer: 34th Street/Herald Square” with its “one tiny elevator serving seven subway lines and the PATH train.” Of this elevator Avery asserts, “You’d rather not work at all, moody Cancer.” The Sixty-Third Street elevator assigned to the Scorpio sign offers the dreariest take on MTA infrastructure: “We live most when we’re closest to death is your motto,” Avery writes. “Every time you operate, you sound an alarm bell for riders in your narrow, stainless-steel compartment, thereby adding to their sense of being shut up in Schrodinger’s cat box to live or die as chance dictates.” When the elevators do work “they are often tiny, foul-smelling and hard to find positioned at the far ends of stations, forcing long wheelchair rides along narrow platforms.” Avery’s motto for the Sixty-Third Street elevator could just as well be a neoliberal resiliency slogan to justify and sell social abandonment.

As long as these issues remain unresolved, inaccessible and broken transit infrastructures will continue to be, in varied ways, debilitating and deadly for disabled and nondisabled people. In the section that follows, we present two further case studies of US infrastructural breakdown, each revolving around questions of mobility, socioeconomic abandonment, and power: the 2019 rolling blackouts during the lead-up to the California wildfire season and the 2021 near-collapse of the Texas power grid. Weaving together questions of electrical power and more collective practices of reclaiming power, these cases enable us to further our understanding of infrastructure neglect, socioeconomic abandonment, and social murder while shoring up possibilities for more collective responses.

Circuit Breakers: The 2019 Power Shutoffs in California and the 2021 Texas Power Grid Failure

In the fall of 2019, leading up to the California wildfire season, three major power companies—Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric—initiated a series of rolling power shutoffs, cutting off electricity for approximately three million people across over thirty counties in Northern California, in addition to several southern areas. The companies described these “public safety power shutoffs” as a responsible, preemptive means of reducing the risk of wildfires sparked by power lines and other electrical equipment during strong and dry seasonal winds.1 “California, Oregon, and Washington, along with several other Western states continue to experience an increase in wildfire risk and a longer wildfire season,” states the disembodied voice of the narrator of a PG&E (2022) promotional video; “high winds can cause tree branches and debris to contact energized electric lines, damage our equipment, and cause a wildfire.” The reason for the rolling blackouts, in the words of PG&E’s chief executive for utility operations Andrew Vesey, is “public safety” (quoted in Walton 2019). As per the company’s promotional video: “PG&E will not take any chances with customer safety” (PG&E 2022).

Yet, PG&E’s version of public safety did not extend evenly across populations. While the shutoffs may have reduced some risk of electrical equipment sparking wildfires, they amplified other and deadly forms of risk.2 Those with the most risk exposure when the electricity went out were disproportionately, and dangerously, affected. This included people who stood to lose wages due to workplace shutdowns, those who faced food insecurity without refrigeration, those who were living in carceral or congregate settings, and those categorized as medically complex or who relied on refrigerated medications, personal support workers, and electricity-dependent medical devices. In short, through the planned outages, hundreds of thousands of multiply marginalized Californians—Black and Brown, older, poor, sick, and disabled—were cast outside the bounds of “public safety” and largely abandoned.

“This week in the Bay Area, disabled people and elders without power are having difficulty breathing, moving, eating, and staying alive,” said Stacey Park Milbern (2019b) during a community gathering outside the PG&E offices in Oakland, California, on October 10, 2019, calling attention to the social debilitation caused by power outages. “A friend is going without her nebulizer treatments,” said Milbern; “a neighbor didn’t have a way to store his insulin. Another community member is homebound because she needs power to open and close their garage. Countless numbers of people are being forced to throw out groceries without knowing where the money will come to replace them.” As with MTA inaccessibility and infrastructural breakdowns, power shutdowns disable, debilitate, and sometimes kill.

Milbern, who lived interdependently with a life-sustaining ventilator, described the unevenness of PG&E’s version of risk reduction. While Milbern had access to PG&E’s Medical Baseline Program, a stopgap fix available to some thirty thousand “qualifying” customers with a doctor-approved “special energy need” that promised electricity at lower rates as well as advanced notifications for planned outages, many others did not (Danylevich and Patsavas 2021). Milbern describes the slow bureaucracy involved in accessing the program and the sheer injustice of a program that relies on users’ access to a medical doctor in a state without public health care and that is deeply reliant on the (often uninsured) labor of undocumented workers. The need for “doctors’ evaluations, diagnoses, and verifications,” write Theodora Danylevich and Alyson Patsavas (2021, § 1), “contribute[s] to the bureaucratic abandonment of a whole set of people living with non-biocertified—‘undocumented’—disabilities or impairments in ways that intersect with race, gender, citizenship status, and class to heighten the impact on those most marginalized.” What is more, the promised power outage notifications didn’t always materialize. For example, sixty-seven-year-old Robert Mardis was not provided with advanced notification when he went to bed at his daughter’s home in Pollock Pines, California, on October 16, 2019. “Around 3:30 a.m., utility company Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) turned off the electricity at millions of homes in California, including the Mardis family home,” reports Kendall Brown (2019). “Twelve minutes later, Mardis was dead.” According to an autopsy, PG&E was not responsible, as Mardis officially died of severe coronary artery atherosclerosis, or, in Brown’s words, his “heart gave out.” Yet for his daughter, Marie Aldea, Mardis’s death had everything to do with power. “The CPAP stopped, and he went and reached for the oxygen tank. We heard my mother scream, and my father was down at the end of the couch,” Aldea said. “I believe he would have been alive if the power didn’t go off.”

In the winter of 2021, two years after the first of the rolling blackouts in California, residents of the state of Texas—the so-called energy capital of the world and America’s largest producer of fossil fuels—found themselves at the center of another historic power crisis. Between February 10 and 20 of that year, a series of severe winter storms swept across twenty-five states, bringing record low temperatures “from the Canadian border to the Rio Grande,” affecting 150 million Americans (Gold 2022). The state of Texas was hit particularly hard. The majority of Texan homes have been built with minimal insulation and are only warmed with electric heaters (Meyer 2021). As temperatures plummeted lower than had been recorded in over a century, Texans did what they could to stay warm: They cranked up their heaters, with some turning on their electric ovens or even using hair dryers to stay warm (Gold 2022). This surge in electricity usage “pushed power demand beyond the worst-case scenarios that grid operators had planned for,” triggering the worst energy infrastructure failure in Texas history (Plumer 2021).

Days after the first storm hit, in the middle of the night, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT)—the body that manages the state’s power grid, supplying electricity to 90 percent of residents—ordered a “load shed,” an intentional blackout, leaving many neighborhoods across the state in cold and darkness. According to ERCOT, these outages narrowly avoided “a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months” (Douglas 2021). According to Houston public media, the council’s timeline indicated the grid was just four minutes and thirty-seven seconds away from complete collapse (Kut 2021). When electricity becomes scarce, it is standard practice for electric companies to temporarily cut off power to one neighborhood before rotating the outage to the next neighborhood and restoring power to the first. In February of 2021, however, the outages did not roll, and some neighborhoods experienced extended blackouts while others were unaffected. After local grids directed power toward the circuits that served critical infrastructure like hospitals and 911 call centers, there was no surplus electricity to direct elsewhere. While some residents kept their lights and heat on, eleven million other people experienced outages, and many were left freezing in the dark for as long as three days (Gold 2022; Meyer 2021). In what Silvia Foster-Frau and Arelis R. Hernández (2021) describe as a “vivid metaphor for the state’s entrenched inequities,” images began circulating online showing the lit-up skyline of Austin’s posh upper-middle-class downtown—which was exempt from the blackouts because it shared the grid with critical infrastructure such as hospitals and government buildings—surrounded by large swaths of darkness in the adjacent working-class and racialized neighborhoods, where, due to endemic neglect, such critical resources are scarce.

The near-collapse of Texas’s energy infrastructure occasioned the emergence of several other interrelated crises. The blackouts led to food, water, and critical supply shortages, which in turn posed acute threats to the physical health of individual residents. Foster-Frau and Hernández (2021) describe how the crisis became “especially dire for the state’s most vulnerable and marginalized communities,” those “whose lives have already been threatened by disaster, disease and destitution in recent years.” They write: “Families living in substandard homes lacking proper insulation are often huddling around a single space heater to stay warm in South Texas. Asylum seekers are wrapping themselves in blankets and keeping a community fire ablaze in a migrant camp near the border. Community organizers in Austin, San Antonio, and other major Texas cities are hustling to rescue the unhoused as hypothermia and frostbite set in.” A third of the state’s one hundred jails and prisons lost power. While some institutions had backup generators, heat was not prioritized and many were left without running water, leaving imprisoned people to freeze in locked cells with overflowing toilets (McCullough 2021). A 2023 report jointly released by the US Senate Finance Committee and the Special Committee on Aging documents the impact of the 2021 grid failure on residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities. According to the report, almost half (570) of Texas’s 1,200 nursing homes reported emergencies during the blackout. Over one hundred nursing homes were without electricity and heat, and more than three hundred nursing homes lost access to potable water. Two people residing in assisted living were killed because of the blackout, lost alongside hundreds of others across the state.

The storm’s official death toll now sits at 246 lives lost (Svitek 2022). However, an investigation by the Houston Chronicle revealed that the actual number of people killed may have been four times higher than the state’s official count. The state tallied more than one thousand deaths during that weeklong storm, a significant spike that could not be explained by regional Covid-19 trends or other historical patterns (Despart 2022). Many of the uncounted deaths associated with the storm and the subsequent outages were of medically vulnerable, elder, chronically ill, and disabled people. For example, after Arcola resident Julius Gonzales was unable to receive kidney dialysis treatment due to a closed clinic, he returned to his frigid mobile home (Aldous et al. 2021). Gonzales’s wife, Mary, describes how her husband was “compulsively shivering” as they huddled for hours to stay warm. Dressed in layers, the eighty-year-old elder died in his sleep hours later. Peter Aldous, Stephanie M. Lee, and Zahra Hirji (2021) note that “on paper, Gonzales’s death has nothing to do with the storm.” Indeed, his death certificate listed his cause of death as “cardiovascular disease, caused by high blood pressure and narrowed arteries associated with diabetes,” also noting “an overactive thyroid gland” as a contributing factor. With the death of Gonzales, the unnamed nursing home residents, and others who are framed passively—either as regrettable human casualties of an unforeseen and unavoidable disaster or else as a tragic coincidence—we return again to Engels’s concept of social murder as a way to emphasize the callous disregard for maintaining and repairing life-sustaining social and material infrastructure and to name the deadly impacts of such forms of neglect.

“Texas tried to kill us,” writes disabled Texan Emily Wolinsky (2021), underscoring her own location below the acceptable threshold for social murder. In the early hours of the morning of February 15, 2021—the beginning of the rolling blackouts—Wolinsky remembers how “the sound of everything shutting down except my vent, which switched to battery power, woke me up.” As the temperature of her house began to drop, Wolinsky details how she silently lay in bed running a status assessment of her durable medical equipment: “I use a ceiling lift that runs on a rechargeable battery to get in/out of bed and on/off the toilet that could no longer recharge. I use a ventilator at night to breathe while I sleep because of lung weakness (my respiration drops to deadly levels when I’m not conscious or when I’m tired). My vent includes one back-up power supply that got me through Sunday night, but I had no idea how long the power was going to be out and when it would run out of charge. I also have a power wheelchair for mobility.” Next, Wolinsky performed a calculus of all other details relevant to her survival. As her personal care workers were also without power and unable to travel on icy roads, she needed to create plans for things like dressing warmly, using the washroom, keeping her medications at the correct temperature, and preserving battery power by tilting her wheelchair less often. Another disabled Texan, Adam Hubrig (2021), shares how his lift chair was rendered useless over the course of the prolonged blackout. He writes, “My partner was able to use a gait belt to get me up. I wiped down my inner thigh with an alcohol swab and injected medication by candlelight. I know I was taking it much earlier than I was supposed to, but I was also worried about the status of my injectable medication—which must be refrigerated but kept above freezing. The following day, without water due to frozen pipes, we melted snow over a small gas camping stove to have clean water to replace my colostomy bag and change wound dressings.” As we attend to the survival stories of those most and multiply threatened in times of crisis, Natalie Osborne (2023, 242) cautions against framing such occurrences as crisis or emergency at all: “Emergencies don’t lend themselves to . . . careful accounting,” she writes. “We typically understand them as temporary.” In the words of Austin mayor pro tempore Natasha Harper-Madison, “It’s not just today. It’s not just this emergency. It’s every emergency. These are the kinds of disparities that we see on a normal basis all the time. They just happen to be amplified because of the emergency” (quoted in Foster-Frau and Hernández 2021). With the Texas power grid outage, as with the transit breakdowns explored in this chapter, broken social infrastructure leads to and results from socioeconomic neglect and abandonment, underscoring a chronic, endemic state of debilitation and acceptable thresholds of social murder. This includes infrastructural negligence, such as there being no elevator at Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue subway station where Goodson fell, as well as there being no planned supports in place to ensure the well-being of vulnerabilized community members during power outages and failures.

Power, Abandonment, and the Biopolitics of Death and Debilitation

The outages in California and Texas are two of countless examples that are constitutive of a broader, transnational crisis of power. According to the Associated Press’s analysis of US government data, the frequency of power outages due to severe weather has doubled over the past twenty years, where incidents have risen “from about 50 annually nationwide in the early 2000s to more than 100 annually on average over the past five years” (Brown et al. 2022). Outage duration has also increased significantly in recent years. The Associated Press reports, for example, that residents in three states—Maine, Louisiana, and California—have experienced a 50 percent increase in outage duration, as well as rising interruption costs. While we focus here on US-based events, the power crisis is a decidedly global one. A report authored by the International Energy Agency (IEA 2022) claims that “around a half of global electricity networks are currently exposed to fire weather for more than 50 days per year,” while some “18% of global electricity networks have a higher risk of wildfires, with more than 200 fire weather days annually.” The wildfires that burned through Australia in 2019–2020, for example, caused massive unplanned power outages mainly due to scorched transmission and distribution lines. In the northwest of Manitoba, Canada, the Pauingassi and the Little Grand Rapids First Nations lost power for three months in the summer and fall of 2021 due to wildfire-damaged transmission lines, affecting hundreds of people (IEA 2022).

Meanwhile, approximately “one-quarter of global electricity networks are exposed to severe storms, and over 10% of the networks are exposed to tropical cyclones, notably in North America, Australia, and East Asia” (IEA 2022). Tropical cyclones have repeatedly broken distribution and transmission lines, compromising electricity supply reliability and causing multiple major blackouts affecting millions between 2019 and 2021 in Japan, Korea, and the Philippines (IEA 2022). A rash of 2021 floods in Europe provoked massive power outages in Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Such global trends will almost certainly continue to increase in both frequency and severity. The impact of extreme weather patterns brought on by climate change on energy infrastructure is clear: “High winds can snap wooden poles used for distribution lines. Flooding can damage electrical equipment on the ground. Drought can reduce water supplies for hydroelectric dams. Intense heat can overwhelm transmission line capacity and decrease the efficiency of power plants” (Moore 2021). “As the weather gets wilder,” writes investigative reporter Tim McLaughlin (2022), “the grid gets older.” As a warming planet foreshadows increases in, and severity of, environmental crises worldwide—from uncontrolled fires to tropical cyclones and superstorms to prolonged droughts, from deep freezes to sweltering heat waves—and as public and private infrastructure falls further and further into disrepair, sparks will fly with more frequency. This globalized power crisis flows from two interrelated forms of socioeconomic abandonment, both driven by the logics and practices of neoliberal racial capitalism: the public and private failure to invest in, maintain, or adequately repair critical infrastructure and the sustained environmental and planetary degradation and neglect that underpin the current climate emergency. In chapter 10, we delve more deeply into the broken cultures underpinning earth’s sixth mass extinction event. For the remainder of this chapter, we consider the relationship between modes of caring for debilitated and aging infrastructure and the people who depend on this infrastructure to live.

Framed as the regrettable, yet inevitable, outcome of “extreme weather events,” the power crises in California and Texas resulted from decades of targeted abandonment. In California, PG&E’s lofty calls for risk reduction and public safety functioned to conceal an underlying story of organized corporate and state neglect. PG&E’s decision to shut off power for millions of people followed the company’s 2019 bankruptcy filing, prompted by its inability to cover a more than $30 billion settlement to victims of wildfires caused by its deteriorating electrical equipment. In 2019, the company was found liable, and later criminally responsible, for over a dozen wildfires between 2017 and 2018, including the catastrophic Camp Fire. In the “biggest corporate manslaughter case in US history,” PG&E pleaded guilty to eighty-four felony counts of manslaughter related to the Camp Fire plus an additional felony for “illegally sparking the fire through reckless, criminally negligent maintenance of its power grid” (Rittiman 2020, 2021).

In the early morning of November 8, 2018, in a windy area of the Feather River Canyon, a nearly century-old c-hook (Figure 24)—long neglected—snapped, causing a high-tension line to strike the metal tower supporting it in the air. Sparks flew and a fire broke out that ended up killing at least eighty-five people and razing the entire town of Paradise to the ground. The fire destroyed 18,804 residences and other buildings, leading to $16.5 billion in property damage (Reyes-Velarde 2019). Just as the effects of PG&E’s rolling blackouts disproportionately affected sick, disabled, and other marginalized people and populations, the victims of the Camp Fire, too, were mostly older, sick, and disabled (Har 2020). Far from being an exceptional circumstance, the “reckless, criminally negligent” maintenance issues that precipitated the Camp Fire fit a larger pattern of risky state and corporate abandonment and neglect. Indeed, PG&E has been found responsible for an average of twelve deaths a year since 2010 (Rittiman 2020).

As we consider this repeated cycle of neglect, damage, and disaster, we concur with Santa Clara University law professor Catherine Sandoval in her assessment that “it’s not about the hook” (quoted in Rittiman 2020). While it is easy, recalling Shannon Mattern (2021, 116), to “make the mistake of focusing on . . . defective objects”—an aging hook, in the case of the Camp Fire—what we should be more concerned about, Mattern suggests, are “the social and political relationships in which [defective objects are] embedded.” To make this point most distressingly clear, PG&E went to court to argue against recordkeeping to better track and identify aging parts like the one-hundred-year-old c-hook that sparked the Camp Fire, saying it would be “enormously expensive and time-consuming” (Rittiman 2020). The Camp Fire disaster cannot be solely attributed to an aging hook but must also be understood in the terms of its abandonment.

Whereas the California fires were sparked from PG&E’s deadly failure to maintain (i.e., fix, repair, replace, or otherwise care for) old and dangerous electrical infrastructure, the Texas power crisis flowed from neglect of a different order: the state’s decision to abandon connectivity and shared resources in favor of an independent, deregulated electricity market. The entire United States is powered by a total of three grids: two provide electricity to the eastern and western parts of the country and one is dedicated solely to the state of Texas (ERCOT). Texas first established grid independence in 1935, severing itself off from other states as well as from federal government oversight (Monroe 2022). Because the Texan grid does not cross state lines, the state’s utilities cannot be subjected to federal rules and regulations. In 1999, Texas lawmakers took grid independence to its logical conclusion: complete deregulation of the utility, which shifted the state’s entire electricity-delivery system to a competitive retail utility market that allowed consumers to choose their electricity providers. “Starting in 2002, people will be able to shop,” said Republican Senator David Sibley. “If the price of a can of beans goes up 10 cents, people shop somewhere else. If the price of electricity goes up, people for the first time will have a choice on what they’re going to do. It’s no more business as usual” (quoted in Weber 2021). The Texas power grid failure was the promise of the free market coming home to roost.

The state’s desire for energy independence via the supposedly free market floats on an extractive fantasy of limitless growth (Acosta 2017). Texas, the leading energy-producing state in the United States, generates approximately half of its electricity by burning natural gas. Over the past decades, gas companies have been building “a labyrinth of pipelines and fracking wells, smokestacks and export terminals” (Meyer 2021). Buried thousands of feet deep, “the tendrils of natural-gas infrastructure now span the length of the state.” Treating the ground as its reserve, the state relies on just-in-time logistics to fuel its grid. That is, to cut costs, natural gas is not stored, and there are no alternatives on reserve to power the grid. Instead, fuel is pumped in and “delivered to power plants nearly at the moment that it’s combusted” (Meyer 2021). Fueled by the “predatorial” logic of extractivism, Texan electrical grid independence relies on the violent fantasy that “if it needs more gas, it can always drill” (Acosta 2017; Meyer 2021). And so, when the storms hit in February 2021 and the pipes froze, gas didn’t flow to fuel the grid. Here, Texas’s “energy independence” or, rather, its disconnection from interstate power-sharing networks—“which allow states to link their electrical grids and obtain power from thousands of miles away when needed to hold down costs and offset their own shortfalls”—“became a devastating liability” leading to, as we’ve seen, further abandonment, debilitation, and social murder (Krauss et al. 2021).

We find in Global North countries such as Canada, the United States, and England, where neoliberal austerity regimes have been embraced for several decades, the wearing down and withdrawal of funds to support building and maintaining public infrastructure. As Dominic Boyer (2018, 223–24) argues: “The Keynesianism that preceded neoliberalism, dominating western political economic theory and policy from roughly the mid-1930s until the mid-1970s, often utilized large-scale public works projects as key instruments for managing labor, ‘aggregate demand,’ and the affective ties of citizenship. Thirty years of privatization, financialization, and globalization later, this legacy of ‘public infrastructure’ has become rather threadbare, capturing a general sense of evaporating futurity in the medium of corroded pipes and broken concrete. . . . Across the global North, one cannot be faulted for feeling a creeping sense of decay spreading across many infrastructural environments.” Thinking with the failure to sustain adequate practices of repair and maintenance helps us connect social relations of social murder to forms of socioeconomic abandonment. Through a lack of funding and a lack of prioritizing system accessibility, people are unable to rely on basic infrastructure to facilitate their needs, such as accessing employment, health care, education, and participating in various forms of community. Through corporate negligence and profit maximization, some people are left exposed to human-induced wildfires while others who require power to live are left abandoned by the state when the grid goes down. Such forms of socioeconomic abandonment are (further) debilitating, disabling, and structurally set people on a path toward an untimely death.

Disabled Infrastructure

The US electrical grid is both “old” and “disabled,” we are told. It is variously described as “unstable,” “decaying,” “decrepit,” “deteriorating,” “creaky,” “crippled,” and “weak.” In their 2021 report card assessing infrastructure in the United States, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation’s energy sector a grade of C-, reporting that electricity delivery “depends on an aging and complex patchwork” of power-generation facilities, transmission lines, and distribution lines, “with some components over a century old—far past their 50-year life expectancy—and others . . . well into the second half of their lifespans” (44). The MTA is similarly described as “aging,” “broken,” “crumbling,” “decrepit,” and “in decline.” Many components of the transit system are either approaching or exceeding one hundred years of age and, as such, are deteriorating. Indeed, the MTA fared even worse than the US electrical grid in its assessment by the American Society of Civil Engineers (2022), receiving a grade of D+. The report discloses that 26 percent of all transit vehicles are already, as of 2022, beyond the end of their service life, with an additional 46 percent of transit vehicles reaching the end of their service life by 2025. Moreover, the report notes that to bring “aging signal infrastructure back into a state of good repair” would require $5.4 billion above and beyond the current funding, where infrastructure modernization would require additional billions (96).

Of course, aging power grids are not separate from deteriorating transit systems. Increasingly erratic weather brought on by a warming planet will continue to flood and freeze subway stations and electrical substations alike. As the American Society of Civil Engineers (2022) report points out, the resilience of the transit system is caught up in the resilience of the electric grid. And so too is our own resilience caught up in these interdependent relations of brokenness, maintenance, and repair. Mia Mingus (2022) writes: “Interdependence is the only way out of most of the most pressing issues we face today. If we do not understand that we are interdependent with the planet we as a species will not survive.” This holds true whether we are discussing infrastructural relations such as electrical grids—which, as Texas’s independent grid demonstrates, are much stronger when interconnected—or human, more-than-human, and ecological relations (see chapter 10). Here again, we are moved to ask broken questions of, to, and for our disabled world: What do we do when the infrastructures upon which we depend break and threaten to break us unevenly in turn? As observed throughout this chapter, the deliberate abandonment and breakdown of our material worlds and infrastructures underscores the interdependence of people and things. We turn now to ask: How does disability experience alter the kinds of relations we form with broken infrastructure? And how might disability culture, wisdom, and justice offer unique and valuable modes of responding to a material world in varying states of disrepair? Learning from interdependent relations between disabled people and assistive devices, we ask: How might we tend to cracked c-hooks, broken elevators, deteriorating buildings, downed powerlines, aging subway cars, malfunctioning transformers, snapped electricity poles, short-circuited conductors, frozen or singed substations, and drained batteries while also attending to the structures of power that invariably break some of us more than others? In the following section, we turn to a consideration of crip maintenance practices as a desire to maintain disabled kin in the face of pervasive forms of infrastructural abandonment, neglect, negligence, and injury. Drawing on disability community wisdom, care lineages, and practices of mutual aid, we envision a means of building and breaking social realities that move us away from an ethos of abandonment—whether broken and debilitated objects, ecologies, infrastructures, or people—in support of our individual and collective survival.

Crip Maintenance/Maintaining Crip

Engracia Figueroa, a fifty-one-year-old Black disabled Californian, died on October 31, 2021, due to injuries she sustained after her $30,000 custom wheelchair was broken by United Airlines in July 2021 when flying home from Washington, DC, to Los Angeles. Airlines require electric wheelchair users to check their wheelchairs as luggage and use an airport-supplied narrow aisle chair to transfer to their seat on the plane. Figueroa and her home-care worker June Laing were in DC representing Hand in Hand—a nonprofit organization advocating for improved working conditions for nannies, house cleaners, home-care workers, and attendants—at the Care Can’t Wait rally, which called on the Biden administration to recognize “care as infrastructure” in its Building Back Better budget (Care Can’t Wait 2024). At the rally, Figueroa and Laing were joined by thousands of parents, older adults, disabled people, and their carers who were demanding higher wages for home-care workers to alleviate widespread workforce shortages and to guarantee dependable, high-quality care for disabled people and others requiring support (Riley 2021; Reyes 2022).

Figueroa’s wheelchair was custom designed to support her spinal cord injury and left leg amputation. While dealing with the airline about the broken wheelchair in Los Angeles, Figueroa spent five hours in an unsupportive transport wheelchair that led to a painful pressure sore. While people often mistakenly believe that wheelchairs are interchangeable, many are tailored to support specific bodily needs, and pressure sores can develop within hours if blood flow is cut off to a particular area. Pressure sores are especially risky for people with spinal cord injuries because they often “do not feel the immediate discomfort that prompts other people to shift in their seats as bones press against the skin” (Reyes 2022). For this reason, many custom wheelchairs are designed to help people regularly tilt and shift their weight. United Airlines provided a basic manual loaner chair while Figueroa’s electric wheelchair was being fixed, but the loaner chair limited her ability to leave her apartment and “further exacerbated her pressure sore, and caused muscle spasms, severe edema, and an inability to eat” (Riley 2021). Figueroa’s pressure sore became infected, leading to hospitalization, skin grafts, and emergency surgery to remove the infected bone and tissue. Figueroa died while recovering from surgery.

On average, airlines break or destroy twenty-nine wheelchairs per day (Riley 2021), stripping people of their independence as they wait for repairs or fight to receive a new chair as a replacement. Adding to this issue is the fact that in the United States, two large companies, Numotion and National Seating & Mobility (NSM), both owned by private equity firms, dominate the repair market and are focused on cutting costs to bolster profits by “reducing technician hours and parts inventories, restricting consumers’ access to parts and software passcodes, requiring pre-approvals from insurers for repairs,” and other practices that delay repairs (Iezzoni 2022). This is partly due to Medicare’s decision to replace set prices with competitive bidding, resulting in the disappearance of locally owned wheelchair repair shops as larger corporations offer lower bids for Medicare and private insurance contracts (P. Roberts 2022). Over the last ten years, Numotion and NSM have bought up dozens of smaller suppliers in the United States and Canada. Slow service has resulted in people “being bedridden for weeks because they were waiting for a flat tire or joystick to be fixed” (Xing 2019). Mobility restrictions resulting from broken infrastructure breaks bodies.

On July 14, 2021, as she waited in a transport chair for hours at the airport after the airline broke her wheelchair, Figueroa (2021) recorded a video and posted it to her Facebook page. As her body was being forced to bear the brunt of broken infrastructure, she offers a powerful analysis of the relationship between social abandonment, broken things, and broken bodies, a process she describes as becoming “re-disabled.” “I’m exhausted,” says Figueroa, pulling down her medical mask and talking directly to her phone camera. “My chair is shit,” she says, panning out to reveal her mangled wheelchair. Figueroa further reveals that she, too, experienced the same callous and reckless neglect from the airline that was shown toward her chair: “I’ve been here all day and United didn’t even say ‘do you want a glass of water?’ . . . You’re a trillion-dollar industry, [pauses] what you mean you can’t feed me? You’re a trillion-dollar industry, what do you mean you can’t compensate me for what you’ve done to my independence. . . . Tomorrow makes thirty years that I’ve been disabled, and I’ve been disabled again by a fucking airline.” She concludes the video by linking the airline industry’s prioritization of profit over people to other disabling and debilitating systems, specifically drawing connections to the broken home-care system she went to protest in Washington, DC. “I mean isn’t that [inaudible] everything I went for yesterday,” she says, “for us to get these $400 billion for home and community-based services. . . . Fucking unacceptable.” In Figueroa’s case, a broken and uncaring air transportation system broke her wheelchair, an assistive device that cared for her. This triggered a series of events that eventually broke Figueroa herself, as well as others who relied on her and her activism. This chain of brokenness, which Figueroa so sharply and powerfully lays out in her Facebook video, requires us to think differently about the relationship between broken things and broken people. Disability cultural knowledge offers us a means of rethinking these relations.

“Mobility devices are an extension of our bodies,” said Figueroa prior to her death. “When they are damaged or destroyed, we become re-disabled” (quoted in Care Can’t Wait 2021). Far from being mere objects, for many disabled, debilitated, and injured people, assistive devices such as canes, trach tubes, hearing aids, communication tablets, and wheelchairs become an extension of a person’s body in relation to their surrounding environment, a kind of extended sociality. In disability communities, as notes Catherine Frazee (2014), “the slings that lift us, the tubes that feed us, the instruments that fill our lungs with air and empty our bladders of urine are understood as tools for living, rather than as markers of spoiled life.” Toronto accessibility advocate Maayan Ziv echoes this disability community knowledge after her custom power wheelchair was also badly damaged from being carelessly stored in the cargo hold on an airplane in September 2022. Like Figueroa and Frazee, Ziv positions her wheelchair as both vital and vitalizing, also describing it as “an extension of [her] body” (quoted in Miller 2022). Ziv explains: “The seating is built to my dimensions, the joystick is positioned the way I need to be able to drive it, and it has a tilt function that lets me easily recline and readjust. I sit in it from the moment I wake up until I go back to sleep. It also has an elevation function which allows me to reach for things on higher counters, speak to people at eye level, press buttons on elevators, and more. It’s fundamental to how I move through the world” (quoted in Miller 2022). After two previous wheelchairs had been damaged by airlines, Ziv (2022) took extra precautions: She arrived at Pearson Airport in Toronto four hours in advance of her international flight to “make sure everything was in order.” Taking great care to prepare her wheelchair for takeoff, Ziv and her travel companions wrapped the device in bubble wrap (Figure 25). To highlight the delicate and precious nature of the item inside the packaging, she wrapped it with red and white sticker tape labeled “FRAGILE.”

As we take in this story of Ziv carefully wrapping her wheelchair before a flight to preserve this extension of her body, we are prompted to revisit Karrie Higgins’s reflection on her inaccessible apartment building discussed in the Introduction. Higgins too identifies a link between broken bodies and broken infrastructure, productively making kin and forging solidarity in the connection between her own disabled bodymind and the inaccessible and broken structures upon which she relies and in which she makes her home. “Get out. Get out. Get out,” writes Higgins (2017) in her poem “Oracle of Flesh and Bones,” describing how she moved from Utah to Colorado to reduce her exposure to the former state’s high levels of air pollution. “I am here,” she says to Colorado; “I am breathing your air.” Higgins only then finds out that her new city is challenging to navigate as a person who uses a cane, restricting her mobility. “You need to get out,” Higgins’s neurologist advised after she disclosed that she was largely living in isolation after the move. “Join groups,” said the neurologist. “Go to lunch. You need to stimulate your brain. You need to be in novel situations.” However, Higgins’s new apartment did not have a working elevator, restricting her ability to leave her home. “We told the landlords we needed an accessible apartment,” writes Higgins, “told them about my walking cane. They said it would not be a problem.” Higgins identifies the broken conditions of disabled people’s isolation due to broken and inaccessible infrastructure while also identifying herself as breaking under these conditions. “Did you know isolation can make you hear things?” she writes. “Make you forget things? Make you doubt things? Make you dead?” As noted in the Introduction, this relationship between broken structures and breaking bodies and minds moves Higgins to claim these as kin, as they are all effects of much larger socioeconomic forms of abandonment. “I have started to see the staircase outside my door as my backbone,” she writes. “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.” We hear reverberations of “I am it, and it is me” in Ziv’s act of bubble-wrapping her wheelchair as she prepares it for flight, as she adorns its packaged surface with stickers urging caution, pleading care. “[My chair] is literally my mobility, my legs,” Ziv reminds us. “And I’m handing it over to people I’m hoping will take good care of it” (quoted in Miller 2022). We also hear “I am it, and it is me” as Ziv describes seeing her broken wheelchair as “trauma” (quoted in Balintec 2022). And we hear it, too, in the silence of Figueroa’s absence.

“I am it, and it is me” hails the labor of tending to and caring for that which is, at once, outside of us but is also of us. This labor is crip maintenance in the fullest sense. As noted in chapter 5, to maintain is “to support,” “to keep up, preserve,” to stave off harm or damage (or more acute forms of these), a practice that sometimes also requires repair (OED 2025b). If the usual labor of maintenance is a kind of care work—with the Latin manu tenere meaning to “hold in one’s hand”—to crip maintenance is also, in Ziv’s terms, a “handing over,” a recognition that what we hold and care for is also that which holds and cares for us. Put differently, crip practices of maintenance are oriented toward preserving, sustaining, and tending to our human, more-than-human, and material relations and environs to stave off (further) harm and debilitation. It is also a recognition that crip practices of maintenance are fundamentally oriented toward maintaining and sustaining crip bodies, minds, and cultures. The labor of crip maintenance, in other words, requires a stance of antiabandonment where human, nonhuman, and vital material objects are not made to break through an ethos of accumulation, extraction, and disposability.

We find crip maintenance in Ziv’s act of bubble-wrapping her wheelchair to preserve her own wholeness. We likewise find crip maintenance in Higgins’s assertion of solidarity with her broken, inaccessible home, which we read as resignation to neither the status quo of structural ableism nor her own perpetual isolation. Instead, we hear a firm rejection of isolationism and disposability that disconnects disabled people, kin, and material, infrastructural, and ecological environs, an articulation of the desire to build and break and move together. Of course, crip maintenance is also, and most poignantly, found in the solidarity formed between Figueroa and Laing: two Black women—carer and cared-for—joined together (with others) in support of more-just laboring conditions and wages for working-class and predominantly racialized domestic caregivers (see Figure 26).

In an interview with Laing and Figueroa for the Care Can’t Wait rally, Laing describes her working conditions as both broken by exploitative systems of class, gender, and race and physically and emotionally breaking: “I love my jobs and sometimes I don’t because of racism,” says Laing. “Nobody in health care should get less than 20 dollars per hour. It should be more because the work is hard. . . . If we don’t take [care of] ourselves, are we going to be around to take care of the patients?” (Care Can’t Wait 2021). Figueroa, in turn, links the issue of just wages to broader systems and structures of raced, classed, and gendered violence, highlighting the connection between colonial histories of enslavement and the ongoing anti-Black racism and misogyny that fuels domestic care work. “The lack of livable wages for caregivers is rooted in slavery,” says Figueroa in the interview, quickly transforming this critical observation into the grounds for actionable change. “Improve the payment, give livable wages to caregivers.” As Figueroa and Laing show us, crip maintenance is not only about maintaining life-giving and life-affirming objects and infrastructure but also about maintaining good relations with the people whose labor maintains our disabled bodies and communities and, relatedly, by understanding the systems and structures that make these relations im/possible.

Crip maintenance is an ongoing and creative practice of attending to a wide array of human and more-than-human relations, acknowledging the role of interdependence in care work. It is a practice that is impure and at times complicit, as the relations we tend to are often noninnocent. By extending care relations to snapped wires, aging c-hooks, vulnerable electrical grids, and broken air travel systems, we recognize the complex relationship between the maintenance of current infrastructures and the maintenance of (multiply marginalized) disabled life. In doing so, we also recognize that we, collectively, need something other than power grids fueled by nonrenewable energy or gas-guzzling, fossil-fuel-burning transportation infrastructures to survive. As we struggle to maintain what we have now to preserve and maintain disabled life and kin, we do so with the understanding that disabled lives and ways of being are essential to a broader, collective struggle for alternative futures. Put differently, if we are to succeed in building more just and life-affirming infrastructures—if we are to move toward alternative futures beyond the insufficiency of the present—we need disabled people, disability perspectives, and the many wisdoms born of disability culture and community. We turn now, and for the remainder of this chapter, to explore disability culture, community care, and solidarity practices as vital “practices of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our material-discursive world” (Hamraie and Fritsch 2019).

Them’s the Breaks: DIY, Mutual Aid, and Solidarity

“I am a disabled person who depends on power to live,” writes California-based disability activist Alice Wong (2023), who goes on to describe the close relations formed between her body and the machines upon which her survival relies. Returning home after spending four weeks in the ICU, Wong writes that she is “tethered to a feeding machine that pumps food into my stomach, as well as to a ventilator that’s attached to a hole in my throat, among numerous other devices.” Such intimate relations connecting body and machine are captured by autistic artist Maria Scharnke’s portrait of Wong, Our Lady of Disability Visibility (Figure 27). The digital portrait depicts Wong, a disabled, Asian American activist, in a hospital bed, breathing with the help of a ventilator. Wong is wearing a patterned hospital gown, with various feeding and drainage tubes that weave into, out of, and surround her body. The disembodied hands of an unseen carer labor amid the tangle of body and tubes. Wong’s own hands and head are surrounded by yellow spheres, halos that highlight the full-bodied and -minded wisdom of a disabled oracle. In reverence to Wong’s activist work, she is depicted wearing a bracelet with the words “community justice” and a blood pressure cuff that bears the logo of her activist media project, Disability Visibility. A small tiger is emblazoned on the gauze surrounding her trach site—a nod to Wong’s (2022) memoir, Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life. The portrait depicts Wong as at once vulnerable and powerful, community care provider as well as care recipient.

As she adapts to new forms of disablement, debilitation, and breakdown shaped by different interdependencies with human and nonhuman relations—assistive technology, machines, carers—Wong is also exposed to new forms of risk, variously describing her body as both “cyborg” and “driftwood.” On the one hand, her entanglements with assistive devices and technology are powerful relations of life and survival. On the other, they are vulnerable to deterioration due to internal and external conditions alike, such as unpredictable weather. She reminds us, for example, that as her body changes, reshaping its relationship to assistive technology, “the stakes for potential harm during a power outage have exponentially increased. My anxiety, vulnerability and fear are real” (Wong 2023). In her memoir, Wong (2022, 45) recalls her teenage years as another “critical period in [her] evolutionary embodiment” as a cyborg, a time marked by permanent alterations to her physical embodiment and respiratory capacities, anticipating new, intimate interdependencies between her body, medical machines, and assistive technologies. Sharing a poem she published in a college literary magazine in her early twenties, Wong highlights the interdependencies between her body/self/identity and life-sustaining medical technologies: “I have a tube that pees me,” she writes. “I have a tube that feeds me. I have a tube that breathes me” (50). Most interestingly, Wong likens such cyborg relations to integrated circuits of exchange. She writes, “Fluids dripping while others / Swim in a raging torrent / Urgently delivering goods/Importing necessities/Exporting wastes along these / Worn down roads / No orifice left / Un plugged / All functions hygienically / Maintained” (50). Here, the tubes and technologies sustaining Wong’s disabled body are framed as a kind of critical infrastructure: supporting, facilitating, and, indeed, ensuring her life and flourishing.

Crip relations to technology and assistive devices invite us to (re)think human–nonhuman interdependencies with material objects, technologies, and built worlds, including broken, inaccessible, harmful, and decaying infrastructures that result from targeted forms of socioeconomic abandonment. This is so important because, as Alison Kafer (2021) reminds us, there is no before or after trauma; we are already living in broken worlds and living under duress all the time. Yet, as we’ve seen through our theory in pieces, the problem is less brokenness itself than the structures of indifference to it—structures that, more often than not, are the very ones that generate brokenness in the first place. Vis-à-vis the targeted violence of abandonment and the material forms of human and more-than-human debilitation that this violence both anticipates and exacerbates, we ask: What are some promising ways of struggling against infrastructural abandonment?

Looking to DIY, mutual aid, and collective solidarity practices seeking to create community capacity and build social and infrastructural realities that move away from abandonment to grow the collective, we find a kind of power that cannot simply be shut off by authorities. DIY, mutual aid, and solidarity movements often use crowdsourcing techniques and decentralized forms of aid to ensure everyone in the community can gain access to what is needed to survive and thrive. In addition to working to directly meet community needs, this work also typically includes efforts to “dismantle existing harmful systems and/or beat back their expansion” and “build an alternative infrastructure through which people can get their needs met” (Spade 2020, 134). As “a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions,” mutual aid builds “new social relations that are more survivable” (136). In short, these practices can be understood as ways of mobilizing cracks to plant seeds of more-just social relations. To borrow from Eliza Chandler’s (2010) meditation on lessons learned from her experiences navigating and sometimes falling because of her city’s inaccessible and uneven sidewalks, while “cracks can still be dangerous . . . we know things grow in the cracks, flowers and the like.”

Los Angeles Walks (n.d.) is one mutual aid community project that generatively intervenes to improve public infrastructure. Lower-income, disabled, and racialized people walk, bike, and take transit at higher rates than white, nondisabled, and higher-income people. If the sidewalk is not passable, people end up moving in the streets, marking pedestrian access as an equity issue. Over the last twenty-five years, Los Angeles Walks has trained community members on how to attain change from the city, equipping people with powerful advocacy skills and knowledge. The project understands that the maintenance, repair, and building of sidewalks is not only a technical infrastructure problem but also a problem of power. As community members skill-up and support one another in the fight to improve sidewalks, they build individual and collective capacities for negotiating governance structures and gain insights into institutional and community-based power dynamics. These skills are, of course, transferable, promising to support connections between the fight for sidewalk accessibility and other social and political issues, potentially nurturing cross-movement coalitions and strengthening solidarities. Empowered by the knowledge of what is needed to bring about change and how to achieve it, sidewalk inaccessibility transcends its status as a purely technical engineering issue. It also becomes a political issue demanding deep, meaningful, and multipronged community engagement and a justice issue, among other justice issues, in the fight for broader social change.

Other examples of mutual aid include: fundraising campaigns that seek to leverage community funds to offset uninsured health care and support needs; meal collectives, grocery runs, and community fridges; ride-sharing; childcare and care collectives; eviction defense; information sharing, teach-ins, and skill sharing; distribution of personal protective equipment like N95 masks; court support; checking in on and with each other and providing emotional support; food sharing and home delivery; creating local microgrids to share solar power or hubs with generators to charge medical devices and keep medicine refrigerated; storm relief like clearing away debris or distributing water; free markets, freecycle, and assistive device libraries; and much more (Dunson 2022; Nishida 2022; Piepzna-Samarasinha 2022; Spade 2020). As Jimmy Dunson (2022, 7) sums it up: “The grid is often down, but we don’t lack power.” Building on these powerful practices becomes increasingly important as social and ecological conditions worsen. Indeed, mutual aid practices “are becoming an even more essential strategy for supporting survival, building new infrastructure, and mobilizing large numbers of people to work and fight for a new world” (Spade 2020, 147).

Of course, as a remedy to often-intentional social, structural, and infrastructural forms of abandonment and decay, DIY activism and mutual aid is not simple, and neither is it innocent. We are, and must remain, alert to the ways these approaches to community care can propagate forms of neoliberal responsibilization and uphold charity models of care and support. As Dean Spade (2020, 134) astutely notes, “Systems of domination produce routes for channeling dissatisfaction that are nonthreatening to those systems. We are encouraged to bring our complaints in ways that are the least disruptive and the most beneficial to existing conditions.” Furthermore, as Sara Ahmed (2022) notes, “so much power [and] violence works through exhaustion: the exhaustion of people’s capacities to resist; the exhaustion of people’s capacities to live their lives on their own terms; the exhaustion of having to navigate systems that are designed to make it harder to get what you need.” While collective care practices like mutual aid seek to smooth over the cracks, exhaustion and burnout are frequently experienced in ways that have disabling, debilitating, and deadly impacts (Nishida 2022).

What is more, as disability and deaf scholar Michele Ilana Friedner (2022) importantly reminds us, there are limits to this alluring desire to (re)claim our power by fixing ourselves and each other. She writes: “In attending to maintenance and repair, scholars have analyzed the emergence of informal maintenance and repair workers who creatively tinker with and fix things,” including “disabled makers who have tinkered with and hacked infrastructures and technologies, engaging in acts as diverse as making curb cuts, rigging air conditioners, and repairing wheelchairs” (129, 130). These practices raise important “questions about who can hack, tinker, and design and the role of these practices in actually dismantling infrastructures of power” (130). Friedner draws our attention to the “maintenance problems” associated with cochlear implants, a surgically implanted device that electronically stimulates the auditory nerve to produce hearing (128). Cochlear implants are battery operated and include a processor that operates on proprietary software. Of her own cochlear implant, Friedner writes, “While I can now hear in the dark and do not need to lipread much when it is quiet, I am dependent on a multinational implant manufacturer and an insurance company, for the maintenance of a sensory capacity” (28). Friedner embraces this dependence ambivalently, noting that “there is always a question of what might be lost in addition to what is gained” (29). This device thus “foregrounds how technology in general has become less available to be adjusted, hacked, or manipulated through other seemingly empowering practices” such as DIY or crip technoscience (130–31; Hamraie and Fritsch 2019).

As we importantly attend to the limits of community-led mutual aid and DIY repair practices, we also know that structural solutions to broken and breaking conditions are not, at least not yet, forthcoming. DIY and mutual aid responses nonetheless offer an important maintenance opportunity—to tend and support and care for our relations now—while also, and at the same time, building something new by, for example, engaging in community capacity-building and other ways of working and being together. These practices are a form of social infrastructure. Following Sins Invalid’s (2022) articulation that our “understanding and practices of liberation must hold the complexity of disability experience and racialized ableism,” we turn now in this final section to an example of disability-led mutual aid as a means of demonstrating how placing disability at the center of a politics of broken worlds is essential to justice-oriented practices of repair and maintenance.

#PowerToLive: Crip Maintenance in Broken Worlds

Disability is a common and shared outcome of living in broken worlds, particularly for those whose bodies are rendered broken and disabled through ongoing, violent relations of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Still, as we’ve argued throughout this book, despite the relationship between disability, debility, and our broken and breaking worlds, the insights of disability cultures and politics are seldom meaningfully engaged in mainstream social movements or by social theorists engaged in the work of building better futures. In their book The Future Is Disabled, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2022, 26–27) asserts that “we won’t be able to survive climate change, the rise of fascism and white supremacy and unending pandemics . . . without disability justice and disabled skills.” Disabled communities, perspectives, politics, and skills are particularly essential, argues Piepzna-Samarasinha, precisely because “disabled people are constantly creating an improbably crip future in the face of all that wants to eliminate us” (31). And as we move to center disabled people, perspectives, cultures, and politics, Piepzna-Samarasinha claims there are important differences marking disabled mutual aid from other forms of mutual aid. “When I think about disabled mutual aid,” they write, “I think of a million examples of subtle, diverse forms of disabled survival work” (52). To conclude this chapter, we turn to a consideration of what disability-led mutual aid can teach us about broken infrastructure and its maintenance and repair.

In a 2019 interview with the Bay Area public news outlet KQED, disability justice activist Stacey Park Milbern reminds us how “a lot of [disability justice] activism work is trying to shift people to think about interdependence rather than independence” (quoted in Green 2019). While interdependence is not a panacea, it is one way we can work from where we are and what we have now so as to stave off further harm and injury for those most and multiply affected by infrastructural abandonment as we build and fight for something better. Milbern helped to form #PowerToLive, a grassroots disability-justice-led mutual aid collective that attempted to mitigate the potentially deadly impact of PG&E’s power shutoffs. In the days leading up to the first blackout, the group circulated an online spreadsheet that enabled people with power to sign up to offer “neighbors without power everything from outlets and fridge space to a place to spend the night” (Green and Hossaini 2019). The collective, which included members from groups like Fat Rose, Access-Centered Movement, and Disability Justice Culture Club, also developed and circulated a crowdsourced survival guide—a so-called living document—for those who require #PowerToLive during a power shutoff. The guide includes tips for how to keep electricity-dependent medical devices running longer in the event of a power shutdown (e.g., ensuring CPAP machines are set to airplane mode) and how to keep insulin and other temperature-sensitive medications cool (e.g., using evaporative cooling techniques). The guide also provides an overview of different kinds of in-home generators and batteries and information about the wattage required per hour to power different types of devices (Green 2019).

While the government response to the dangers posed by the PG&E blackouts leaned into individual responsibility—to quote the City of Berkeley’s (2019) social media post: “We are asking those in the potentially affected area who are power-dependent for medical reasons to use their own resources to get out”—disability communities offered concrete collective support that preserved those most and multiply affected by the shutoffs (Green and Hossaini 2019). “All across the Bay, disabled people are providing mutual aid to one another,” Milbern (2019b) said in her remarks at a vigil and community gathering in the midst of the power shutoffs in Oakland. “We are calling our friends and community regularly to check in. We are helping each other find housing and evacuate. We are sourcing generators, ice, and medication. We are making sure people are getting updates in a format accessible to them. We are hosting and transporting people, stranger and friend alike. The world might not care if we live or die but we do.” Drawing insight from disabled queer artist Alli Yates, Milbern goes on to remind us: “Disabled wisdom saves lives” (Green 2019). “Do you remember last year when no one could breathe and Mask Oakland disseminated thousands of masks?” asks Milbern (2019b). “That was the work of disabled people too. We live and love interdependently. We know no person is an island, we need one another to live. No one does their own dental work or cuts their own hair. We all need support. Hierarchy of what support is okay to need and what isn’t is just ableism.”

Disability wisdom, culture, and politics teaches that to create and maintain infrastructure is to care for collective survival. Disabled organizing practices that center on interdependence and leadership of the most affected offer alternatives to individualistic cultures of interpersonal and infrastructural abandonment and disposal. Interdependence, writes Mingus (2022), “is ultimately about ‘we,’ instead of ‘me.’ It understands that we are bound together, by virtue of existing on this planet. Interdependence is generative and grounded in care for one another. . . . Interdependence cannot exist in scarcity, competition, comparison, domination or greed. It flourishes in abundance, appreciating and honoring difference, collective care and collective access. Interdependence can exist between two people or six billion and everything in between. We need you. We need all of us. . . . We need each other.” For example, as we continue to fight for more accessible transit infrastructure, we can foster interdependence in our everyday lives in small but impactful ways. This could mean helping people carry strollers or heavy bags up and down the subway stairs or creating digital tools that provide accessibility information about existing subway stations, such as Avery’s (2015) “What Sign of the MTA Elevator Zodiac Are You?” While these are neither perfect nor lasting solutions, small acts of interdependence can challenge abandonment. “There is a lot to do and it’s going to take all of us,” concludes Milbern (2019b).

Crip wisdom recognizes our interdependence with one another while also acknowledging our interdependence with technology, assistive devices, and infrastructure: Our collective and individual survival is bound up with tubes that deliver nutrients and pipes that deliver clean water, with electricity that keeps us warm and powers ventilators, with working lifts, elevators, and accessible transportation options that ensure we have access to communities. Crip wisdom also invites us to consider how maintaining the technologies, devices, and infrastructures upon which our collective and individual survival depends includes the maintenance of good relations—relations of solidarity—with those whose (often undervalued and exploited) labor is essential to their and our upkeep. “We need to recognize that we all have a stake in transforming this extractive system, and together we have the power to shut it down,” Raia Small (2022) tells us. But, as Mingus (2022) asserts, it “is in the interest of those in power to keep people uncared for, sick and dependent on dwindling crumbs.” In rejecting crumbs, our struggles against neoliberal and racial capitalism and for expansive social transformation are “a joint rejection of the worst actually imposed by capitalism and of the best it offers and wants us to dream about” (Dauve 2012). Systemic change requires transformation across all levels, whether individual, community, state, or beyond. On a mass scale, this “we” who rejects both the best and worst of capitalism is unlikely to flourish without sustained building and maintenance where such building and maintenance is made increasingly difficult through the mundane and extreme ways dominant power relations debilitate and abandon, both gradually and rapidly wearing out our capacities. Here, care and interdependence enacted through mutual aid is not a panacea, but it is one way we can work from where we are now. Doing so requires building on the “visioning and enactment of other-world-making activated by marginalized and debilitated communities” (Nishida 2022, 180). Where possible, the capacity-building that crip wisdom and crip maintenance offer helps us to survive the infrastructural neglect of the lacking elevators of the MTA or the violence and harms of the airline industry and to have the energy for the structural fights that mutual aid cannot address. Whether done from one’s sickbed or out on the street, in a careless world, people are daring to care for one another (Nishida 2022). Crip maintenance reveals that in a world shaped by neoliberal neglect and extractive labor, our survival and flourishing depend on sustaining one another, tending to the technologies and infrastructures that carry us, and enacting mutual aid and solidarity. Whether big or small, such persistent acts of care challenge abandonment and make possible the structural transformations we fight for together. In embracing crip wisdom, we recognize that survival is never solitary and that our collective flourishing depends on the ongoing labor of sustaining one another and the infrastructures we rely on, even and especially in broken worlds designed to wear us down. In the final chapters of this book, we further explore how collectively oriented practices of care and access can foster solidarities across our communities, sustaining us amid the brokenness of our current worlds as we work toward abolishing that which harms, and imagining and building worlds that can better hold us.