Acknowledgments

This book began as a series of talks in 2019, starting at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, organized by Katie Aubrecht, and at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, organized by Jane Dryden. Thank you to Katie and Jane, as well as to our interlocutors at these events who offered critical feedback, including OmiSoore Dryden, Claudia Malacrida, Aly Patsavas, Joshua St. Pierre, and Eliza Chandler. We are also deeply grateful for the opportunity to workshop early versions of this work with Eunjung Kim, Mel Y. Chen, Eli Clare, Alison Kafer, and Robert McRuer, all of whom have generously shaped and fostered our scholarship since our earliest encounters at the Society for Disability Studies conferences as graduate students.

Writing this book together was made possible after many years of collaboration, including as copanelists on disability studies conference panels, working alongside one another during grad school reading and writing groups, and coediting and coauthoring multiple works together. We are also thankful to have been able to continue our scholarly-artistic collaboration with visual artist Eduardo Trejos, with whom we worked to illustrate our children’s book We Move Together. We thank Eduardo for brilliantly crafting some of the images and illustrations included in this book, including on the cover and in the Preface, Introduction, and chapters 7 and 9.

Over the past several years, different chapters of this book were also presented in draft form at the Disability Futurity Seminar Series, jointly hosted by Carleton University and Liverpool University in 2020; the Disability Summit, hosted by the University of Maryland in 2021; the 2021 and 2022 Canadian Sociological Association annual conferences; the Entangled Symposium, hosted by Columbia University in 2021; Fabula Rasa: Queer Perspectives on the Utopian and Dystopian, hosted by the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, University of Cologne, and University of Siegen in 2022; the 2023 American Studies Annual Conference; the Technoableism Seminar Series, hosted by York University in 2023; and a lecture at the Centre for Global Disability Studies at the University of Toronto in 2024. We thank the organizers and participants at these events for the ways their intellectual comradery shaped this work.

Thanks to funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Carleton University, and the University of Toronto, we had the great privilege of being able to workshop the first full draft of this manuscript with Jeffrey Ansloos, Suze Berkhout, Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan, Michele Friedner, Efrat Gold, Laura Jaffee, Natalie Kouri-Towe, Audra Mitchell, Aparna Raghu Menon, and Fady Shanouda. The nourishing discussion that unfolded at this workshop opened us up to some of the many different directions this book could take, and we greatly appreciate everyone who so generously contributed their time, labor, and expertise to help inform our final revision.

We would like to thank Taryn Parker for her insightful comments and thoughtful engagement with one of our chapters, as well as the many colleagues and friends who offered helpful feedback as we workshopped possible titles and cover designs for this book. We are also incredibly grateful to everyone who gave us permission to include their illustrations and photographs: Shayan Asgharnia, Ben Barry, Micah Bazant, Dave Chan, Veldon Coburn, Sky Cubacub, Fix Our Schools, Shanna Hunter, Mariame Kaba, Evan Mitsui, Sandra Oviedo/Colectivo Multipolar, Michelle Peek, Maria Scharnke, Jesse Winter, Sandie Yi, and Maayan Ziv.

While this book has been workshopped and presented across many different lands and territories, much of this text was written from occupied Tkaronto (Toronto), the territory of many Indigenous nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples, as well as on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory in Odàwàg (Ottawa).

This book would not have been possible without the enthusiasm of our editor Jason Weidemann and his excellent team at the University of Minnesota Press, including Zenyse Miller, Eric Lundgren, Jeff Moen, Shelby Connelly, Rachel Moeller, Mike Stoffel, and others behind the scenes who not only made the publication process smooth but also have been a total joy to work with. Part of the joy of this process was due in no small part to the incisive and encouraging feedback we received from Aly Patsavas, which greatly sharpened our contribution. Thanks also to our anonymous second reviewer for their comments that helped us to clarify which book we wanted to write. Special thanks and deep appreciation to Ziggy Snow for his attentive copyediting and editorial care; any remaining errors are our own.

Finally, our individual and collective experiences with brokenness alongside our interdisciplinary approach brought us down many unexpected and sometimes frictional paths, and we are grateful for the many rabble-rousers, colleagues, students, friends, family, kin, and ancestors who shared their abundant expertise and guidance with us and who supported us over the years we dedicated to completing this project. Our extra hearty thanks to Aaron Gordon, Eleanor and Beatrice Fritsch, NKT, and Eduardo, Mateo, Noé, and Sebi Trejos McGuire.

The digital collage that appears on the cover is a collaboration between the authors and graphic artist Eduardo Trejos, representing our collective effort to weave together the central themes of Broken Worlds, Disabled Kin. The image features a green, blue, and purple silhouette of a plant from its root system to a still-emerging bud stretching upward against a swooping flash of yellow sunlight. Its stem connects the twisted, gnarled, and thorny with the delicate softness of leaf and blossom. Each leaf offers a glimpse into the broken systems, structures, bodies, and objects explored across the book. They include scenes of ecological destruction and renewal (e.g., melting ice sheets, burning wildfires, plastic pollution, a rainforest canopy); social abandonment (e.g., poorly maintained tactile pavement, corroded metal pipes); infrastructures we rely on (wires feeding into a power conductor, transportation systems); and material and/or embodied vulnerabilities (e.g., rubble from a bombarded building, cancer cells, a metal spinal cord). Silhouettes of disabled kin also appear amidst the leaves (e.g., canaries in flight and a bee hovering).