Broken Worlds, Disabled Kin: Strategies for Collective Survival

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

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

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

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

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Kelly Fritsch is Canada Research Chair in Disability, Health, and Social Justice and associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. She is coauthor, with Anne McGuire, of We Move Together, an award-winning children’s book about accessibility and disability culture, and coeditor of Disability Injustice: Confronting Criminalization in Canada and Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle.

Anne McGuire is associate professor in critical disability studies and director of the program for Critical Studies in Equity and Solidarity at the University of Toronto. She is author of War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence, which was awarded the Tobin Siebers prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities.