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11:30 AM
BMH Rotunda

Join us for the launch of Broken Worlds, Disabled Kin: Strategies for Collective Survival. Author Kelly Fritsch (Carleton University) will be in dialogue with Celeste Orr (UNB Sociology) and Tobin LeBlanc Haley (UNB Political Science). 

We live in a world broken by design: a web of systems that debilitate and destroy 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? Charting a politics of solidarity capable of cultivating worlds where we sustain each other instead of the systems that harm us,  (2026, University of Minnesota Press) traces how relations of care, access, and justice are fostered amid social, ecological, and political collapse. By showing that care for disabled life is inseparable from care for the infrastructures and environments that sustain us, the book asks what it means to be accountable not only to one another but also to the fragile material relations that make collective life possible.  

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. Working across critical disability studies, science and technology studies, political economy, and social movement studies, Fritsch’s approaches disability as a site of contestation, friction, and generative possibility. Her research traces how disability takes shape through shifting relations among bodies, technologies, institutions, economies, and environments, examining both how these relations debilitate and imperil life and how disability cultures and movements collectively build otherwise through practices of access, interdependence, abolition, and care. 

Celeste Orr is the Wendy J. Robbins Professor in Women and Gender Studies and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick. Orr is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research broadly concerns intersex studies, disability studies, and queer studies. Orr is the author of the award-winning book, Cripping Intersex (UBC, 2022), which received a 2024 Canada Prize from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. 

Tobin LeBlanc Haley is Associate Professor of Political Science and co-director of the Housing, Mobilization and Engagement Lab (HOME-RL) at UNB. Her research sits at the intersection of Canadian social policy and political economy. She examines the politics of housing, disability, and poverty within Canada's ever-changing welfare state.