Nurturing Difference – Parenting and Disability in a Careless Age
JOIN US as we celebrate two distinguished members of our UCSC community and their new books. We’ll be discussing Danilyn Rutherford’s Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World (Duke University Press) and Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons: Can a game take care of us? (University of Chicago Press). Joined by Donna Haraway and Megan Moodie, and moderated by THI Faculty Director, Pranav Anand, the panel will explore questions of caregiving, parenthood, disability, language, meaning, and technology.
Danilyn Rutherford is the president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier (Princeton, 2003), Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua (Chicago, 2012), Living in the Stone Age: Reflections on the Origins of a Colonial Fantasy (Chicago, 2018), and, most recently, Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World (Duke, 2025).
Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a Professor of Computational Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He studies and makes video games and electronic literature. Before his most recent book, Noah authored or co-edited six books on games and digital media for the MIT Press, including The New Media Reader (2003). His collaborative art projects have been exhibited by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Krannert Art Museum, and a wide variety of festivals and conferences. Noah holds both a PhD (2006) and an MFA (2003) from Brown University, an MA (2000) from the Gallatin School at New York University, and a BA (1994) from the Johnston Center at the University of Redlands.
Megan Moodie is a Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. She is chair of the Disabled Faculty Networking Group and a core member of the disability studies initiative on campus.
This event is presented by the Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice Project, a UC Multicampus Research Program and Initiative and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute