Nurturing Difference – Parenting and Disability in a Careless Age
In an increasingly careless world where cruelty is celebrated and disability mocked, these two highly-readable scholars remind us that beautiful relationships of compassion, connection, communication, and empathy still exist. Rutherford recounts her experiences raising a high assistance-needs daughter, Millie, describing the importance of a web of caregivers who support and enrich their lives and the potential for human communication beyond words. Wardrip-Fruin writes about parenting in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, exploring how his own need for rest and care in the face of growing disablement reshaped his ideas about masculinity, fatherhood, and video game imaginaries. Both books speak to Wardrip-Fruin’s provocative question posed in the subtitle to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, “Can a game take care of us?” If the “game” is a resource-stripped, social media-driven capitalist competition where everyone must fight for survival, where basic welfare programs are being destroyed, what can we learn from care-centered disability worlds? At a time when we most need it, these scholar-parents give us extraordinary insight into the form of attention in which all our hopes rest: love.
On January 20, 2026, the Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice Project held a panel conversation in the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, where they discussed 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 discussed caregiving, parenthood, disability, language, meaning, and technology.
Watch the video of the event here:
Event photos:
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. meganmoodie.github.io
This event was presented by the Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice Project, a UC Multicampus Research Program and Initiative and co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute and was a featured event of THI’s year of Nourishment.