Nurturing Difference - Parenting and Disability in a Careless Age
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).
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.
If you have disability-related needs, please contact us at [email protected] or call 831-459-1274 by January 13, 2026. ADA parking for this event will be available in lot 170, directly adjacent to the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn. Sign language interpretation will also be available during the event.
About Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World:
When Danilyn Rutherford and her husband Craig noticed that their six-month-old daughter Millie wasn’t making eye contact, they took her to their pediatrician. And an optometrist. Then a neurologist. Later, to a team of physical and occupational therapists. None of the doctors could give Millie a diagnosis, but it was clear that her brain was not developing at the rate it should. At an age when some children take their first steps, Millie had the cognitive ability and motor skills of a three-month-old. Three years later, Craig died suddenly of a heart attack and Danilyn found herself on the precipice of her anthropology career as a widow and single mother, still trying to solve the puzzle posed by Millie’s inaccessible mind.
Now in her twenties, Millie has never been able to express herself verbally, but she has a thriving social environment rooted in the people around her and in things her companions and family can see, hear, smell, and feel. Life in Millie’s world is far richer than might be immediately evident to those who think and communicate in conventional ways.
Beautiful Mystery explores what it means to be a person in the spaces between what we can and cannot say, and how we can fight to care for those we love when they don’t have the language to fight for themselves. Through her unique lens as a mother and an anthropologist, Rutherford tells the story of arriving in Millie’s world, what she found there, and how Millie showed her that words aren’t always what makes us human. Enlightening and deeply felt, Beautiful Mystery proves that you don’t have to understand someone to love them—a lesson that, if we all learned it, might allow us to live together in a fractured world.
About Animal Crossing: New Horizons: Can a game take care of us?
Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released on March 20, 2020—just as a pandemic kept many from family, work, restaurants, and the rest of their regularly scheduled lives. At its height, the game averaged one million copies sold per day, as players sought comfort, escape, and a virtual means of connection. In this book, game scholar Noah Wardrip-Fruin, isolated with his family by both lockdown and disability, explores the power of this game and the mixed emotions of a player and a parent trying to make it from one day to the next—while his kids’ obsession with Animal Crossing creates conflicts between them and pushback against family rules.
Wardrip-Fruin helps both Animal Crossing fans and newcomers understand the unexpected beneath the game’s surface: like the story of the first Animal Crossing, codesigned by an absent father seeking connection; like the hallmarks of video game manipulation, from “streak” bonuses to game-determined playtimes; like the appeal of endless shopping, in a kind of “safe” capitalism; and, of course, like the character quirks of a raccoon dog, Tom Nook, who provides a world of both safety and strange paternalism.
For many, this blockbuster game offered a comforting world compared to a reality of danger. In this first entry in the Replay series, Wardrip-Fruin offers an absorbing investigation of a game’s role in contemporary social life and a book that belongs on the shelf of anyone
Event Links
Website: https://go.evvnt.com/3387041-0
