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- Convenors:
-
Alice von Bieberstein
(Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Elliot Mrozinski (Rutgers)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores anti-ableist approaches to ethnographic research, centering disabled, mad, d/Deaf, chronically ill and neurodivergent researchers' knowledge and experiences. Is it possible to reimagine anthropological methods through disability justice principles (following Sins Invalid)?
Long Abstract
Anthropological fieldwork has long been imagined through ableist assumptions about researcher mobility, productivity, and bodily capacity. This panel challenges these norms by turning our attention away from disability as research topic and towards the diverse bodyminds of researchers and research participants. We explore the possibilities of anti-ableist approaches to anthropological knowledge production that center disablement, debility, madness, deafness, chronic illness, and neurodivergence as lived experiences, knowledge systems, and political standpoints.
Cripping ethnographic methods means fundamentally rethinking how we practice anthropology. What alternative temporalities become possible when we reject neoliberal expectations of constant productivity? How do collaborative and care-based approaches reshape fieldwork relations? What forms of knowledge emerge when we center access, interdependence, and embodied difference? Polarisation here figures as the social, bodily and epistemic space of non-normativity that we imagine as a space of possibility for doing ethnography otherwise.
Drawing on anti-ableist, decolonial, and feminist commitments, panelists will share personal trajectories, collective experiments, and imaginative horizons for cripping ethnography. How can our research approaches, structures, practices and relations challenge ableist norms in academic knowledge production and participation? How can we disrupt neoliberal assumptions about professionality, productivity, time and personhood? How might we cultivate institutional spaces that value diverse ways of knowing, being, and doing research?
This panel invites students, researchers, and practitioners to join in the collective work of reimagining anthropology as a discipline accountable to disability justice, accessible to multiply-marginalized scholars, and generative of knowledge that emerges from rather than despite embodied difference.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This presentation focuses on a set of crip photographs and videos I recorded during two protests outside Broadview Detention Center, Illinois. These images, and crip protest ethnography more broadly, represent one way to witness and contest contemporary state violence against migrant communities.
Paper long abstract
In this paper, I reflect on preliminary research I have recently begun related to the “disabling of asylum” by the current US administration. I will focus on a set of photographs and videos I recorded during two protests in Fall 2025 outside of Broadview Detention Center, Illinois. These recordings were taken in the context of “Operation Midway Blitz,” an ongoing, militarized attack by the US government against migrant, refugee, and related racialized communities in the Chicago area, part of a broader project of white nationalism and a “thickening” borderlands condition (Rosas 2006). These recordings are “crip” in that they center disability and disablement, and they challenge the status quo of state power. I argue that crip images, and crip protest ethnography, represent one way to witness and confront contemporary state violence.
Paper short abstract
This paper discusses what happens when ethnographies of autism become autistic ethnographies. Centering autistemologies (autistic epistemologies) in a study of London’s urban sensescapes, it problematises ethnographic methods as autistic engagement and facilitating an autistic ‘right to the city’.
Paper long abstract
There is no one way of sensing the urban, just as there is no one way to be autistic. Still, navigating the city has unique challenges for those who embody other ways of sensing and perceiving the urban environment. Among these other urban embodiments, ‘autism’ represents a variety of experiences gathered under a diagnostic label which emerged out of modern, western psychiatric endeavours. These endeavours subsequently constructed ‘autistic’ as a particular kind of bodymind, one that is socially, sensorily, and behaviorally distinct from non-autistic ways of being.
My upcoming doctoral research turns its attention to autistic experiences as lived realities beyond diagnostic labels and emplaces these sensory experiences within the context of urban sensescapes in London, UK. That is, it explores how the sensory organisations of the urban, which are themselves socially, historically and geographically contingent, interact with the concept of an ‘autistic’ kind of sensory experience.
This paper focuses on the methodological (which are simultaneously ethical) considerations that emerge out of such an inquiry. In mapping out the entanglements of the autistic, the sensory and the urban, there emerges a need to empower autistic narratives of urban space. I argue that this can be explored through a neuroqueering of ethnographic processes of data collection as participant-led initiatives. Bridging the gap between ethnographic and autistic ways of knowing allows not only for empowerment of autistic narratives in anthropological knowledge-making, but also for an exploration of the possibilities of an autistic ‘right to the city’.
Paper short abstract
In a field dominated by visual observations, it is not unusual for an ethnographer with (im)partial sight to be confronted with the question on knowing what she knows. Hence, I attempt to elucidate an embodied mode of knowing – beyond seeing.
Paper long abstract
As an ethnographer, who cannot rely on her eyesight to perceive the surroundings, I am often confronted with the question on knowing what I know. Here I seek to elucidate certain aspects of the embodied approach that I subconsciously developed over time and continued to exercise during the course of my fieldwork, primarily conducted between March 2022 and May 2023. From establishing the initial contacts to being connected to prospective interlocutors, my (dis)ability often played a significant role. It was frequently demonstrated how my research partners catered to these ‘special’ circumstances and adapted accordingly. Moreover, my ‘(im)partial’ sight facilitated me in sharing an intimate (physical) space with many of my research partners. Coming into physical contact, which was often not necessary, altered the notions of (in)tangibility in our routine interactions. Hence, the performativity of touch not only contributed to strengthening my relations with my research partners through their depiction of empathy towards me but also was indicative of the depth of our relation(s). Additionally, going into the field as an ‘embodied ethnographer’ allowed me to acquire some material details through perception by the skin, in the form of active as well as passive touch. This also enabled me, at instances, to feel and know beyond the visual. In a nutshell, this contribution encompasses my reflections on the role ‘touching’ and ‘being touched’ played in my ethnography with the Afghans who migrated to Pakistan following the Taliban taking charge of the Afghan government, in August 2021.
Paper short abstract
This paper crips digital accessibility, showing the shift from activism to a neoliberal "business case." partialy embeded in Universal Design. Basing on my research and my own embodied experience I call for a communal, slow anthropology that values interdependence over productive self-sufficiency.
Paper long abstract
This paper "crips" the digital accessibility landscape by challenging the ableist and neoliberal norms embedded in current implementation practices. Although digital accessibility is often framed as being aligned with disability justice, I argue that its current form neglects the movement’s motto, "nothing about us without us," in favor of a "profitable business case."
Drawing on a comparison between Universal Design and Inclusive Design, I argue that contemporary standards often function as "political technologies" that prioritize neoliberal productivity and individualism over cooperation, interdependence, and the lived realities (Selanon, Dejnirattisai, Naknawaphan 2025) of multiply-marginalized individuals—specifically at the intersections of queer, neurodivergent, and POC identities (Harrington 2020). I highlight tensions within expert and user communities—including critiques from neurodivergent contributors regarding WCAG standards —to demonstrate how Universal Design can paradoxically exclude specific needs while instrumentalizing them for market gain (Lalitha 2025).
My arguments are grounded in both theoretical literature and my current research project, which utilizes Participatory Design and inclusive methodologies. Crucially, I center my own embodied experience as a queer and neurodivergent researcher navigating in polarized spaces. Through this, I propose a "crip" intervention into anthropology as I have learned it—advocating for a move away from the myth of the self-sufficient hero-researcher toward a more collaborative, slow, and communal practice that values non-normative ways of knowing and being (Taylor 2017).
Paper short abstract
The role of inaction in anthropological fieldwork is an under-examined condition that permeates most fieldwork situations. Grounded in fieldwork with arts practitioners in Berlin, this paper will explore inaction as an activist affordance, in line with Dokumaci’s theory of the same name.
Paper long abstract
The role of inaction in anthropological fieldwork is an under-examined condition that permeates most, if not all fieldwork situations. As a result of a categorisation of personhood that arose in the social sciences throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the researcher is often assumed to be both neurotypical and able-bodied. These expectations presume immersive data collection and assume that the production of knowledge emerges from a standardised physiological viewpoint.
The reality for the majority of researchers, however, is a patchwork approach that features cancellation, inertia, and rest. Rather than seeing this mode of inaction as a fieldwork failure, it can be seen as a mode that exists in opposition to ableist expectations of academic participation. In fact, inaction can highlight resistance and resilience that expands fieldsite contexts, enriching ethnography by both its inclusion and its intrinsic utility in participants' lives.
Arising in my own ethnographic practice working with participants who utilise crip methods, inaction also features as a necessary part of any research methodology. Grounded in my fieldwork with arts practitioners in Berlin, my presentation will explore inaction as an activist affordance, in line with Dokumaci’s theory of the same name. The conscious rejection of activity in favour of serving the capacity of one’s body-mind is a technique of improvisation that builds a material bridge between uninhabitable and inhabitable worlds. In relation to the theme of polarisation, this paper outlines the benefits of incorporating inaction in the creation of anti-ableist ethnographic frameworks as a fundamental aspect of anthropological knowledge production.
Paper short abstract
How might some of the ruptures in conventional fieldwork practice enable an attention to restorative relations through ways of centering care in the doing of work on the field? This paper will discuss the role of care in/and/as a means to crip anthropological knowledge production in current times.
Paper long abstract
How might some of the ruptures in conventional fieldwork practice generated by current geopolitical conditions also enable an attention to restorative relations through ways of centering care in the doing of work on the field? Drawing upon the author’s experiences as a disabled researcher doing fieldwork (Fernandes 2021) during COVID-19, this paper offers a reflection on the role that illness plays in stitching together fieldwork. The paper will discuss how wholeness and care can enable the work of patchworking ethnographic methods (cf. Gunel, Varma and Watanabe 2020) during fieldwork. It will also demonstrate how crip carework in/and/as ethnographic method can play a crucial role in shaping the contours of the field.
Since the start of COVID-19, disability has shifted as a transforming and rapidly expanding category, a space of identity and belonging that is continually changing even as it is being defined. Attending to the responsibilities that come with how disability shifts, and what these shifts mean for fieldwork, this paper will follow theorizations of chronic illness methodology to ask: what methodological possibilities might emerge through an engagement with the simultaneous work of carework and/as fieldwork? The paper draws upon three vignettes from mutual aid work during the second wave of COVID-19 in India (April – May 2021), happening simultaneously during the author’s dissertation fieldwork. Through these vignettes, the paper will work to (a) engage with how risk in field relations comes to redefine the boundaries of the field and (b) examine how fieldwork can facilitate crip potentialities for wholeness.
Paper short abstract
This paper highlights the exciting and innovative methods of more than forty diverse disabled, mad, d/Deaf, sick, and neurodivergent anthropologists who have earned their PhDs.
Paper long abstract
Using disability-as-method to intervene in ableist fieldwork models, I present alternative methods of ethnographic knowledge production that create greater disability accessibility and collective access in anthropology from my book manuscript, “Enabling Ethnography: Crafting Anti-Ableist Fieldwork Methods.” The book developed out of two collaborative research projects—one an experiment in anti-ableist research design about universities and racial inequality, the other an oral history project with disabled, mad, d/Deaf, sick, and neurodivergent anthropologists to learn how ethnographers create access for themselves and others in the field.
The EASA paper comes from the chapter “Cripping Ethnography” that draws on the published writings of academic anthropologists and interdisciplinary ethnographers who have reflected on their bodyminds in research as well as insights from the twenty-six participants in the Disabled Anthropologist Oral History Research Project (DAOHP). By creating an archive of the different ways that disabled, mad, d/Deaf, sick, and neurodivergent ethnographers conduct research with publications and DAOHP interviews that have not yet been collected together, I illuminate the exciting and innovative paths that other researchers might take or learn from to begin their anthropological journeys. While these include insights gained from adapted mobility and anti-capitalist recouperations of medical leave, I will highlight ethnographic methods in the categories of “Crip Imagination, Fabulation, Creativity” through ingenious engagements with with the arts and “Crip Tech Hacks, Invention, and ‘Making’” that grapple with the complications of techno-ableism.