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.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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