Send message to Author

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.