1st Edition

The Disabled Anthropologist

Edited By Sumi Colligan, Anna Jaysane-Darr Copyright 2025
240 Pages 19 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

240 Pages 19 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

240 Pages 19 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book brings much needed attention to disabled anthropologists, making clear that “disabled” and “anthropologist” belong together. The disabled anthropologists who contribute to this volume and on which these chapters focus have refused erasure from a profession that would ignore their critiques and creativity. Applying autoethnographic, photographic, and poetic venues, the contributors... Read more

Introduction Sumi Colligan and Anna Jaysane-Darr

1. The Intrepid Anthropologist Valerie Black

2. Cripping Ethnography: Disability, Unruly Movement, and the Doing of Anthropology Alana Ackerman

3. Working on Pain Time: Doing Anthropology While Living with a Painful Chronic Illness Amanda Votta

4. Assembling the Field during a Crisis: Disabled Carework and/as Fieldwork Kim Fernandes

5. Reimagining Ethnographic Research for Collective Access through (Crip) Collaboration Erin L. Durban and Miranda Joseph

6. Recognition, Care, and Childhood Disability Krisjon Rae Olson

7. Disability Touch Susan Seizer

8. “You Used to Speak Like Us”: Being Aphasic in a Spanish Galician Community and Affrilachian Neighborhood Elder Club Heidi Kelley and Kenneth A. Betsalel

9. Ethnographic Insight, Painfully Come By Rachel Parks

10. The Disabled Body and the Body Politic: Multiple Readings and Experiences Sumi Colligan

Gratitude, Concluding Thoughts, and a Mini-Manifesto Megan Moodie

Biography

Sumi Colligan is a Professor Emerita from the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. She received her BA from UC Berkeley and her PhD from Princeton. She was among the first disabled anthropologists to address the experience of being a disabled ethnographer. She has served on the Board of the Society for Disability Studies and published in the Anthropology of Work Review, Disability Studies Quarterly, and the International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies.

Anna Jaysane-Darr is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Her research foci include neurodiversity in educational and clinical spaces in South Africa, and reproduction and nationalism among refugees. Her work has been published in Children and Society, Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, and in the edited volume Refugee Resettlement in the United States: Loss, Transition, and Resilience in a Post-9/11 World, among other venues.