The Disabled Anthropologist

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 assess the drawbacks of their anthropology training programs, the limitations of accessibility practices in the academy, and how their own embodiments and the contingencies of their research and research settings have facilitated the discovery of novel methodologies and insights. Collectively this volume’s contributors demonstrate a shared concern for the wellbeing of disabled ethnographers and interlocutors, whether working with Colombian refugees in Ecuador or those living with chronic pain in Michigan.

The Disabled Anthropologist is essential reading for students and scholars working in cultural and medical anthropology.

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.