Conference Conversations
An archive of gatherings by and for disabled ethnographers and anthropologists.
Disability-as-Method
Imagining Disabled Anthropologists
Cripping Ethnography
How Do We Show Up for One Another?
Disabled Voices in the Field
Disability-as-Method
Society for Applied Anthropology Conference 2026
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Friday, March 20, 2026
9:00–10:45am Mountain time zone
Disability-as-Method: Accessible Approaches to Ethnographic Research
Following the publication of the pathbreaking anthology The Disabled Anthropologist (2025), this roundtable continues a disciplinary conversation about accessible approaches to ethnographic research. The roundtable features disabled, chronically ill, and mad anthropologists who will discuss “disability-as-method” related to their research projects. Drawing on the panelists’ experiences of doing research across a range of diverse contexts, the roundtable will consider where and how disability-as-method influences the development of ethnographic research that makes room for disability as lived experience. The conversation will highlight and expand on known “best practices” for disability accessibility that attune to a diversity of bodyminds.
Organizers: Erin L. Durban and Kim Fernandes
Sponsors: DRIG/SfAA DTIG
Participants:
Sara M. Acevedo, University of Maryland
Valerie Black, UCSF
Jaewon Byun, University of Minnesota
Kevin Darcy, University of Colorado
Erin L. Durban, University of Minnesota
Kim Fernandes, Brown University
Suzanne Stolz, University of San Diego
MaryGrace Trifilio, University of Minnesota
Kayley Whalen, UC Davis
Imagining Disabled Anthropologists
American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting 2025
New Orleans, Louisiana
Friday, November 21, 2025
12:45–2:15 PM Eastern
Imagining Disabled Anthropologists: Haunting Ableism in the Field, Roundtable/Town Hall
This roundtable celebrates the publication of the book, The Disabled Anthropologist (2025). The title, while it could be understood as essentializing, has value in asserting and affirming our presence and calling for desired transformations (Moodie 2025). This publication is the first of its kind and incorporates a spectrum of academic positionings (from graduate students to senior anthropologists), embodiments, and perspectives. The chapter contributors share their ingenious and creative methods and strategies for engaging in their work and underscore ways in which their diverse bodyminds have contributed to insights about what constitutes the field, ethical considerations about engagement with field interlocutors, and how they have envisioned and enacted their scholarly endeavors. Through the deployment of their own imaginations, authors and roundtable participants hope to excite the imaginations of others, demonstrating that the doing of anthropology doesn't require "intrepidness" (Black 2025). The book and the roundtable haunt the ableism that continues to pervade our field by establishing that disabled anthropologists, however unacknowledged, have been here all along, like ghosts, challenging and unsettling the received knowledge and practices of the canon. In so doing, we hope to enjoin our anthropological compatriots to envisage and shape a more inclusive, more flexible, and less audacious discipline, a goal that will be more easily achieved if others recognize our wisdom and let us guide them. All the contributors use autoethnography to impart their experiences and astuteness, mostly through narrative but also via poetry and photography. They explore how the mythos of anthropological fieldwork initially informed their understanding of how to conduct fieldwork, and then their discovery of alternative and appropriate methodologies, such as the design of an ethnographic methods class built on the principle of collective access. Many contributors address the significance of mutual care, bonding, and/or mutual aid between the anthropologists and their interlocutors in making fieldwork possible and yielding fruitful insights, according themselves and their interlocutors "value." Others evaluate how "pain time" can fundamentally disrupt ethnographic processes and academic responsibilities, rendering hyperproductivity unachievable and undesirable. Roundtable participants will discuss their initial impetus for involvement in the book project; how their essays play a part in haunting ableism in the field (both in terms of identifying obstacles posed and realizations made); how the act of reflection and composition deepened or altered their views on this haunting; how they best think the specter and manifestations of ableism can be eradicated in this disciplinary context; and, finally, examine what genuine "recognition" looks like.
Organizers: Sumi Colligan and Anna Jaysane-Darr
Participants:
Alana Ackerman
Valerie Black
Erin L. Durban
Kimberly Fernandes
Megan Moodie
Krisjon Olson
Cripping Ethnography
Society for Applied Anthropology Conference 2025
Portland, OR
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
9:00–10:45am Pacific Standard
Cripping Ethnography: Disability Creativity and Ethnographic Research
Traditional models of ethnographic fieldwork rely on hyper-mobile researchers negotiating their informants’ immobilities, a residue of the interrelated white, colonial, masculinist, and ableist design of anthropology. “Cripping Ethnography” disrupts these models and argues that a greater diversity of researcher bodyminds enhances ethnographic inquiry and analysis. This panel thinks through disability accessibility in ethnographic fieldwork. The presentations and discussion highlight two research projects: one an experiment in anti-ableist research design about universities and racial inequality, the other oral histories with disabled anthropologists. We will also present selections from a forthcoming anthology, The Disabled Anthropologist, to which several of us have contributed.
Organized by Erin L. Durban
Session Participants:
Sumi Colligan
Erin L. Durban
Miranda Joseph
O. Sailer
Annika Yates
How Do We Show Up for One Another?
American Anthropological Association 2021
Virtual
Thursday, November 18, 2021
2–3:45pm Eastern
How Do We Show Up for One Another?: Learning from Disability Justice and Anthropology in Conversation
In keeping with this year’s theme, “Truth and Responsibility,” roundtable participants explore the ways in which disability justice ideals and practices inform or could be integrated into aspects of their own work as anthropologists, whether in the spheres of activism and advocacy, pedagogy and teaching, and/or research. Although truth, justice, and responsibility are threads that have long existed in anthropology, there has been a dearth of effort to underscore the perspectives of disabled anthropologists regarding these commitments and/or to consider ways in which disability hierarchies and parity shape the contours of these endeavors.
Disability justice is a grassroots movement led by disabled, non-binary artists and performers of color (Sins Invalid 2015). This movement offers a critique and antidote to the individualistic and neoliberal approach to disability rights prevalent in the United States. It emphasizes the voices of disabled people who have been omitted from the dominant disability discourse and incorporates intersectional, collaborative approaches to engaging in work and struggle that valorize interdependence as a guiding principle (Mingus 2017). In short, the question of how people should show up for each other is key to defining and structuring any undertakings devoted to disability justice (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018).
This question of how people do or should show up for each other has been an abiding query posed by many anthropologists. It is reflected in studies concerning forms and norms of kinship, globalization and emerging inequalities, resistance and protest, shifting parameters and definitions of community, and contested understandings of what constitutes a moral life, to name a few. Yet despite these intellectual and material pursuits, the insights gained have not drawn routinely on the lessons disabled anthropologists or anthropology versed in disability studies scholarship and praxis could provide or the value of examining these issues through a disability justice lens.
In seeking to bring disability justice and anthropological perspectives into explicit conversation with one another, this roundtable addresses the following: In what ways has the question of how people should show up for one another been reflected in the work of disabled anthropologists or how disabled anthropologists have approached their work? Has this concern been particularly magnified by the context of the COVID-19 pandemic or has this been a pressing framework in which disabled anthropologist have always evaluated and framed their work? How have the principles and practices of disability justice been explicitly embedded in the research formulations, fieldwork navigations, and methodologies of roundtable participants? How has broader anthropological scholarship regarding approaches to how people show up for one another illuminated these applications? Do participants perceive these perspectives as converging or in tension with one another? How might disability justice viewpoints and organizing strategies reveal certain truths about the current state of our anthropological profession and offer guidance regarding how to show up for one another and our interlocutors?
Organizers: Sumi Colligan and Anna Jaysane-Darr
Sponsored by American Ethnological Society
Presenters:
Sara Acevedo
Valerie Black
Erin L. Durban
Krisjon Olson
Karen Nakamura
Mark Bookman
Disabled Voices in the Field
AAA Raising Our Voices 2020
Thursday, November 5, 2020
5:00–6:00 PM Eastern
Disabled Voices in the Field: Toward Reimagining Anthropologists at Work
In keeping with this year’s AAA theme, roundtable participants explore and interrogate the diverse and multi-faceted factors that shape, constrain, and enliven their decisions regarding, and/or engagement with the “field” as those “claiming disability” (Linton 1998) or as anthropological professionals who foster opportunities for those who do. As definitions of and legal requirements for disability expand to encompass increasingly diverse mind-body identities, statuses, and experiences, the “field” remains a rite of passage and cornerstone for anthropology and, hence, a key component of inclusion and promotion within the profession. There is no better moment than the marking of the 30th anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act to reckon with our shortfalls in this inclusion process and to assess how these deficits could be remedied.
It is clear that our profession persists in promoting images of and expectations for the “fit” and often “lone” ethnographer, an unshakable and abiding myth of the ideal anthropologist, forging an investigation into ever-changing worlds and global processes and inter-connections. This myth has not successfully been dispelled despite the reflexive turn and the plethora of books that have been written on women in the field, children in the field, “natives” in the field, and so forth. Thus, the prospects of success for those who “claim” disability or those evaluating their path forward if they do are complicated by fears of disciplinary or faculty advisor discouragement or impediments specific research sites might pose.
In seeking to erode the myth and bolster the path, this roundtable addresses the following questions: What considerations have disabled anthropologists or disabled anthropologists-in-the-making taken into account as they weigh their choice of field sites and/or research emphases? What kinds of advice, obstacles, or supports have they encountered as they prepare for entry into the field? What challenges and rewards have they faced in the field, and what strategies and insights have they gained as disabled researchers in the field? Finally, what “truths” do these experiences reveal about the current state of our profession and what responsibilities should our profession assume to facilitate a more inclusive professional environment and more satisfying and productive field experiences?
Organizers: Sumi Colligan and Anna Jaysane-Darr
Participants:
Sara Acevedo
Valerie Black
Mark Bookman
Erin Durban
Rebecca Eli Long
Karen Nakamura
Krisjon Olson