Events & Gatherings
The Sociocultural Anthropology Network of Disabled Scholars hosts virtual and in-person gatherings designed to foster connection, share advocacy strategies, and center the unique perspectives of disabled ethnographers in the field.
Upcoming Events
May 22, 2026
5-6pm CST
Disabled Graduate Student Ethnographer Meet-Up #2
July 2026
Time TBD
EASA: "Cripping Ethnography: Anti-Ableist Approaches to Anthropological Knowledge Production"
Hybrid panel at the European Association of Social Anthropologists 2026
Convened by:
Alice von Bieberstein (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Elliot Mrozinski (Rutgers)
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.
Archive
April 10, 2026
Disabled Graduate Student Ethnographer Meet-Up #1
A virtual space to connect disabled graduate students who are sociocultural anthropologists and interdisciplinary ethnographers.
Organized by Samantha Schwartz
Mar 20, 2026
SfAA: "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
Dec 3-5, 2025
Wenner Gren Workshop on Being Accompanied
University of Amsterdam
December 3-5, 2025
Anthropologists have long been interested in the methodological and ethical implications of "accompanied fieldwork." Critical of the "lonely hero" model of fieldwork, feminist anthropologists in particular unsettled the boundaries between fieldwork and care work, showing how familial entanglements shape – and strengthen – ethnographic possibilities. While "patchwork" ethnography is increasingly recognized as the new normal, work that views the researcher’s own kin entanglements as a source of knowledge and theory-building remains scarce, or is relegated to the margins of our discipline and monographs. Our proposed workshop advocates for a rethinking of ethnography as accompanied throughout all its phases – from the choice of research topic to fieldwork, writing, and publishing. Moving beyond Western heteronormative tropes of accompanied research, we interpret kin entanglements expansively, encompassing not only caregiving responsibilities for children, but also other human and more-than-human care relationships. The workshop draws on multimodal methods and contributions from Black, Chicana and indigenous feminist scholarship, critical kinship and dis/ability studies to create a space where experiences of being accompanied, with their unique affordances and temporalities, are integrated into the ethnographic endeavor. Attendees will be invited to take part in multimodal sessions using sound, body maps, and zine-making to reflect on experiences of accompanied knowledge production.
Organized by Andie Thompson, Magdalena Suerbaum, Elisa Lanari
Relevant Presentations:
Paras Arora, "Where's Your Brother?" Sustaining Siblingship through Fieldwork
Erin L. Durban, Accompaniment as Anti-Ableist Ethnographic Practice "In the Meanwhile"
Arseli Dokumaci, Access in the Making Lab: How to Build Relationality into Concrete Infrastructures of Knowledge Production
Menahil Tahir, Redirecting the "Ethnographer's Gaze": Embodiment and Reflexivity in Collaborative Fieldwork
Nov 21, 2025
AAA Roundtable: "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
This roundtable celebrates the publication of the book, The Disabled Anthropologist (2025). This publication is the first of its kind and incorporates a spectrum of academic positionings, 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. 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, challenging and unsettling the received knowledge and practices of the canon. All the contributors use autoethnography to impart their experiences and astuteness, mostly through narrative but also via poetry and photography. Many contributors address the significance of mutual care, bonding, and/or mutual aid between the anthropologists and their interlocutors in making fieldwork possible. Others evaluate how "pain time" can fundamentally disrupt ethnographic processes and academic responsibilities, rendering hyperproductivity unachievable and undesirable.
Organizers: Sumi Colligan and Anna Jaysane-Darr
Participants:
Alana Ackerman, Valerie Black, Erin L. Durban, Kimberly Fernandes, Megan Moodie, Krisjon Olson
Oct 20, 2025
Cripping Ethnographic Methods: Enabling Ethnography
Using disability-as-method to intervene in ableist fieldwork models, Professor Durban presents alternative methods of ethnographic knowledge production that create greater disability accessibility and collective access in anthropology. “Enabling Ethnography” developed out of two research projects—one an experiment in anti-ableist research design about universities and racial inequality, the other an oral history project with disabled, chronically ill, and mad anthropologists. The presentation from this research highlights how cripping ethnographic methods using multimodal engagement and other strategies enhances ethnographic inquiry and analysis.
Organized by Alice von Bieberstein
Mar 26, 2025
SfAA: "Cripping Ethnography" Panel
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.
Organized by Erin L. Durban
Session Participants:
Sumi Colligan, Erin L. Durban, Miranda Joseph, O. Sailer, Annika Yates
Mar 24-25, 2025
NSF Disability Anthropology across Four Fields Workshop
Organized by Siobhán Cully, Megan Moodie, and Ian Wallace
Relevant Presentations:
Karen Nakamura, "Universal Design Sucks"
Erin L. Durban, "Disabled in the Field"
Laura Heath-Stout, "Nothing about Us without Us"
Kevin Darcy, "The Cognitive Load of Professional Conferences"
Nathan Tilton
Nov 18, 2021
AAA Roundtable: "How Do We Show Up for One Another?"
American Anthropological Association 2021
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. Disability justice is a grassroots movement led by disabled, non-binary artists and performers of color. 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. 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? How have the principles and practices of disability justice been explicitly embedded in the research formulations, fieldwork navigations, and methodologies of roundtable participants?
Organizers: Sumi Colligan and Anna Jaysane-Darr
Presenters: Sara Acevedo, Valerie Black, Erin L. Durban, Krisjon Olson, Karen Nakamura, Mark Bookman
Nov 5, 2020
AAA Roundtable: "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 factors that shape their decisions regarding the “field” as those “claiming disability” or as anthropological professionals who foster opportunities for those who do. As definitions of disability expand, the “field” remains a rite of passage and cornerstone for anthropology. This myth has not successfully been dispelled despite the reflexive turn and the plethora of research on diversity in the field.
In seeking to erode the myth and bolster the path, this roundtable addresses: What considerations have disabled anthropologists taken into account as they weigh their choice of field sites? What kinds of advice or obstacles have they encountered? 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?
Organizers: Sumi Colligan and Anna Jaysane-Darr
Participants: Sara Acevedo, Valerie Black, Mark Bookman, Erin Durban, Rebecca Eli Long, Karen Nakamura, Krisjon Olson
Propose an Event
If you have an idea for a talk, workshop, or reading group, we would love to hear from you. Proposing an event is a powerful way to meaningful connections.
disabledethnographersnetwork [at] gmail [dot] com