Related Initiatives
The Disability Research Interest Group (DRIG) is a network of scholars, educators, activists, and practitioners invested in building ties between people who contribute to disability anthropology. As a special interest group (SIG) of the Society for Medical Anthropology, we foster disability research in and across all fields of anthropology. The DRIG understands disability anthropology to be research that seeks to theorize disability by documenting and analyzing the diversity of everyday life experiences of people with disabilities across space, time, and social and cultural context. We situate the medicalization of disability as a sociocultural phenomenon with political consequences, and contend that there is much to be said about disability that exists outside of the realm of biomedicine.
AIM is an anti-colonial, anti-ableist, feminist research lab working on issues of access, disability, environment and care through creative experimentation.
With its mission of "Making Better Crips," the lab has been operational since 2018 and led by Karen Nakamura who is the Haas endowed chair for Disability Studies and Professor of Anthropology.
The Disabled Archaeologists Network (D.A.N.) is a coalition of disabled archaeologists committed to providing an open and welcoming space to all disabled and disability-questioning people. The D.A.N. operates under the premise that disability is a social, political, and intersectional lived experience. We are building a community where disabled archaeologists can access an international network of fellow archaeologists in professional, compliance, and academic archaeology.
Critical Design Lab is a multi-disciplinary arts and design collaborative centered in disability culture and crip techno-science. Our work pivots around the concept of access: access is our ethic, our creative content, and our methodology. We use digital media and social practice to craft replicable protocols that treat accessibility as research-creation, an aesthetic world-building practice, and an invitation to assemble community.
Patchwork Ethnography is a new methodological and theoretical approach to ethnographic research, which attends to how changing living and working conditions are irrevocably transforming knowledge production.
The Disability Archives Lab is a Disabled-led collaborative center by and for disabled people. The Lab investigates the ways that archives and the materials they hold document, shape, and impact disabled people—historically and in the present. Keeping critical disability studies at the forefront of researching and building projects around disability, the Lab hosts multi-disciplinary projects and research initiatives that center the politics of disability, how disabled people are affected by archival representation, and how to imagine archival futures that are centered around disabled desires.
Resources
Sins Invalid is a disability justice-based movement building and performance project that celebrates disabled people, centering and led by disabled Black, Indigenous, and people of the global majority, and queer, trans, and nonbinary disabled people.
Leaving Evidence is a blog by Mia Mingus. "We must leave evidence. Evidence that we were here, that we existed, that we survived and loved and ached. Evidence of the wholeness we never felt and the immense sense of fullness we gave to each other. Evidence of who we were, who we thought we were, who we never should have been. Evidence for each other that there are other ways to live--past survival; past isolation."
The Disability Visibility Project is an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture.