This bibliography contains publications by disabled, chronically ill, Deaf, mad, and neurodivergent ethnographers. It is also available as a zine titled, Is there a reading by a disabled scholar on your anthropology syllabus? You can read and download the zine here.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ANTHOLOGIES
Colligan, Sumi, and Anna Jaysane-Darr, eds. 2025. The Disabled Anthropologist. Routledge.
Emery, Steven, Sanchayeeta Iyer, Amandine Le Maire, Erin Moriarty, and Annelies Kusters. 2024. Deaf Mobility Studies: Exploring International Networks, Tourism, and Migration. Gallaudet University Press.
Fagan Robinson, Kelly, Mark T. Carew, and Nora Ellen Groce. 2024. Inaccessible Access: Rethinking Disability Inclusion in Academic Knowledge Creation. Rutgers.
Mills, Mara, and Rebecca Sanchez. 2023. Crip Authorship: Disability as Method. New York University Press.
ARTICLES, BLOGS, & CHAPTERS
Acevedo, Sara. M. 2022. “Praxis-Oriented Research Toward a Liberatory Disability Politics: A Contemplative Inquiry Approach.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 22(6): 593–604.
Atuk, Tankut. 2025. “Epidemiology of Conspiracy: Infected Vaccines, Infectious Patients, and Superspreaders for Hire.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly: online.
Balasubramanian, Harshadha. 2024. “Against Frictionless Access.” In Inaccessible Access: Rethinking Disability Inclusion in Academic Knowledge Creation. Rutgers University Press: 117–139.
Beutin, Lyndsey, and Cal Biruk. 2023. “Toward Sick Futurity: Ill Wisdom for Liberation.” Somatosphere: science, medicine, and anthropology: online.
Bloom, Molly. 2020. “Toward a Disability Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa.” Hesperis-Tamuda 55(4): 273–291.
Bradley, Candice. 1997. “Doing Fieldwork with Diabetes.” Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal 9(1): 1–7.
Brown, Lindsey, and Felicity K. Boardman. 2011. “Accessing the Field: Disability and the Research Experience.” Social Science & Medicine 72: 23–30.
Chaudhry, Vandana. 2019. “Centering Embodiment in Disability Research through Performance Ethnography.” Qualitative Social Work 18(5): 754–771.
Colligan, Sumi E. 1994. “The Ethnographer’s Body as Text: When Disability Becomes ‘Other’‑Abling.” Anthropology of Work Review 15(2–3): 5–9.
Darcy Jr, Kevin. 2024. “An Ethnography of Disability in Academia: Stories of Crip Time, Cripping Independence and the Cognitive Load of Disability.” PhD diss., University of Colorado at Boulder.
Duncan, Austin. 2024. “Living ‘with TBI’ as Complex Embodiment.” Disability & Society 39(6): 1546–1567.
Durban, Erin L. 2022. “Anthropology and Ableism.” American Anthropologist 124(1): 8–20.
Durban, Erin L. 2024. “Doing It Together: A Queer Case for Cripping Ethnography.” In Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures: 227–246.
Emery, Steven, Sanchayeeta Iyer, Amandine le Maire, Erin Moriarty, and Annelies Kusters. 2024. “Doing Deaf Ethnography.” In Deaf Mobility Studies: Exploring International Networks, Tourism, and Migration. Washington: Gallaudet University Press.
Evans, Bethan, Alison Allam, Ana Bê, Catherine Hale, Morag Rose, and Anna Ruddock. 2024. “Being Left Behind Beyond Recovery: ‘Crip Time’ and Chronic Illness in Neoliberal Academia.” Social & Cultural Geography: 1–21.
Falu, Nessette. 2021. “Invisible Hands: The Reproductivities of Queer(ing) and Race(ing) Gynecology.” In The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Reproduction. Routledge: 305–320.
Fernandes, Kim. 2023. “For Graduate Students, When the Sadness is Unbelievable.” Lateral 12(1): online.
Friedner, Michele. 2023. “Political, Economic, and Relational Production of Sense: Negotiating Sensory Inequality and Access in Research on Cochlear Implantation in India.” In The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Ethnography. Routledge: 158–169.
Friedner, Michele, and Annelies Kusters. 2020. “Deaf Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 49(1): 31–47.
Friedner, Michele, with Devva Kasnitz, and Zoë Wool. 2018. “What I Wish I Knew about Anthropology and Disability: Notes Toward a More Enabling Anthropology.” Anthrodendum: online.
Gibson, Hannah. 2019. “Living a Full Life: Embodiment, Disability, and ‘Anthropology at Home’.” Medicine Anthropology Theory 6(2): online.
Hoppe, Silke. 2012. “The Negative Side of Independence: An Exploration of the Self and Others.” Medische Antropologie 24(1): 131–147.
Hunter‑Pazzara, Brandon, and Kevin Darcy. 2020. “Accessibility at the AAA Annual Meeting.” Anthropology News: online.
Jackson, Liz, Alex Haagaard, and Rua Williams. 2022. “Disability Dongle.” Platypus: online.
Kapadia, Melissa. 2020. “Illness Methodology for and Beyond the COVID‑19 Era.” Penn GSE Perspectives on Urban Education 18(1).
Karagoz, Orhan. 2023. “Doing Ethnography Blind.” Anthropology in Action 30(2): 35–40.
Kasnitz, Devva. 2020. “The Politics of Disability Performativity: An Autoethnography.” Current Anthropology 61(21): online.
Kusters, Annelies. 2012. “Being a Deaf White Anthropologist in Adamorobe: Some Ethical and Methodological Issues.” In Sign Languages in Village Communities: Anthropological and Linguistic Insights. Gruyter: 27–52.
Long, Rebecca‑Eli, and Hannah Quinn. 2022. “Rupturing ‘Capacity to Consent’: Toward Anti‑Ableist Research Relations.” Disability as Rupture Series: online.
Marie, Aron S. 2023. “Precarious Interdependence: Sign Language Interpreting in Hà Nội, Việt Nam.” PhD diss., The University of Chicago.
Mello, Anahí Guedes de. 2019. “Olhar, (não) ouvir, escrever: uma autoetnografia ciborgue.” Tese (Doutorado em Antropologia Social) – Centro de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis.
Mogendorff, Karen. 2020. “A Closer Look at ‘Wheelchair’ Ethnography: Ableism and the Insights Disabled Scholars Generate With–Not Despite–Their Impairments and Disabilities.” In Social Research and Disability. Routledge: 50–63.
Moodie, Megan. 2022. “Disruption at the Center: Disability Anthropology and Black Feminist Research‑Creation.” Disability as Rupture Series: online.
Moodie, Megan. 2025. “Autoethnography, Undone: Toward a Crip Critique of Ethnographic Realism.” In Autotheories. MIT Press.
Moore, Erin V. 2021. “On Borrowed Time: Living with Chronic Terror in the United States’ Insulin Crisis.” Somatosphere: science, medicine, and anthropology: online.
Moriarty, Erin. 2020. “‘Sign to Me, Not the Children’: Ideologies of Language Contamination at a Deaf Tourist Site in Bali.” Language & Communication 74: 195–203.
Moss, Pamela. 2016. “Writing Illness through Feminist Autobiographical Analysis.” In Practicing Qualitative Methods in Health Geographies. Routledge: 74–91.
Price, Margaret, and Stephanie L. Kerschbaum. 2016. “Stories of Methodology: Interviewing Sideways, Crooked, and Crip.” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 5(3): 18–56.
Rogers, Emily Lim. 2022. “The Lapsed Ethnographer: Toward Foggy Fieldwork.” Disability as Rupture Series: online.
Rogers, Emily Lim. 2023. “Virtual Ethnography.” In Crip Authorship: Disability as Method, edited by Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez, 93–98. New York University Press.
Sauma, Julia. 2021. “The Body Perfect: On Disability, Experience, and the Aesthetics of Expertise.” Teaching Anthropology 10(1): 71–74.
Want me to do the same formatting for **Anthologies**, **Monographs**, or **Coming Soon** next?
MONOGRAPHS
Dokumaci, Arseli. 2023. Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds. Duke University Press.
Friedner, Michele. 2022. Sensory Futures: Deafness and Cochlear Implant Infrastructures in India. University of Minnesota Press.
Heath-Stout, Laura E. 2024. Identity, Oppression, and Diversity in Archaeology. Routledge, 2024.
Jain, S. Lochlann. 2013. Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us. University of California Press.
Martin, Emily. 2007. Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture. Princeton University Press.
Nakamura, Karen. 2013. A Disability of the Soul: An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan. Cornell University Press.
Taylor, Sunaura. 2024. Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert. University of California Press.
COMING SOON!
Sick Work: Exhaustion, Labor, and Invisible Illness, by Emily Lim Rogers. Forthcoming with Duke University Press.
The Handbook of Disability Anthropology, edited by Sumi Colligan and Anna Jaysane-Darr. Under contract with Routledge.
Enabling Ethnography: Crafting Anti-Ableist Fieldwork Methods, by Erin L. Durban. Under contract with University of Minnesota Press.