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COLLIGAN, SUMI, & ANNA, JAYSANE-DARR. (EDS.). (2025). The Disabled 

Anthropologist. New York, NY: Routledge. 240 pp., ISBN 9781032760278. 

 

Keywords: disability, positionality, field methods, auto-ethnography, medical anthropology 

 

What does it mean to be a disabled anthropologist? What barriers do disabled 

anthropologists encounter in their careers, and how have the methodological innovations and 

theoretical insights of disabled scholars enriched the field as a whole? While medical anthropology 

has a long history of analyzing impairment and there is a growing movement to bring insights from 

critical disability studies into conversation with anthropological theory, the voices of disabled 

anthropologists themselves are often missing. The Disabled Anthropologist, featuring ten auto-

ethnographic chapters by disabled anthropologists from a wide variety of subdisciplines and career 

stages, sheds light on the rich experiences of disabled ethnographers.  

This publication fittingly coincides with the 35th anniversary of the passage of the 

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and captures a moment when disability anthropology is 

beginning to be embraced by mainstream anthropology.  As the volume’s introduction by Sumi 

Colligan and Anna Jaysane-Darr explains, the collection was inspired by the early COVID-19 

moment where disabled anthropologists who had long been dismissed for using digital, remote, or 

“patchwork” ethnography (Boellstorff 2020; Günel, Varma, and Watanabe 2020; Rogers 2023) 

suddenly found themselves turned to as experts for how to conduct fieldwork amidst lockdown. 

While such newfound recognition can be validating, it also served as a reminder of the ways 

disabled ethnographer's innovations are dismissed as “mere accommodations” rather than 

celebrated as a way to make the field more humane and inclusive to all body-minds. By centering 

the experiences of disabled ethnographers, the volume invites the reader into a project of re-

imagining ethnographic methods and the discipline of anthropology as a whole. 

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The volume starts off with disabled anthropologists theorizing the ableist underpinnings of 

anthropology. Valerie Black (Ch 1) unpacks the figure of the “intrepid anthropologist:” the 

mythical Malonaskian archetype of the hyper-mobile white cisgendered heterosexual male, 

blithely unconcerned for their own wellbeing or access needs. Black explores how intrepid 

ethnography is reified in anthropological discourse, how it shaped her own fieldwork, and suggests 

a move to more inclusive “un-intrepid” methods. Similarly, Alana Ackerman (Ch 2) details her 

process of unlearning the glorification of in-person fieldwork as she sought methods that worked 

for her disabled body-mind. Ackerman calls for cripping ethnography by rethinking what counts 

as “being in the field.”  Amanda Votta (Ch 3) unpacks the ableism inherent in university time, with 

its deadlines, class schedules, and funding models all tightly tied to the academic calendar. Votta 

examines the conflict between university and “pain time,” defined as the way “chronic pain shapes 

and reshapes the pace of life, the capacity, and the concerns of those who live on it” (62).  

The collection also celebrates the methodological innovations of disabled ethnographers. 

Erin L. Durban and Miranda Joseph’s chapter details how collaborative cross-disability 

ethnography can make fieldwork more accessible. Their creative use of multiple modalities 

combined with the incorporation of access into the analysis process allowed students and 

professors alike to participate in ways that centered their respective access needs and strengths. 

Other chapters, such as those by Heidi Kelley and Kennen A. Betsalel (Ch 8) and Colligan (Ch 

10), provide examples of what is often referred to as “disability expertise” (Hartblay 2020), 

detailing how non-normative body minds create new possibilities for connecting and engaging 

with participants. Kelley and Betsalel demonstrate how the changes in Kelley’s speech and 

movement after a stroke allowed them to see the way their Galician and Affrilachian interlocutors 

valued community and refused to “throw away” things, be they at the scale of sub-par cornbread 

or aging community members.  Similarly, Colligan reflects on how her long career in the field 

examining embodied vulnerability served as a source of insight and allowed her to forge 

connections with her interlocutors.  

Several chapters, most notably chapters 2, 3, and 9, build on critical disability studies’ 

reckoning with the particularities of chronic pain. These chapters point to the interplay between 

physical and psychological triggers for chronic pain flare as an example of the “leakiness” of 

bodies (44), and the blurred boundaries between the ethnographer and their interlocutors. 

Ackerman describes the way conducting fieldwork led to a relapse of her chronic pain condition: 

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“My pain was not a personal, individual experience contained within my own bodymind; it was 

triggered by the social environment within which I found myself. I had spent several months 

listening to refugees’ testimonies of horrifying persecution and violence…my body began 

responding to and incorporating the trauma I was witnessing” (44). Rachel Parks takes this insight 

in a slightly different direction, using her own experience of having chronic pain dismissed, as a 

way to understand the difficulties her interlocutors have in quantifying pain, and the impossibility 

of ever fully comprehending another’s experience of pain. 

The volume also contributes to the anthropology of care and care work. Kim Fernandes 

(Ch 4) explores the grief and helplessness of conducting fieldwork with disabled people in India 

as a severe wave of COVID-19. She asks us to consider what ethical fieldwork and care look like 

in the midst of an unfolding crisis. Krisjon Rae Olson (Ch 6) uses her experience as the parent of 

a disabled child to inform her ethnography of parents' mutual support networks and the desire to 

seek care outside of formal institutions. Finally, in a deeply personal chapter, Susan Seizer (Ch 7) 

turns to ethnography as a way to process her own experience with multiple sclerosis, shifting care 

needs and the impact on relationships with her wife and family. 

While this book is not a handbook or methods guide for how to conduct fieldwork as a 

disabled individual (nor does it pretend to be), it will likely appeal to instructors of methods courses 

and those mentoring graduate students. As a multiply-disabled anthropologist myself, this is the 

book I wish I had had before I embarked on fieldwork. I see disabled students and faculty turning 

to this volume for validation, as a source of collective wisdom, and a tool to articulate their 

experiences to colleagues, granting agencies, and committee members. For non-disabled scholars, 

the concluding mini-manifesto by Megan Moodie offers both tangible steps for allies and a call to 

join us in making anthropology a more accessible and humane discipline for all.  

 

References: 

 

Boellstorff, Tom. 2020. “The Ability of Place: Digital Topographies of the Virtual Human on 

Ethnographia Island.” Current Anthropology 61 (S21): S109–22. 

https://doi.org/10.1086/704924.  

Günel, Gökçe, Saiba Varma, and Chika Watanabe. 2020. “A Manifesto for Patchwork 

Ethnography.” Society for Cultural Anthropology. June 9, 2020. 

https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/a-manifesto-for-patchwork-ethnography.  

Hartblay, Cassandra. 2020. “Disability Expertise: Claiming Disability Anthropology.” Current 

Anthropology 61 (S21): S26–36. 

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/705781. 

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https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/a-manifesto-for-patchwork-ethnography
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Rogers, Emily Lim. 2023. “8. Virtual Ethnography.” In Crip Authorship, edited by Mara Mills 

and Rebecca Sanchez, 93–98. New York University Press. 

https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479819386.003.0011. 

 

 

Aron Seegers Marie (he/they) is an Assistant Professor in the departments of Anthropology and 

American Sign Language at the University of Virginia. As a medical and linguistic anthropologist, 

his work examines how disabled people and their allies create political movements and 

communicate in innovative, non-normative ways. His current projects focus on how deaf leaders 

and sign language interpreters interdependently advocate for the growth of sign language 

interpreting in Hà Nội, Việt Nam, and how dyslexic scholars like himself crip existing writing 

technology.  

 

 

 

 

© 2025 Aron Seegers Marie 

 

 

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