Key research themes
1. How do anthropological and ethnographic methods contribute to understanding the lived experience and sociocultural constructions of disability?
This research theme explores how qualitative methodologies, particularly ethnography and autoethnography, provide insights into the embodied, social, and political dimensions of disability. It highlights the unique contributions of anthropology in revealing culturally situated meanings, lived experiences, and identity negotiations of disabled people, especially where disability intersects with race, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status. Such approaches contest reductive medical or social models by centering disabled people's voices and everyday realities.
2. How can disability be theoretically conceptualized beyond traditional medical and social models to capture the experiential and relational nature of impairment?
This theme investigates novel theoretical frameworks that reconceptualize disability as a lived, relational, and dynamic experience rather than a fixed trait or social category. Moving beyond dominant medical and social models, recent scholarship proposes experiential, phenomenological, and decolonial accounts that foreground subjective impediments, affective dimensions, and socio-cultural relationalities. These theoretical innovations advance more nuanced understandings of disablement and embodiment that challenge Eurocentric and normative assumptions.
3. What are the intersections between disability, identity politics, and emancipatory methodologies within queer, critical, and decolonial disability studies?
This theme addresses the politicized dimensions of disability via critical, queer, and decolonial lenses that challenge normative, ableist frameworks and traditional anthropological methods. It emphasizes the role of intersectionality in exposing how race, gender, colonialism, and capitalism intertwine with disability. It advocates for transformative methodologies such as 'cripping ethnography' and calls for an expanded, inclusive scholarship that centers marginalized disabled voices and rejects dominant academic paradigms.