Presented During:
Thu, 11/20: 10:15 AM - 11:45 AM
Sheraton
Submission Number:
3674
Submission Type:
Roundtable/Town Hall
Co-Organizer:
Organizer/Submitter:
Discussant(s):
Presenter(s):
Helena Fietz
Louisiana State University, Department of Geography & Anthropology
Abstract:
This roundtable engages with hauntologies that emerge at the nexus of disability and care – a nexus we contend is central to anthropology.
Disability, argues Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, is "the essential characteristic of being human" because it reminds us of the mundane truth that "all bodies need care and assistance to live" (2017, 328). How, then, to make sense of anthropology's resistance to disability as a focus of research and its troubled histories of engaging disabled people and disabled anthropologists (e.g. Colligan and Jaysane-Darr 2025)? Conversely, anthropological literature on care has proliferated so extensively that its contours have blurred. Care is in need of troubling (Duclos and Criado 2020), but it continues to haunt our work: we constantly return to care as a category of analysis and practice.
Relationships between care and disability are ethically and politically fraught. Histories of eugenic and colonialist social policies haunt disability, highlighting how care can be paternalistic, violent, and toxic as much as beneficial or healing. Disabled people and allies clash over what good care looks like and to what ends. Paid and unpaid caregivers get worn out by the machinery of care bureaucracies and the weight of caring in conditions of precarity. Through research and lived experiences with care, anthropologists navigate these contradictions and highlight forms of kinship, ethical and political orientations, and embodied action that emerge from the disability-care nexus.
Roundtable participants will grapple with the uneasy nexus of care and disability by addressing the following questions: How do we ethnographically engage the specters of violence that haunt care in disability worlds? What does it mean to work towards "middle theories of care" (Wolf-Meyer 2025), and what can this work do for the study of disability and for anthropology writ large? What ethnographic modalities inform and emerge from grappling with disability and care, and how can these be mobilized across subfields of our discipline?
Hauntologies invite us to engage with the spectral presences that we as researchers and our research communities contend with in everyday life. This roundtable explores how ghosts-of people, policies, and practices-shape how anthropologists have and might address disability and care anew, to align historical forces with future needs for us as anthropologists and for the communities we serve.
Colligan, Sumi, and Anna Jaysane-Darr, eds. 2025. The Disabled Anthropologist. Routledge.
Duclos, Vincent, and Tomás Sánchez Criado. 2020. "Care in Trouble: Ecologies of Support from Below and Beyond." Medical Anthropology Quarterly 34 (2): 153–73.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2017. "Becoming Disabled." In Beginning with Disability: A Primer, edited by Lennard J. Davis, 15–19. Routledge.
Wolf-Meyer, Matthew. 2025. "Forget Care." Anthropology News. Jan 16, 2025.
Primary Section:
Society for Medical Anthropology
Secondary Section:
Society for Cultural Anthropology
Tertiary Section:
General Anthropology Division
Comments to the Executive Program Chair and AAA Meetings Team
If you or your group has any requests-- i.e. religious, academic, disability, time zone, or personal conflicts, please indicate below. Please note that every effort will be made to accommodate requests, but we cannot guarantee this. If you need your session to be virtual for accessibility purposes, please enter your request here. As the organizer, please inform your co-panelists to email individual access requests related to disability and scheduling to [email protected].
NOTE: Comments will be viewed and considered when scheduling.
We would like to request support for a hybrid session. Given the international nature of our roundtable composition, and considering the uncertainties of international travel under the current administration, it is likely that some of our panelists will need to join via video conferencing. Supporting hybrid sessions would also show that the AAA supports the many disabled anthropologists among its members. Thank you.
Proposals that demonstrate a commitment to equity and inclusion and/or a thoughtful analysis of power structures and relations will be given priority. How does your proposed session help fulfill this commitment. You are encouraged to characterize the diversity of proposed session participants with respect to organizational/institutional affiliation, career stage, race, ethnicity, ability status, sexuality, gender, class, and national identity.
Besides centering a category of identity that has been historically marginalized in anthropology (disability), this roundtable session features anthropologists of diverse career stages, institutional affiliations, and gender, sexual, disability, and national identities. Participants, some of whom are disabled, range from graduate students to prominent senior scholars in public and private universities across North America and internationally.