Specters of Care and Hauntologies of Disability in Anthropology

Sheraton 

Room: Grand Ballroom A-C (5th fl) 

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.

Anthropology

Care

Disability

Society for Medical Anthropology

Society for Cultural Anthropology

General Anthropology Division