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.

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