Ethnographic approaches to Global Disability Studies: Kinship, Value, and Care

Part of the Critical Conversations Series

This panel brings together scholars who engage in both disability studies and anthropology, to explore what ethnography can bring to our understanding of key questions in global disability studies. Ethnographic methods and frameworks provide a unique window into disability studies, offering insight into how disability is both constructed in local contexts and caught up in global flows of power. The panelists will discuss the possibilities, compatibilities, and tensions that can arise from this disciplinary intersection, using their own ethnographic writing as a way into these issues. How can we study disability globally without feeding into universalising conceptualisations of disability? How does ethnography allow disability theorists to engage with themes such as kinship, value, and care? And how do we place everyday disability experiences in local and global structures of power?