CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 137Disability Rights and RepresentationAnthropological Studies and InsightsInclusion and Disability in Education and Sport

Disability Expertise: Claiming Disability Anthropology

Open access
Hartblay, Cassandra·2020·Current Anthropology
DOI 10.1086/705781
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

This paper stakes out a space for a critical global disability anthropology that considers disability not as a medicalized classification of impairment but as a relational category. Disability expertise, I argue, is the particular knowledge that disabled people develop and enact about unorthodox configurations of agency, cultural norms, and relationships between selves, bodies, and the designed world. Disability expertise is a descriptive domain, that is, a container into which ethnographers might enumerate observations about how disabled people enact personhood and moral agency in diverse cultural settings. To illustrate what I mean by disability expertise, I draw examples from one interlocutor’s experiences, described in interviews conducted during broader ethnographic research in Russia. I elaborate one particular domain of disability expertise: managing perceptions of disability, especially the tendency of nondisabled people to view disability through the tropes of suffering and pity. I call for anthropologists to claim disability anthropology as a space for critical, interdisciplinary knowledge production.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1086/705781

Cites

5 of 5 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Disability expertise is the particular knowledge that disabled people develop and enact about unorthodox configurations of agency, cultural norms, and relationships between selves, bodies, and the designed world.

    “Such knowledge represents what Hartblay called disability expertise -' the particular knowledge that disabled people develop and enact about unorthodox configurations of agency, cultural norms, and relationships between selves, bodies, and the designed world ' [38].”

    From Disability-First AI Dataset Annotation: Co-designing Stuttered Speech Annotation Guidelines with People Who Stutter (2026) · cites this paper as [38]

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 74

  1. Ablon, Joan. 1981. Stigmatized health conditions. Social Science and Medicine B: Medical Anthropology 15(1):5-9.
  2. Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1990. Can there be a feminist ethnography? Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 5(1):7-27.
  3. Acevedo, Sara María. 2015. Exploring disability identity and disability rights through narratives: finding a voice of their own. Disability and Society 30 (7):1127-1129.
  4. Asad, Talal. 1979. Anthropology and the colonial encounter. In The politics of anthropology. Gerrit Huizer and Bruce Mannheim, eds. Pp. 85-94. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.
  5. Benedict, Ruth. 1934. Anthropology of the abnormal. Journal of General Psychology 10:59-82.
  6. Ben-Moshe, Liat, Allison C. Carey, Chris Chapman, and Angela Davis, eds. 2014. Disability incarcerated: imprisonment and disability in the United States and Canada. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  7. Biehl, João, and Torben Eskerod. 2013 (2005). Vita: life in a zone of social abandonment. 1st edition, updated with a new afterword and photo essay. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  8. Boyer, Dominic. 2008. Thinking through the anthropology of experts. An- thropology in Action 15(2):38-46.
  9. Boys, Jos, ed. 2017. Disability, space, architecture: a reader. New York: Routledge.
  10. Carr, E. Summerson. 2010. Enactments of expertise. Annual Review of An- thropology 39(1):17-32.
  11. Dale, Robert. 2013. The Valaam myth and the fate of Leningrad's disabled veterans. Russian Review 72(2):260-284.
  12. Davidson, Michael. 2016. Cripping consensus: disability studies at the inter- section. American Literary History 28(2):433-453.
  13. ---. 2011. Disability and difference in global contexts: enabling a trans- formative body politic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  14. Forber-Pratt, Anjali J. 2019. (Re)defining disability culture: perspectives from the Americans with Disabilities Act generation. Culture and Psychology 25 (2):241-256.
  15. Frank, Gelya. 2000. Venus on wheels: two decades of dialogue on disability, biography, and being female in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  16. Friedner, Michele Ilana. 2015. Valuing deaf worlds in urban India. New Bruns- wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
  17. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 1997. Extraordinary bodies: figuring physical disability in American culture and literature. New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press.
  18. Hartblay, Cassandra. 2014. A genealogy of (post-)Soviet dependency: dis- abling productivity. Disability Studies Quarterly 34(1).
  19. ---. 2017. Good ramps, bad ramps: centralized design standards and disability access in urban Russian infrastructure. American Ethnologist 44 (1):9-22.
  20. ---. 2017. Notes on an inclined plane-Slope:Intercept. In Disability, space, architecture: a reader. Jos Boys, ed. Pp. 276-286. Abingdon: Routledge.
  21. Höjdestrand, Tova. 2009. Needed by nobody: homelessness and humanness in post-socialist Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
  22. Iarskaia-Smirnova, Elena. 1999. "What the future will bring I do not know": mothering children with disabilities in Russia and the politics of exclusion. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 20(2):66-86.
  23. ---. 2001. Social change and self-empowerment: stories of disabled people in Russia. In Disability and the life course: global perspectives. Mark Priest- ley, ed. Pp. 101-112. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  24. Iarskaia-Smirnova, Elena, and Pavel Romanov. 2013. Heroes and spongers: the iconography of disability in Soviet posters and film. In Disability in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Michael Rasell and Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova, eds. Pp. 85-114. New York: Routledge.
  25. Ingstad, Benedicte, and Susan Whyte. 1995. Disability and culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  26. ---. 2007. Disability in local and global worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  27. Kafer, Alison. 2003. Compulsory bodies: reflections on heterosexuality and able-bodiedness. Journal of Women's History 15:77-89.
  28. ---. 2013. Feminist, queer, crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  29. Kikkas, Kaido. 2001. Lifting the Iron Curtain. In Disability and the life course: global perspectives. Mark Priestley, ed. Pp. 113-122. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  30. Klepikova, Anna. 2011. Dobrovoli'tsy blagotvoritel'noi organizatsii v gosudar- stvennom ucherezhdenii dlia lyudei s tiazheloi invalidnost'iu: konstrukty volonterstva i professionalizma [Volunteers of a charity organization in the state-run institutions for severely disabled people: the constructs of volun- teerism and professionalism]. Journal of Social Policy Studies 9(3):391-416.
  31. ---. 2018. Naverno Ia Durak [I'm probably an idiot]. Saint Petersburg: European University Press.
  32. Klotz, Jani. 2003. The culture concept: anthropology, disability studies and intellectual disability. In Disability Studies and Research Institute (DSaRI) Symposium 12(9).
  33. Kondakov, Alexander. 2013. Resisting the silence: the use of tolerance and equality arguments by gay and lesbian activist groups in Russia. Canadian Journal of Law and Society/Revue Canadienne Droit et Société 28(3):403- 424.
  34. ---. 2018. Crip kinship: a political strategy of people who were deemed contagious by the shirtless Putin. Feminist Formations 30(1):71-90.
  35. Kudlick, Catherine J. 2003. Disability history: why we need another "other." American Historical Review 108(3):763-793.
  36. Kulick, Don, and Jens Rydström. 2015. Loneliness and its opposite: sex, dis- ability, and the ethics of engagement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  37. Kurlenkova, Alexandra. 2017. 'Koty-murziki,' 'kapriznye bol'nye' i 'transgres- sory': nezr-jachie v 'professional'nom obshhestve' skvoz' prizmu modelej invalidnosti ["Dead souls," "the whimsy sick" and "transgressors": non-sighted people in "professional society" through the lens of disability models]. Journal of Social Policy Studies 15(2):235-250.
  38. ---. 2005. What is disability studies? PMLA 120(2):518-522.
  39. Manning, Erin. 2016. The minor gesture: thought in the act. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  40. Mayer, Gerald L. 1975. The use of Ty and Vy in modern standard Russian. Slavic and East European Journal 19(4):435-442.
  41. McCurdy, David W., James P. Spradley, and Dianna J. Shandy. 2004. The cultural experience: ethnography in complex society. 2nd edition. Long Grove, IL: Waveland.
  42. McKearney, Patrick, and Tyler Zoanni. 2018. Introduction: for an anthropology of cognitive disability. Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 36(1):1-22.
  43. Meekosha, Helen, and Karen Soldatic. 2011. Human rights and the Global South: the case of disability. Third World Quarterly 32(8):1383-1397.
  44. Mitchell, David, and Sharon L. Snyder. 2001. Narrative prosthesis: disability and the dependencies of discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
  45. Mladenov, Teodor. 2015. Neoliberalism, postsocialism, disability. Disability and Society 30(3):445-459.
  46. Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The body multiple: ontology in medical practice. Dur- ham, NC: Duke University Press.
  47. Moser, Ingunn, and John Law. 1999. Good passages, bad passages. Sociological Review 46(2):196-219.
  48. Nakamura, Karen. 2013. A disability of the soul: an ethnography of schizophrenia and mental illness in contemporary Japan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
  49. ---. 2015. Why I am not a medical anthropologist. Paper presented at the Society for Disability Studies conference, Atlanta, June 12.
  50. Phillips, Sarah. 2009. "There are no invalids in the USSR!" a missing Soviet chapter in the new disability history. Disability Studies Quarterly 29(3).
  51. ---. 2011. Disability and mobile citizenship in postsocialist Ukraine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  52. Price, Margaret. 2015. The bodymind problem and the possibilities of pain. Hypatia 30(1):268-284.
  53. Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. The right to maim: debility, capacity, disability. Anima. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  54. Rapp, Rayna. 2016. Prologue. In Mapping feminist anthropology in the twenty- first century. Ellen Lewin and Leni M. Silverstein, eds. Pp. 1-5. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
  55. Rasell, Michael, and Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova. 2013. Introduction: conceptual- ising disability in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In Disability in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union: history, policy and everyday life. Michael Rasell and Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova, eds. New York: Routledge.
  56. Rich, Adrienne. 1980. Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5(4):631-660.
  57. Robbins, Joel. 2013. Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(3):447-462.
  58. Rouse, Carolyn Moxley. 2009. Uncertain suffering: racial health care dispar- ities and sickle cell disease. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  59. Schalk, Samantha Dawn. 2018. Bodyminds reimagined: (dis)ability, race, and gender in black women's speculative fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  60. Shaw, Claire L. 2017. Deaf in the USSR: marginality, community, and Soviet identity, 1917-1991. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
  61. Shuttleworth, Russell P., and Devva Kasnitz. 2004. Stigma, community, eth- nography: Joan Ablon's contribution to the anthropology of impairment disability. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 18(2):139-161.
  62. Silverstein, Leni M., and Ellen Lewin. 2016. Introduction: anthropologies and feminisms: mapping our intellectual journey. In Mapping feminist an- thropology in the twenty-first century. Ellen Lewin and Leni M. Silverstein, eds. Pp. 6-38. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
  63. Snyder, Sharon, and David Mitchell. 2010. Introduction: ablenationalism and the geo-politics of disability. Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 4(2):113-125.
  64. Shaun Grech and Karen Soldatic, eds. Pp. 35-49. International Perspectives on Social Policy, Administration, and Practice. Cham: Springer International.
  65. Stone, Deborah. 1984. The disabled state. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
  66. Titchkosky, Tanya. 2011. The question of access: disability, space, meaning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
  67. Tremain, Shelley. 2005. Foucault, governmentality, and critical disability the- ory: an introduction. In Foucault and the government of disability. Shelley Tremain, ed. Pp. 1-24. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
  68. Valentine, David. 2007. Imagining transgender: an ethnography of a category. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  69. Wengle, Susanne, and Michael Rasell. 2008. The monetisation of L'goty: changing patterns of welfare politics and provision in Russia. Europe-Asia Studies 60(5):739-756.
  70. Wiedlack, M. Katharina, and Masha Neufeld. 2016. Dangerous and moving? disability, Russian popular culture and north/western hegemony. Soma- technics 6(2):216-234.
  71. Williamson, Bess. 2012a. Getting a grip: disability in American industrial design of the late twentieth century. Winterthur Portfolio 46(4):213-236.
  72. ---. 2012b. The people's sidewalks: designing Berkeley's wheelchair route, 1970-1974. Boom: A Journal of California 2(1):49-52.
  73. Zoanni, Tyler. 2019. Appearances of disability and Christianity in Uganda. Cultural Anthropology 34(3):444-470.
  74. Zola, Irving Kenneth. 1989. Toward the necessary universalizing of a disability policy. Milbank Quarterly 67(suppl. 3):401-428. S36 Current Anthropology Volume 61, Supplement 21, February 2020

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Hartblay, C.
Corresponding author
Hartblay, Cassandra
ORCID
Hartblay, Cassandra
Venue
Current Anthropology
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Published
2020-02
Volume
61
Issue
S21
Pages
S26-S36
ISSN
  • 0011-3204 (ISSN-L)
  • 1537-5382
DOI
10.1086/705781
OpenAlex
W2984079509
Cited by
137
References
5
Citations by year
2026: 27 · 2025: 21 · 2024: 28 · 2023: 28 · 2022: 23 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 1 · 2019: 3
FWCI
14.43
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
Current Anthropology (publishedVersion)
Funders
  • National Science Foundation
  • Wenner-Gren Foundation
  • Yale University
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • University of California, San Diego
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Safety Research › Disability Rights and Representation
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Anthropological Studies and Insights
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Inclusion and Disability in Education and Sport
Keywords
personhood, moral agency, perceptions of disability, medicalization of disability, people with disabilities, Russia, knowledge production

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review