Disability Worlds

Abstract

When we take disability into account, nothing seems the same. The cobblestones in the driveway leading to the palace in Portugal, where Wenner-Gren has held so many of its symposia. The speed, volume, and cadence with which the participants in these discussions spoke to one another. Whether they turned to face their interlocutors, or not. The embodied biases of their metaphors. All those times they referred to "perspectives," "gazes," and "points of view." Anthropology is supposed to be the discipline that makes room for difference. But the spaces we have created have often been cramped and inhospitable, wrongly configured for the work we aspire to do. From March 9 to 15, 2018, at the Hacienda del Sol Guest Ranch in Tucson, Arizona, the Wenner-Gren Foundation hosted a symposium that brought together 17 scholars from seven countries around the world (fig. 1). Their goal was to investigate the worlds that have arisen around disability, the socially experienced state of difference and disadvantage experienced by people with nonnormative bodies and minds. It was a week of unexpected resonances and spirited debates. The political became the practical, as participants drew connections between the limits that confront disabled people and those that hamper our field. We used CART, a communication system that projected a written version of the conversation as it unfolded. The group included a revoicer to help those unaccustomed to atypical speech. These improvements in access fostered sharper thinking, with the participants paying close attention to what was being said. Even as the symposium focused on disability worlds, it created one of its own, shifting the stakes and norms of academic debate. In their opening essay, Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (2020) draw on a long tradition of scholarship to trace the ground covered in the meeting (see also Ginsburg 2013; Rapp and Ginsburg 2011). And this ground was wide: it extended from the way we imagine, study, and inhabit families, to how we analyze structural violence and inequality, to our grasp of the intersections between technology, infrastructure, and the performance of everyday life. The participants drew on fieldwork in rural communities, urban neighborhoods, and online communities in India, Uganda,