I'm very glad that a performance of my ethnographic play will be presented this March as part of the program of the 2018 Soyuz Symposium for Postsocialist Cultural Studies, this year hosted by the Department of Anthropology and the European Studies Council at Yale. Friday March 2nd at 7:30pm, with a talk back session at … Continue reading I WAS NEVER ALONE at Yale
I am glad to be featured this week on the AnthroPod podcast, produced by the journal Cultural Anthropology. The piece is the first of three in a series on ethnography and design, featuring two other dear colleagues and my collaborators the past two years in the UC Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design, Lilly Irani and Keith … Continue reading Ethnography & Design on the AnthroPod PodCast
Visual media like video and photography can only capture a limited glimpse of the social phenomena that live performance produces; a photo of a still moment in a performance can hardly produce the kind of communitas or social shift in emotive and interactional awareness that live performance creates.
I WAS NEVER ALONE (IWNA), a play script based on ethnographic fieldwork in Petrozavodsk, Russia with adults with disabilities, just keeps on moving - developing in new ways and finding collaborators and possibilities that, as a first-time documentary playwright, continue to astound and amaze me. The February 2016 staged reading of IWNA (dir. Joseph Megel) … Continue reading I WAS NEVER ALONE keeps on moving
This week takes me back to North Carolina to work on logistics leading up to a planned workshop and staged reading that will take place at UNC-Chapel Hill Performance Studies during the first week of February 2016. The workshop will be the second process presentation for I WAS NEVER ALONE, a documentary play script and … Continue reading I WAS NEVER ALONE workshop and staged reading
I'm happy to announce the publication of my photo essay and accompanying text in the interdisciplinary journal Landscapes of Violence. You can download the PDF version from the LoV website, or read the abstract, below. Abstract A recent Human Rights Watch report documented the ways in which people with mobility impairments in Russia are both … Continue reading New photo essay on Disability in Russia
I am someone who thinks about disability and Russia for many hours of the day, most days. So, naturally, I paid attention when the social media world was suddenly flush with posts and tweets about the strange story that a US government report had speculated that Putin has an Autism Spectrum Disorder. This was a … Continue reading What are we doing when we say Putin has Asperger’s Syndrome?
