cassandra hartblay

Author: Cassandra Hartblay

  • I WAS NEVER ALONE keeps on moving

    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) at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill was the focus a recent video from Carolina Performing Arts. Check out a few clips from the reading, and me, trying not to not say the wrong thing, in the two-minute video feature.

    Thanks to a grant from the FISP program, the play is moving forward with a more elaborated workshop that will take place in the fall at the University of California San Diego. Auditions for cast members, and meetings with prospective production team members will take place on June 2 & 3rd at UCSD (Dept of Theater & Dance, Galbraith Hall, Rm 20 on the lower level). Sign up for an audition slot here, or contact me or assistant director Jason Dorwart for more information or with access requests.

    Meanwhile, script development continues on the Russian side of things, with the Russian-language version of the edited script nearing completion thanks to the collaboration of Valeriya Markina, my colleague at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, whose own project looks at disability theater in Moscow. This version of the Russian-language script will be shared with research participants, who will have the opportunity to review their own segment privately, and then, in late July, participate in a day long table reading and workshop about issues of disability representation that the script brings up. I’m looking forward to heading back to Russia for the first time since 2014 in order to conduct that workshop!

    I guess the show’s subtitle, Oporniki, might have something to it — this thing really does seem to have a backbone!

     

     

  • I WAS NEVER ALONE ethnographic play in development

    I WAS NEVER ALONE is a documentary play script and performance ethnography project that I am developing in collaboration with Joseph Megel (UNC Performance Studies artist-in-residence and director of FREIGHT) and collaborators in Russia. The script focuses on the personal narratives of  seven adults with disabilities living in contemporary Russia, presented in a 90 minute play as a series of monologue-type portraits. The narratives are drawn nearly verbatim from translations of interviews with Russians with a range of disabilities in Russia who have participated in the development of this project since 2012.

    Winter 2016 brings two exciting moments in the development of the work. There will be a table reading of the draft script at UCSD as part of the Studio for Ethnographic Design’s new Performance Ethnography Lab series on January 7th. In late January and early February, the play will be workshopped and performed in two public staged readings featuring local actors in the Performance Studies program at UNC-Chapel Hill. The staged readings will take place on Friday, February 5th at 7pm, followed by a talk back session with the audience, and on Saturday, February 6th in the afternoon, followed by a roundtable event featuring local scholars of Russia, disability studies, and performance studies. I will also be talking about the methodology for the project withthe Moral Economies of Medicine working group of the Medical Anthropology Program on Friday February 5th at lunchtime.

    See the staged reading details and times on the UNC Department of Communication website.

    See the write up in the local news here.

  • I WAS NEVER ALONE workshop and staged reading

    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 performance ethnography project that I am developing in collaboration with Joseph Megel (UNC Performance Studies artist-in-residence and director of FREIGHT) and collaborators in Russia. The script focuses on the personal narratives of  seven adults with disabilities living in contemporary Russia, presented in a 90 minute play as a series of monologue-type portraits. The narratives are drawn nearly verbatim from translations of interviews with Russians with a range of disabilities in Russia who have participated in the development of this project since 2012.

    Find more information about the casting needs please contact me (cassandra.hartblay@gmail-dot-com) or Joseph Megel (megel@unc-dot-edu). Casting will continue through November 2015.

  • Some Recent Links

    As I settle into a new role as a postdoctoral fellow at the UCSD Studio for Ethnographic Design, I’m reflecting on all that happened during the summer of 2015 – what a packed few months it’s been!

    a composite of three photographs shows Cassandra Hartblay, Eric Mathews, and Andrea Mazzarino, dressed formally and seated at a table, each in turn learning forward to speak into microphones. Low light and a projection screen with a blue hue are in the background. Various note papers and water glasses are on the table in front of the speakers.

    A few highlights:

    I was also an enthusiastic spectator-at-a-distance for the production of the new play FREIGHT at HERE Arts Center in New York. Joseph Megel, who developed and directed that show, has been a great mentor to me as I develop a documentary theater project based on my research. Congrats to all involved in that production!

    Finally -in the travel tips/canine adventures department, the dog beach at Ocean Beach in San Diego is fantastic!

  • California and other changes

    I’m thrilled to announce that have accepted an appointment as the 2015-2016 Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethnographic Design at the Studio for Ethnographic Design at the University of California San Diego.

    This is an exciting position that includes a departmental home in the UCSD Department of Communication, and a key role in planning and executing upcoming events for both the UCSD interdisciplinary Studio for Ethnographic Design and the inter-institutional Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design (CoLED). Working with Dr. Elana Zilberg and CoLED, I’ll be planning a conference for the fall of 2016 on the future of ethnography as a form of qualitative inquiry. I want to hear about your innovative, collaborative, engaged, digital, design-focuses, multimedia ethnographic projects and thoughts about the ethnographic form.

    So — get in touch!!

    With this change in institutional affiliation, my UNC-CH web address and email with expire. If you’re reading this, then you’ve already arrived at my new personal website – cassandrahartblay.com. While much of the content is the same, please note that my previous website, cassandra.web.unc.edu will expire shortly, and I will cease to update it as of July 1, 2015. Please update my email address in your address books, as the UNC address will no longer be active, but I can be found at chartblay-at-ucsd.edu.

    At UCSD, my current project on disability in Russia will continue, as I work on preparing my manuscript for publication, including the addition of new research on transnational disability rights conducted this summer at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington DC, and, of course, my dissertation data. I am also working on the script of a documentary play based on this work, which had its first read-through in May in Chapel Hill, and will be workshopped in the UNC-CH Communication Studies performance series in early 2016.

  • Summer 2015: The Role of Transnational Disability Rights in US-Russia Relations

    June and July of 2015 will find me in Washington DC, as a Summer Fellow at the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center. I’m excited to be a part of this vibrant community of scholar working on global, policy-relevant research.

    This marks a new phase of my research and the development of my manuscript, as I develop the ways in which the ethnographic research I’ve conducted with adults with disabilities in Russia holds relevance for transnational disability advocacy and for policymakers concerned with US-Russia relations and global human rights.

    This phase of the project will focus on qualitative interviews with DC area experts including disability rights advocates, policymakers, and international relations practitioners. Interviews will focus on the recent history of transnational disability rights advocacy, on US foreign policy strategy concerning disability rights, and on how disability rights advocacy compares to other minority rights issues, e.g. gender and LGBTQ rights in these arenas.

    A little background:

    In 2012, the Russian Federation ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD).

    As of 2014, the United States has not ratified the same Convention. In policy briefs and news articles, disability advocates cite the fact that Russia has ratified the CRPD as a manner of shaming US lawmakers, implying that a country often considered to be backwards on human rights is ahead of the United States on this issue.

    What’s going on here? Why do Americans assume that Russia is always worse on human rights than the US? What is the recent history of the efforts of US disability advocates to lobby for a ratification of the UNCRPD? What are the political factors that have led to its repeated shelving in US Congress? When do US foreign relations practitioners bring up disability rights in transnational conversations?

    In part this project will function as an oral history of the transnational disability advocacy movement. At the same time, it will document recent developments in both US-Russia foreign policy in regard to human rights, and offer a sustained investigation of how disability rights come into play (or don’t) when Americans talk about Russia.

  • New photo essay on Disability in Russia

    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.

    A photo from the LoV photo essay shows my friend Alina and some neighbor children at her computer desk, the monitor glowing white. Description: Alina is wearing a pink cardigan and has dark hair. Her hands are visible, but her wheelchair is not. She is talking to a young girl with a long braid who is looking at the screen, while a young boy leans over the keyboard.
    A photo from the LoV photo essay shows my friend Alina and some neighbor children at her computer desk, the monitor glowing white. Description: Alina is wearing a pink cardigan and has dark hair. Her hands are visible, but her wheelchair is not. She is talking to a young girl with a long braid who is looking at the screen, while a young boy leans over the keyboard.

    Abstract

    A recent Human Rights Watch report documented the ways in which people with mobility impairments in Russia are both physically and socially marginalized by the built environment in Russian cities, which is strikingly inaccessible. These photos attempt to center the perspective of people with disabilities traversing (or being limited by) the Russian cityscape, and explore the ways in which (failure to adhere to) building codes effectively limit the public participation of people with (certain) disabilities in the daily life of the democracy. Subtle barriers, immediately obvious to a wheelchair-‐‐user, begin to emerge for the viewer considering these photographs. They document the ways in which people with disabilities recognize the material structures of the city as socially produced, and as a key factor excluding them from public life. Seemingly passive objects and the history of particular infrastructures turn out to be arbiters of marginalization, domination, and discrimination. Some of these photos have appeared on a collaborative blog documenting accessible and inaccessible entryways in the city of Petrozavodsk, Russia. Some images are examples of what I call check-‐‐mark ramps -‐‐ objects that look like ramps, but don’t “work,” i.e. that don’t actually facilitate access for people with mobility impairments. Images of such “failed” ramps have circulated as an internet meme, but their ubiquity elides the fact that there are far more places that simply lack the elements of accessible architecture altogether. This photo essay is related to the ongoing digital installation project DYTLI, based on the same ethnographic research.

  • What are we doing when we say Putin has Asperger’s Syndrome?

    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 story that hit the trigger buttons for two constituencies that aren’t usually found together: the neurodiversity community, and Russian conspiracy theorists intent on documenting US Imperialism and incompetence.

    After tracking down the report for myself (so middling, it’s hard to believe it was newsworthy) and surveying both the US and Russian popular responses, I wrote a thought piece for the medical anthropology blog Somatosphere.

    While much of the critical response focused on what The Guardian called “the stupidity of psychological diagnosis from a distance,” or, via media footage, I found a different element worth considering. What happens to a diagnosis when cultural traits are pathologized using that diagnosis? And what happens to ethnic or national identities when cultural traits are pathologized? Is there something specific about scenarios in which both occur simultaneously?

    You can read the full blog post on Somatosphere, here.

  • Barriers in Digital Worlds: A conversation with Amanda Cachia

    I recently presented a poster at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association detailing the research methodology that I used in a recent project exploring barriers in digital space. In preparing that poster, I realized that I had lost track of a really fantastic component of that project, curator Amanda Cachia‘s interview with participating artists, including with me, on the subject of disability and access in digital and material worlds. Although the interviews are published in the Canadian Journal for Disability Studies, they are secondary to the curated artworks, which are the focal point of the special issue.

    I especially like the following excerpt on accessible design:

    There is no utopia. And something that might be enabling for one user can be totally disabling for someone else. So just the way the chirping sidewalk crossing might be really enabling for someone with low vision, it can be totally distracting for someone with autism, and then a similar thing can happen online where technological interfaces might be fantastic for someone and totally exclude other people.

    This bit on the interrelatedness of cyber and material barriers:

    We talk a lot about the built environment, and I think kind of take for granted that when we say “the built environment” we mean the physical environment. But we then use the word to build when we say to build a website, and in some ways that’s a metaphorical linguistic construction, but in other ways it’s completely not. It’s a very literal construction, not meaning to make a pun there, but I think when we are constructing a website, we’re thinking very carefully about how pieces fit together, and how design and elements might result in certain outcomes for users. And then you also have to – resulting question of how easy is it for users to rebuild or change or manipulate a given environment. And in some cases, it’s easier to manipulate an online environment, and in some cases it’s easier to manipulate a physical environment. But that also depends on who you are and what your embodiment is like. … So I think the kind of core of this is I wanted to lay bare how design can preclude or produce certain outcomes by intentionally or unintentionally allowing access.

    And this section on non-text-based research modalities:

    I think of this in the tradition of performance ethnography following Dwight Conquergood and other ethnographers. But I also think it’s really important to disability studies in that as an ethnographer whose goal is to recenter the stories of people with disabilities, I think it’s really important to put research outcomes in places and in voices or idioms or representations that aren’t only textual articles designed for scholarly audiences. So this is an attempt also at a public anthropology that lets laypeople and research participants interact in the process of knowledge creation in a much more explicit way than just being interviewed.

    If you’d like to read the full interview, please visit the CJDS website, where you can find it as a .html webpage, a .PDF document, or as a YouTube video. All credit for this phenomenal set of interviews goes to Amanda Cachia, a phenomenal curator, scholar, and activist (and a fellow SDS Zola Award winner), and to CJDS editor Jay Dolmage for masterminding this special issue.

  • On the UNC Anthropology Website

    I’m honored to be featured this week on the Updates section of the department website for UNC-CH Anthropology. Read it here!

    A screen shot from the UNC-CH Department of Anthropology blog shows a short blurb about Cassandra and a photo of her standing in a wool coat near the Prague Castle