cassandra hartblay

Author: Cassandra Hartblay

  • Springtime Laudations

    It’s been an exciting few months!

    Not only does mid-May find me wrapping up my year of fieldwork in Petrozavodsk (bye for now, everyone – I’ll miss you!), my email inbox has been full of good news and encouragement.

    In April, it was announced that my paper was selected for the 2013 Irving K. Zola Award for emerging scholars in disability studies! The paper argues that considering the Soviet case complicates how we understand the role of capitalism in pathologizing disability. I’ll accepting the award at the Society for Disability Studies conference in June in Orlando.

    I was also recently awarded the 2013 Summer Graduate Research Fellowship by the Program in Sexuality Studies at UNC-CH, to help support my work in Petrozavodsk. Read more about how my work fits into the Sexuality Studies framework here.

    I was thrilled and honored to learn that the faculty of the Department of Anthropology at UNC-CH selected me for this year’s Honigmann Graduate Award in Sociocultural Anthropology, a yearly honor to a graduate student in the department. This honor was particularly sweet, in that my dissertation adviser, Michele Rivkin-Fish, took the time to nominate me and highlight my work to the rest of the faculty.

    Invisible_Children_CoverFinally, returning to North Carolina, I picked up my mail to find two copies of “Learning to See Invisible Children,” a book of case studies on inclusive education efforts in Central Asia. Chapter Five in this volume is one that I coauthored with Galina Ailchieva, and presented at CIES in 2012. I am so excited to read this volume in full – each of these case studies proposes important lessons for best practices in implementing inclusive education. Major thanks to editors Kate Lapham and Martyn Rouse who put this incredible book together. Also, this is the first time that I get to see my name as an author on a book chapter – wheee!

    Summer 2013 is shaping up to be a whole new ballgame, as I move on from fieldwork to transcription and analysis. I’m looking forward to digging in to all the interview data collected over the past year. So – friends in Petrozavodsk – I may not be with you physically, but I am very much with you in spirit!

  • New posts up on “Kto Kuda Kak?” Accessibility Blog

    You might remember a meme that got passed around the internet last fall, showing pictures of utterly inaccessible ramps from around Russia. Russian accessibility activists like to call these the “galochki” or check-mark ramps: Is there a ramp? Yes! Does it work? Who cares?! It’s there, put a check mark in the accessibility box!

    Last November, we launched a collaborative blog to collect photos of galochki ramps

    A screen shot of the website "Who? Where? How?: ability in the built environment of Karelia"
    http://ktokudakakkarelia.tumblr.com/

    around Petrozavodsk and surrounding regions. We hoped to get lots of submissions from the general public, and even tried announcing a contest as a way to spur people to action. But, responses have only trickled in. This is partly because so few people with mobility impairments travel or go for leisurely walks in Karelia in the winter anyway – the feet upon feet of snow the region receives is quickly compacted on walkways into the dark brown, slick and slippery substance known in Russian as “slyakat’” – which makes movement through the city difficult for everyone, regardless of mobility capacity.

    I am happy to say that by the third week of April, we are finally “slyakat’” free, and some new photos have started to trickle in. I’m taking the opportunity to post many photos that I’ve taken myself over the past few months. Russians may say that spring officially starts on March 1st, but I’m going to take it upon myself to say that today – the first day that it rained instead of snowed – it is finally, finally spring in Karelia.

    Check out the new photos, comment away, submit your own examples, and don’t forget to pass our website on! Now that the weather’s nice, we’re planning a “day of action” coming up to collect a whole lot of photos at once.

  • A visit to Moscow’s Higher School of Economics

    The disability studies group at the sociology department of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics (a university) put up this sweet post (in Russian) about my visit in February.

    Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova and her graduate students are some of the most dedicated social scientists I’ve met. I loved visiting their qualitative methods course, and of course talking shop with other ethnographers of disability in Russia.

  • What happens at the museum…

    A recent visit to the State Biological Museum in Moscow was too quirky to keep to myself. I had to share the story. You can read it in full on the Russia! Magazine website.

    WARNING: not for those with weak stomachs!!! Extensive discussion of blood transfusions, strange experiments performed on dogs, and poisonous mushrooms. Not to mention the sex in the museum art happening.

    Maybe there’s a longer term project here, but for now, a popular audience piece.

  • In the News in Petrozavodsk

    The very charming Zhenya Volnikova whiled all sorts of admissions out of me over coffee at my favorite cafe. Check out the article, in Russian, here.

  • Imag(in)ing Accessibility in Karelia, Russia

    A screen shot of the website "Who? Where? How?: ability in the built environment of Karelia"I’m excited to announce the launch of a collaborative project with several non-profit organizations in Karelia, Russia! It is a blog collecting images of accessibility in the North Western republic of the Russian Federation where I am living while conducting my dissertation fieldwork.

    You may remember a series of viral images that circulated on Facebook and Twitter in the early fall of 2012, collecting images of impassable ramps (ramp-fails) in Russia. This project seeks to gather images of both accessible and inaccessible space in the region, and to include images of accessibility that do not reduce disability or access to wheelchair-users only. A photo contest, and some special events open to area high school students, will help to spur participation for local citizens to submit photos to the blog.

    Special thanks to the co-organizers of this project, and read more in Russian on the webpage itself.

  • Call for Contributions

    HEY YOU! Contribute to my current project, UNDOING ABLEISM // A VIDEO ASSEMBLAGE!!

    The prompt: Capture a part of your body that does not have a name (e.g. that you can’t describe in two words or less). Submit your digital video to be a part of a larger assemblage, which will be presented as a video installation and shared online.

    How does *your* body fight against medicalized or partial views of itself?

    Read on HERE.

  • Sensory ethnography and Art-making

    “I think especially now that social science is becoming much more interested in communicating our research to public audiences, some of those methods are going to be much, much more effective than the kind of academic writing and report-type writing that has been the traditional method of communication. …

    “I don’t know if the researchers will actually become film-makers rather than thesis writers, but I think there is an increasing development in that area. One of the things I foresee is increasing amount of collaboration with artists. I think there are very exciting possibilities for work with participatory artists developing participatory art projects that help us to communicate social science research outside academia. But sensory ethnography findings in particular, because I think some very interesting possibilities could develop there.”

    -Sarah Pink

    What is sensory ethnography? 2011. United States of America: Professor of Social Sciences, Loughborough University

  • The History of Disability in Russia – Спецвыпуск ЖУРНАЛ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ СОЦИАЛЬНОЙ ПОЛИТИКИ!

    I am really excited to be included as a review author in this amazing special issue edited by Marianna Muravyeva, which for the first time collects a wide array of articles around the history of disability in Russia. The journal is published in Russian – so for those of you who read Russian, dig in! This is an unparalleled collection.

    I’ve pasted the ToC here, but you can find the full contents, and other issues of JSPS on the journal’s website.

     

    Том 10, № 2, 2012

    THE JOURNAL OF SOCIAL POLICY STUDIES
    ЖУРНАЛ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ СОЦИАЛЬНОЙ ПОЛИТИКИ

    От редакции. История инвалидности в России  147

    Статьи
    Марианна Муравьёва
    Калеки, инвалиды или люди с ограниченными возможностями?
    Обзор истории инвалидности. . . .. . . . . . 151

    Дэниэл Кайзер
    Нищие и калеки в российских городах начала XVIII века .. . 167

    Светлана Голикова
    Инвалидизация в горнозаводском производстве Урала
    конца XVIII – начала XX веков . . . . .  . . . . . 195

    Анастасия Кайатос
    Говорящие в беззвучии: Скорее молчаливы, чем немы
    Советский театр глухих и пантомима после Сталина . . 215

    Сара Филлипс
    Инвалидность, маскулинность и сексуальность
    в постсоветской Украине . . . . . . . .  . . 235

    Мария Ворона, Екатерина Русакович
    Визуальная история социальной политики и инвалидности:
    в кадре и за кадром . . . . . 259

    Рецензии, обзоры
    Наталья Черняева
    Общественная гигиена в историческом измерении:
    по итогам международного семинара. . . . . . . . . 267

    Кассандра Хартблей
    Мобилизация инвалидности на постсоветском пространстве
    Phillips S. D. Disability and Mobile Citizenship
    in Postsocialist Ukraine. Bloomington:
    Indiana University Press, 2010. 318 p. ISBN 978–0-253–22247–3.. .
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

    Лариса Шпаковская
    Производство социальной идентичности в советском
    и постсоветском обществе: классовые аспекты
    Фицпатрик Ш. Срывайте маски! Идентичность и самозванство
    в России ХХ века. М.: РОССПЭН; Фонд «Президентский центр
    Б. Н. Ельцина», 2011. 375 с. ISBN 978–5-8243–1413–7.. .   . . 276

    Джон Литтл
    Советская инвалидность и конструирование маскулинности
    в сталинскую эпоху
    Kaganovsky L. How the Soviet Man Was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity
    under Stalin. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008. 256 p.
    ISBN: 978-0822959939 . . . . . . . . 281

  • In the “news” in Petrozavodsk

    Cassandra gives a presentation about life in North Carolina to children and staff at the Rodnik Rehabilitation Center in Petrozavodsk

    Having recently arrived in Petrozavodsk as part of my dissertation research, I was invited to tell students at the summer school session at the municipal center for children with disabilities about life in Chapel Hill North Carolina. My presentation made it on to the organization’s website under the news category! Check it out here.