Access Vernaculars observes that both disabled people and nondisabled people in Russia recognize and point out instances of poorly executed accessible design in the built environment. The book argues that the popular interest in images of failed accessibility ramps and other similar features circulating on the Russian internet in the 2010s can be understood as a general critique of the Russian state, pointing out hypocrisy in false façades of access, and practices therefore considered critiques of Russian ablenationalism. At the same time, the text traces how disabled people in one Russian city narrate their own experiences of navigating an environment rife with performative accessibility layered over pervasive inaccess and ableism. Through sustained ethnographic attention to the stories that disabled people tell about experiences of access and inaccess, Access Vernaculars examines local Russophone vocabularies that people with mobility impairments use to describe passage through the built environment. In addition to terms translated from global disability advocacy discourse, disabled interlocutors also used terms inherited from previous generations of Russophone political advocacy, that have been largely ignored as part of the lexicon of disability politics in contemporary Russia. The book calls for a critical global disability studies that contends with a de facto Euro-American hegemony in disability advocacy movements, and attends to the ways that vocabularies of disability access travel in friction, taking on dynamic and unexpected meanings in transnational sociopolitical contexts. Finally, the book asks how disability advocacy movements proceed in the context of ablenationalist cooptation.
View of a neighborhood in Petrozavodsk Russia, taken from above. 2013. Photo by Cassandra Hartblay.
In November 2021, the authors and editors of a special issue of the journal Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media gathered online for a panel hosted by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. A recording of the panel discussion is available on YouTube, and embedded below.
The issue, “Digital Selves: Embodiment and Subjectivity in New Media Cultures in Eastern Europe and Eurasia,” is available in open access at digitalicons.org. It has been a pleasure to get to know the emerging scholars who contributed to this special issue as co-editor.
Embedded YouTube video with captions, recorded Zoom panel.
Very delighted to announce that the book is now available!
Order your copy from University of Toronto Press now. And visit the companion webpage [opens in new tab] where you can find supplemental resources, watch videos of past performances of the play, and consider performing the work yourself!
My first book, I Was Never Alone or Oporniki: An Ethnographic Play on Disability in Russia, is now available for pre-order from University of Toronto Press, Amazon.com, and Amazon.ca. The book is scheduled for release in May 2020 [edited to note publisher’s delay] November 2020.
I Was Never Alone or Oporniki presents an original ethnographicstage play, based on fieldwork conducted in Russiawith adults with disabilities. The core of the work is the scriptof the play itself, which is accompanied by a description ofthe script development process, from the research in the fieldto rehearsals for public performances. In a supporting essay,the author argues that both ethnography and theatre can beunderstood as designs for being together in unusual ways,and that both practices can be deepened by recognizing thevibrant social impact of interdependency animated by vulnerability,as identified by disability theorists and activists. (more…)
Not long ago, I was in Russia, to take part in an event at European University at Saint Petersburg, DIS.ART – disability, ethnography & the arts on October 10, 2018. The event featured four creative works by a cohort of medical ethnographers working on disability at European University in Saint Petersburg.
The evening started with a screening of some research footage, which Ilya Utekhin and others filmed at Anna Klepikova’s research site, as a way of presenting Klepikova’s new book, Naverno Ia Durak, or, Probably I’m an Idiot. Out this year in Russian with European University Press, the book takes the form of a “novel” or a sort of ethnographic memoir, following Klepikova herself as she works to discover how international volunteers (from Germany, Poland, and other European countries) make meaning in their work at two state institutions for people with mental disabilities in the St Petersburg region.
With support from Ilya Utekhin, two scenes from my ethnographic play, I WAS NEVER ALONE, or OPORNIKI, were performed in a live reading by Olga Pavlova and Sergei Yakovenko, with musical accompaniment by Leonid Levin. See the video, above (in Russian). This was the first public reading of the script in Russian, and this ethnographer delighted in observing how the jokes and emotive ups and downs in the script play differently in Russia as opposed to in North America.
Finally, the evening closed with the screening of a rough cut of a new ethnographic film by Anna Altukhova, about young adults living in assisted living in a rural town in central Russia after aging out of an orphanage for children with intellectual disabilities. The film documents how this cohort imagines what it means to live independently as adults, envisioning standardized ideals of heterosexual family units in separate homes, and pondering what kinds of work might be viable. The film is shot through with an ironic depiction of an unusual practice amongst the group, the standing challenge to spend a night, or several, away from the assisted living apartments that they share in small groups, living ‘independently’ in a seemingly abandoned house (without heat aside from a wood stove). The house, local lore has it, once belonged to a pre-revolutionary Baron, and, was visited by Lenin himself.
The event and all of the presented works were in Russian. Klepikova’s book has yet to be translated to English. My playscript has also been presented in English, and will be subsequently performed in English and Russian. Althukhova’s ethnographic film will be available with English subtitles shortly.
The event leaves us with several important questions. Is there something about disability ethnography that calls for visual, performative, or multimedia modalities? Is there something about experiential differences implied by the word “disability” that exceeds the authority of text to describe experience, or that suggests nonverbal avenues of communication? Or, is multimedia ethnography just a fun technological trick for engaging non-academic audiences? What schools of disability anthropology are emerging globally, and how does this new St Petersburg school differ from the Moscow school led by Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova? Is there a characteristic ‘Russian’ approach to disability? Naturally, this event included discussion with the gathered audience, which included documentary filmmakers and disability activists as well as academics affiliated with EUSP, including a variety of disagreements about how this content should be best presented, and whose consumption it might be for. Focused on ethnography and the arts, the event did not include related work on disability justice by young arts professionals in Russia, such as artisan workshops for adults with Autism, fine art studios attached to institutions, public art projects aimed at raising awareness and interrupting ableism, and critical curatorial practices that seek to make art exhibitions more accessible.
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 9pm Saturday, March 3rd at 1:00pm, with a talk back session at 1:30pm
At the Yale University Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) Movement Studio, 149 York Street
with additional roles and production design by Rachel Chew, Dana Smooke, Chayton Pabich, and Yuki Hayasaka.
The staged reading is presented as part of the Soyuz Symposium for Postsocialist Cultural Studies, with support from the European Studies Council, the Department of Anthropology, Theatre Studies, Slavic Studies, and WGSS at Yale University.
Event details on the Yale Events Calendar are here.
More about this project here.
I’m pleased to announce that I will spend the 2017-2018 academic year as a postdoctoral associate and lecturer for Russian Studies in the European Studies Council at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. I’ll also be cross-appointed in the Department of Anthropology. I will be teaching two courses, moving the ethnographic play project along, and working on my ethnographic monograph.
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!
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.
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.
