How does one choose an image for an ethnographic monograph? And how did this one come to be?
The cover for Access Vernaculars features a painting by artist Andrei Roiter, with text design by Cornell University Press. This is the second time I’ve used an image by Roiter for a book cover. The theatre chairs that appear on the cover of my first book are also from one his works.
For the cover of Access Vernaculars, I spent quite a bit of time searching contemporary artworks by artists originally from Russia and Ukraine. Several works of photography and painting were in the list I sent to the production team at Cornell University Press. One option was the image that appears as an illustration of the “second kind of inaccess story” in the Access Vernaculars Introduction. However, ultimately, I worried that this image, a photo of a person in a wheelchair on a ledge high above the ground, might be misread without the context explaining that it is an intentionally ironic contemporary artwork intended to circulate on social media.
Roiter’s image of a rolling red ramp on a dark green background stuck out to me and my editor for its combination of semi-abstract elements that make for a compelling cover, and it’s thematic conceptual link in the form of a ramp unusable for wheelchair access.
Interestingly, while Roiter’s archive does include paintings of several “disability things” (to use Ott’s turn of phrase), the image that we chose for the book cover is not specifically linked to disability.
Titled “The Red Waves” (1998, oil on canvas, 50x70cm), this piece depicts a ramp that rises, then falls, then rises again, in a series of waves, with little contextual information to place the purpose of such a design, a decontextualization which has the result of suggesting a kind of absurdity, even as the confident, painterly strokes leave no doubt as to what is depicted. In the background, text hovers over the sky of the implied painted landscape. Rendered in brushstrokes in a hue similar to the dark greenish-blue ground, Cyrillic text reads «формы знаков на моё пути из дома». The text might be translated as “forms of signs on the path from my house,” a phrase that resonated with the poignant observation from my interlocutor, Anya, a powerchair user, who quipped, “I don’t need a ramp at the pharmacy if I can’t get out of my house!”
Detail from Andrei Roiter’s original image, “The Red Waves” 1998. View the full image on Roiter’s webpage.
Of course, I knew that my own interpretation was distinct from Roiter’s original intention. When I wrote to his studio to inquire about usage rights, his assistant shared that The Red Waves is one of the few of his works that Roiter keeps hanging in his own home. He was kind enough to reply to my inquiry about the origin of the image.
The image comes from a snapshot I took of a minigolf course in a park. This painting is anexample of my regular practice of defamiliarizing a banal site (or object) in order to see it as an abstract form. This allows me to see potential for other readings and poetic messages. For this piece, “The Red Waves” I associated the form with the dynamics of Russian history, with its high and low points.
– Andrei Roiter, personal communication, July 18, 2025
Reading Roiter’s email, I immediately recognized the rolling red ramp as part of a minigolf course, and appreciated, as he mentioned, the poetry that emerged through defamiliarizing the designed object.
His practice of defamiliarizing speaks to me as an anthropologist invested in the work of making the making the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Perhaps this elemental similarity between his painting practice and ethnography (as well as an affinity for gestural oil paintings) is part of what draws me to Roiter’s work. I’m very glad to feature this one of his images as part of the design of the Access Vernaculars cover.
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.
I am pleased to share that as of July 1, 2024, I was promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure! I look forward to continuing my role in the Department of Health and Society at University of Toronto Scarborough, and as graduate faculty in the Department of Anthropology and (the recently renamed) Centre for European & Eurasian Studies at the University of Toronto. I am very grateful to the file reviewers at UofT and elsewhere for the generous consideration of my research and teaching dossiers.
I’m looking forward to engaging with colleagues in several events. I have left physical locations off of the below notations, please message me if you are not able to find the locations in the program.
8am Friday, November 17. Discussant for Virtual Panel “Navigating healthcare systems while disabled.”
12:30pm-2:30pm Friday, November 17. Participating in Debra Vidali’s participatory installation “The Alchemy of Ethnographic Theatre Making” (come make a mini-performance and be an embodied creative collaborator, a companion to the Saturday roundtable, below).
4:15pm-6:00pm Friday, November 17. Panel Chair. “Critical Engagement with Design and Designers in Medical Anthropology.”
4:15pm-6:00pm Saturday, November 18. Roundtable presenter. “Transitions, Transductions, and Alchemy at the Intersections of Anthropology and Theater.”
The #CripRitual, a disability art exhibition co-curated by Critical Design Lab members Aimi Hamraie, Jarah Moesch and I (Cassandra) appeared as a live physical exhibition in two galleries in Toronto, Ontario in the winter-spring of 2022, with a season of accessible virtual events and an online virtual exhibition of the works to complement the exhibit. The exhibition asked artists with disabilities to imagine the ritual practices that sustain crip /disability /sick culture. Read more, including detailed descriptions of all artworks in multi-modal accessible forms, a virtual tour of the artworks installed in the Tangled gallery, and media coverage of the exhibition on the #CripRitual website. The curatorial team plans to keep the website live as an accessible digital humanities resource for teaching disability culture for approximately five years.
Artwork by Leena Raudvee. Installation view. “Precarious Gestures.” Doris McCarthy Gallery, January 2022. Photo by Michelle Peek Photography. More: https://cripritual.com/raudvee/Installation view of artwork title “Rebirth Garments” by Sky Cubacub. Doris McCarthy Gallery 2022. More here: https://cripritual.com/cubacub/
In early fall of 2021, the American Anthropological Association introduced a new set of guidelines and obligations for panel organizers for the upcoming November meeting. Among those guidelines were several measures intended to improve the accessibility of online and in-person conference presentations. The guidelines were developed by the AAA staff, including Nell Koneczny, a staff member with extensive disability access expertise, including a related MA degree, and lived experience of disability. Nell’s presence on the AAA staff was very important to many members of the AAA community with access needs. For several year’s prior to Nell’s hire in 2019, I served on an ad-hoc committee of the Disability Research Interest Group (a sub-section of the Society for Medical Anthropology) devoted to improving accessibility at the annual meeting. The committee came about in direct response to several members of the interest group threatening to forego AAA meetings in the future altogether after years on end of not having their access needs met, and having to start from zero explaining their access needs to temp workers hired by the org in the lead up to the conference. The subcommittee initially developed a document, Guidelines for Accessible Conference Presentations, which we circulated on our listserv, through the SMA, and eventually as part of the AAA “know before you go” information. Our strategy during this period (~2015-2018) was to slowly implement and develop a culture of access from below, colleague to colleague. We also advocated for change with the AAA as an organization, sending letters and holding meetings, that eventually led to the inclusion of accessibility in job description hiring for the position that Nell eventually filled. With Nell in place, we were hopeful that more would be done in the AAA office.
One unfortunate outcome of this advocacy work was that some elements of accessibility praxis were introduced to the broader AAA community through top-down mandates, most prominently in the fall 2021 communication about presenter and panel organizer responsibilities. On the heels of the pandemic, many anthropologists felt overwhelmed that not only were they trying to figure out how to safely attend a conference, they were being asked to shift their conference presentation habits and preparation practices with very little notice, in a way that put an unanticipated demand on presenter time in a year when everyone was already stretched thin, burnt out, and working through the experience pandemic disaster capitalism. Many anthropologists, reading the new guidelines took to Twitter to raise legitimate concerns about how when the new guidelines were introduced, and to wonder how to reconcile the inconvenience of shifting their planned conference preparation timelines weeks earlier that ever before including the preparation of new access elements that many had never implemented before. In spite of efforts from the AAA office to offer education and the politics of access as an ethos of non-exclusion an important diversity practice for the betterment of the scholarly community, the top-down nature of the changes struck overwhelmed anthropologists as too much to handle.
Observing this moment with other disability anthropologists on a group text thread, we tried to figure out how to conceptualize the conundrum. Many of the tweets circulating carried an unintentional air of ableism: why should I be inconvenienced by changing my presentation preparation timeline and practices just so that someone with hearing impairment/vision impairment can participate? For those of us in disability anthropology where access is an essential part of our scholarly praxis, and we are often eagerly awaiting the comments and feedback of our peers and mentors attending the conference, the benefit of these practices was clear. But how could we win others over to this point of view? What had gone wrong? What could be done to salvage the important politics of access while also acknowledging the real overwhelm and burnout the communique unearthed?
With this conundrum in mind, in a flurry of concern and righteous indignation, I wrote a Twitter thread (again in 2021, so well before the Muskification of Twitter) addressing the issue. As of this writing, the first tweet in that thread has been retweeted nearly 150 times, bookmarked 380 times, and received nearly 600 likes and nearly 50 quote tweets. Other tweets in the thread have likewise been liked, retweeted, and commented on. Now that Twitter, under Elon Musk’s leadership, made the site unsearchable for those not on the site, the thread is less accessible. However, anyone can access the original thread here on the Thread unroll site, although the comments and likes aren’t reflected there.
What, then, of the time-honored tradition of writing your paper en route to the conference, or over stale coffee on your hotel room desk mere minutes before the presentation? If that isn’t our disciplinary culture, I don’t know what is.
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It doesn’t help that these requests come via impersonal email from the AAA head office: it’s easy to forget that there are actual colleagues w/ access needs and access workers behind these requests.
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ASL and captioners need materials in advance in order to prepare. Especially, they need to know how to spell names; what unusual jargon, terms, places names, etc. you will be using; and something about the rhythm of the presentation overall.
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Plus, staff need to organize these materials & get them to the access workers. You may know that @AmericanAnthro hired an access specialist two years ago after decades of lobbying from disabled anthropologists who had persistently experienced exclusion at our conferences.
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But the great news is that while disability access practices for conference presentations are new to many anthropologists, your colleagues over here with research cross-over with disability studies have been immersed in a totally different conference culture for years.
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So how do we do it?
It is totally possible to make a slide deck before you write your paper. I like to think of it as an outline. Here’s how I do it in 5 easy steps.
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Step 1: I pick 1-4 key images that I know I want to talk about. They each get their own slide. I know that talking about each image, including describing it and discussing its significance will take 1-2 minutes, so I almost never use more than four images.
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Step 2: I look back at my paper abstract as submitted. I make a list of proper nouns, including author and interlocutor names, theoretical terms, and place names that I know I will need to use in my presentation. Hey look, an access guide!
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Step 3: I look at my list of words. How can they be represented on slides? If there is a key concept or theoretical idea, I put it as a stand alone word or phrase in the middle of a slide. If there is a place name, I put it on a slide with a map. …
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… If there is a sequence or timeline or set of ideas, I put those things together as bullet points or in a graphic on a slide.
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Step 4: Look at these slides. What order would they need to be in to make a coherent presentation? Reorder accordingly. Consider if you’ve missed something.
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Step 5: Add a cover slide (with your name and affiliation) and an end slide. Check for any other “favorite” slides you like to include in presentations about your research that you’ve missed.
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There! Done! This is a flexible slide deck that can now be used for your 15-20 minute AAA conference presentation, or repurposed for a longer talk in another venue. You can upload it in October for a November talk you haven’t written yet.
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Congrats! Welcome to access culture. It’s not so bad.
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One of the insights of disability studies is that access practices actually create aesthetic and theoretical opportunities that we might otherwise miss. So dig in: what new connections and aesthetic possibilities will making a slide deck this way prooffer?
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Access practices are not empty virtue signaling. They are a way to ensure that your colleagues have an opportunity to comprehend your ideas, colleagues whose input on your work you may be missing otherwise.
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And, well, getting feedback from colleagues is… the point of conferences.
And if you’re unsure as to why you’re being asked to engage in a particular access practice, that’s totally fair. Changing habits is uncomfortable and takes time. Access practices require culture change. AAA has suggested new habits faster than our collective has changed…
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Ask one of your colleagues with disability access knowledge for input. Or spend a little time learning about disability access & disability justice.
Or, you know, just submit your slides using the steps above & feel confident about being ahead of the game come November.
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And hang in there, everyone. Pandemic life is tough.
Addendum: If you’re reading this thread as a non- anthropologist, it is relevant to know that the standard practice at anthro conferences is to read aloud from a written script. The text takes primacy & is expected to be of written-article quality. …
… many of us were trained to wordsmith our written presentations down to the last second, and only add slides as a bonus if we have time. …
… thus, asking anthropologists to make a slide deck before writing then presentation script goes against years of disciplinary training and common practice. More so than in fields on which presenting data without a script based on slides is the norm.
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.
Emergent Pandemic Strategies among Disabled Adults in Long Term Care
An elegy for one disabled artist’s death from COVID-19 in Russia, as others seek alternatives to institutionalization.
In July 2020, Alexei Dymdymarchenko, Lyosha or Dym-Dym to his friends, an artist whose work I had been following, died of complications from the COVID-19 virus in St. Petersburg, Russia. His death, devastating for his community, is too easily characterized as one death among many stalking adults living in long-term care facilities. The pandemic has accelerated the slow emergency of disabilityincarceration affecting communities across the world. Anthropologists in Russia studying the question of deinstitutionalization are finding that the pandemic has shifted the possibilities for redesigning social care in postsocialism.
I learned of Dymdymarchenko’s artwork when I wrote to Sasha Ivanov, a curator and art studio manager in St. Petersburg, asking for samples of works by artists with disabilities for a gallery show in Toronto. I was immediately taken with Dymdymarchenko’s works. Untitled, they are typically an amalgam of seemingly random marks on the blank rectangles or European standard printer paper sizes. Ivanov described the work as “somewhere between sound art and performative practice” in a write-up for the international media art festival CYFEST, where the works were exhibited. Dymdymarchenko created each work by taking a bin of pastels (or crayons) and dumping it out over the paper, repeatedly, ceremoniously, as a tactile, gestural, and auditory process. In this way, each paper is a trace left over from a ritual sound performance, evidence of the repeated sound: the rush of small objects falling onto paper on a wooden tabletop. Dymdymarchenko himself was minimally verbal, and Ivanov typically represents him and other artists in the studio to the broader public. The studio itself is a program run by a nonprofit organization and housed in a small annex connected to a residential institution (called an internat in Russian) for adults with neurological and psychiatric disabilities near St. Petersburg.
I reached Ivanov via video chat for an interview about Dymdymarchenko’s passing and the broader impact of the pandemic on the studio community. Ivanov looked down for a moment, gathering his thoughts before describing Dymdymarchenko to me. He was, Ivanov recalled, light and willowy, tall and thin. He didn’t talk or hold conversations, but he had a unique kind of resolve and special focus and creative concentration in the studio that inspired others to consider their own work in new ways. He would sit quietly and turn the crayon bucket over, over and over again, with careful attention. […]
The Centre for Global Disability Studies at the University of Toronto will celebrate it’s first birthday this July, 2021. In the past year, we’ve been so lucky to assemble a community of faculty and graduate students at UofT. We also chartered our small grants program for UofT researchers and a group of our core lab members presented at the virtual Society for Disability Studies conference.
Finally, we’ve launched a website, Twitter and Instagram, and begun planning our first event series (postponed til fall 2021 due to the CAUT censure of UofT).
Follow us on these platforms to find out what is coming up during the next year at CGDS!
