cassandra hartblay

Publications

Book cover - Access Vernaculars: Disability and Accessible Design in Contemporary Russia. By Cassandra Hartblay. Text imposed over a cover image of a rolling red ramp on green background.

Access Vernaculars: Disability and Accessible Design in Contemporary Russia

An ethnographic monograph by Cassandra Hartblay. Available now from Cornell University Press.

“Access Vernaculars is a groundbreaking ethnography […] that pushes the boundaries of global disability studies. Refusing simplistic North-South or able/disabled binaries, Hartblay introduces ‘global access friction’ and ‘inaccess stories’ as incisive analytic tools for understanding the messy, often contradictory ways that accessibility is imagined, implemented, and lived. “

– Jasbir Puar, author of The Right to Maim and Terrorist Assemblages
More about ACCESS VERNACULARS

Other Publications

book cover shows book title "I was never alone or oporniki: an ethnographic play on disability in Russia: Cassandra Hartblay" in grey, yellow, and red text inside of a yellow circle reminiscent of a spotlight on an off-white background over a partial view of theatre seats which are painted in a way that some are fading into the background.

I Was Never Alone or Oporniki

A stoop in front of a neighbourhood grocery story has four steps to the left, or a ramp to the right. The ramp is broken at the bottom, made of slippery granite tile, and has one handrail to the right. The door opening on the stoop for someone entering blocks the top of the ramp from the open side.

Academic Research Articles

Public & Digital Scholarship

book cover shows book title "I was never alone or oporniki: an ethnographic play on disability in Russia: Cassandra Hartblay" in grey, yellow, and red text inside of a yellow circle reminiscent of a spotlight on an off-white background over a partial view of theatre seats which are painted in a way that some are fading into the background.

I Was Never Alone or Oporniki: An Ethnographic Play on Disability in Russia

I Was Never Alone or Oporniki presents an original ethnographic stage play based on fieldwork conducted in Russia with adults with disabilities. The book includes a preface by George Marcus, Hartblay’s play script, and Hartblay’s reflective chapter contextualizing the work and reflecting on ethnography, theatre, vulnerability, and disability.

Order Book
Watch Performances

This book was published in 2020 by University of Toronto Press. Visit the companion site to the book for further resources, including video recordings of the play.

Selected Academic Research Articles

Disability Expertise: Claiming Disability Anthropology

Current Anthropology. 62(S21). 2020.

After Marginalization: Pixelization, Disability, and Social Difference in Digital Russia

South Atlantic Quarterly. 118(3): 543–572. 2019.

An image of a long staircase of 20 or more steps in a park with long ramp for bikes or strolles alongside of it. The angle makes it too steep to safely traverse in a wheelchair.

Good Ramps, Bad Ramps: Centralized Design Standards and Disability Access in Urban Russian Infrastructure.

American Ethnologist 44(1). 2017.

“Can Concrete Be Corrupt? Dysintentional matter, infrastructure maintenance, and the case of Gogolevsky Bridge.” Chapter in The Social Properties of Concrete, edited by Eli Elinoff and Kali Rubaii. Punctum Press. 2025.

Chudakova, Tatiana, Cassandra Hartblay, Maria Sidorkina. “A Chto Sluchilos’?: Ethnographies of Holding It Together.” Russian Review 83(1). 2024.

“Beyond the neutral body: Performing disability anthropology.” Chapter in The Routledge Companion to PerformanceAnthropology. Lauren Miller Griffith and David Syring, eds. 2024.

“Disability and Globalization.” Entry for Disability in American Life: an Encyclopedia of Concepts, Policies, and Controversies. Tamar Heller, Sarah Parker Harris, Carol Gill, and Robert Gould, eds. 2019.

“This is not thick description: Conceptual art installation as ethnographic process.” Ethnography  19(2). 2018. 

“Disabling Structures: Perspectives on Marginalization in a Russian Cityscape,” Landscapes of Violence 3(1) 2015.
http://scholarworks.umass.edu/lov/vol3/iss1/4 *this is a photo essay that combines text and photographs, compiled as a large, image-based PDF file; please message me if you would like a text-based version of this publication with image descriptions.

“Welcome to Sergeichburg: Disability, Crip Performance, and the Comedy of Recognition in Russia” in Journal of Social Policy Studies 12(1) 2014. In English and Russian translation.

“A Genealogy of (post-)Soviet Dependency: Disabling Productivity.”  2013 Zola Award Article, Disability Studies Quarterly, 34(1), 2014.

Liminality in Love: Reading Ritualized Institutional Practice as Civil Society in Alina Rudnitskaya’s Civil Status
Anthropology of East Europe Review, 29:2, 2011

Selected Editorial Projects

Photo: Anya Klepikova.

Keywords for Ethnography & Design

Edited Collection with Joseph D. Hakins and Melissa Caldwell. Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website. March 2018.

A woman smokes and captures a video of a live performance on a handheld digital phone.
Photo: Olga Kononenko

Digital Selves: Embodiment and Subjectivity in New Media Cultures in Eastern Europe and Eurasia

Digital Icons 21: 2021.

Selected Public and Digital Scholarship

Cass has shoulder length wavy brown hair with green streaks, wears a black paisly shirt and is gesturing with eyes closed while speaking into a microphone on stage.
Photo: Glenn Pritchard.

Disgust: A story about becoming an ethnographer

Story Collider live storytelling podcast

Alexei "DymDym" Didimarchenko creating an artwork by dumping pastels out of a bucket and onto a paper. Taken from slightly above, we see part of Alexei's brown hair and face, a blue t-shirt, and a pile of pastel crayons, and a blue bin, on a white table top.
Photo: Oksana Bashta.

Reflection on the loss of an artist with disabilities who died in long term care during COVID

Anthropology News. 2021.

The book Other Russias, with a blue and white hand drawn illustration of people standing in the snow on the cover, sits on a blue background.

Review of Russian artist-journalist Victoria Lomasko’s first collection in English, OTHER RUSSIAS (n+1)

Culture Trip. 2017.