Compare methods

	Disability Life-History Narrative Method	Disability Autoethnography
Field	Disability Studies	Disability Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2008	2020
Originator	Brett Smith & Andrew C. Sparkes (narrative inquiry in disability studies)	Devva Kasnitz (critical disability autoethnography)
Type	Narrative-inquiry qualitative method for disability research	Autoethnographic qualitative method for disability research
Seminal source	Smith, B., & Sparkes, A. C. (2008). Narrative and its potential contribution to disability studies. Disability & Society, 23(1), 17-28.	Kasnitz, D. (2020). The Politics of Disability Performativity: An Autoethnography. Current Anthropology, 61(S21), S16-S25.
Aliases	Disability Narrative Inquiry, Narrative Analysis in Disability Studies, Disability Life Story Method, Biographical Narrative Method in Disability Research	Critical Disability Autoethnography, Autoethnography in Disability Studies, Disability Performativity Autoethnography, Crip Autoethnography
Related	3	3
Summary	The disability life-history narrative method collects and analyzes disabled people's life stories as a way of understanding disability from the inside, attending not only to what people say happened but to how they tell it. Articulated for the field by Brett Smith and Andrew Sparkes in their 2008 Disability & Society article on narrative's contribution to disability studies, the approach distinguishes the storyteller stance (working with stories, telling alongside) from the story-analyst stance (analyzing stories as objects), and offers structural, performative, and creative-analytic ways to interpret narratives. Its distinctive contribution is to treat stories as both data about lives and as the very means through which disabled identity and meaning are made.	Disability autoethnography is a qualitative method in which a disabled researcher uses their own embodied experience and everyday interactions as ethnographic data to analyze how disability is lived, performed, and positioned. In Devva Kasnitz's 2020 Current Anthropology article on the politics of disability performativity, she analyzes recorded dialogues from her own life with mobility and speech impairments to examine her biopolitical positioning as disabled, connecting intimate encounters to ableism and the disability-justice movement. The method's distinctive premise is that the disabled researcher is not a neutral observer of disability but a privileged knower whose own experience is a legitimate and revealing source of theory.