Disability Autoethnography

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.