What is the DRIG?
The Disability Research Interest Group (DRIG) is a network of scholars, educators, activists, and practitioners invested in building ties between people who contribute to disability anthropology. As a special interest group (SIG) of the Society for Medical Anthropology, we foster disability research in and across all fields of anthropology. The DRIG understands disability anthropology to be research that seeks to theorize disability by documenting and analyzing the diversity of everyday life experiences of people with disabilities across space, time, and social and cultural context. We situate the medicalization of disability as a sociocultural phenomenon with political consequences, and contend that there is much to be said about disability that exists outside of the realm of biomedicine.
DRIG Mission Statement
By bringing researchers together, the DRIG seeks to educate our colleagues and to foster vibrant anthropological conversations about disability and the theoretical insights of disability studies in the classroom, at conferences, in informal communication, and in scholarly research and publications.
The DRIG recognizes that disabled people’s experiences are frequently left out of anthropological knowledge production. That is, most research unwittingly excludes disabled people from its population of study, or does not consider disability as an analytical or experiential category. People with disabilities are underrepresented in our field as both scholars and research participants. Thus our mission is to ensure that disabled people studied by anthropologists are not only objects of study but active makers and/or participants in their own history, as researchers, educators, and research participants. Therefore the DRIG promotes the participation of people with disabilities in the field of anthropological research, and seeks a future for the field that recognizes ableism as a form of systemic oppression that intersects with other forms of difference including race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality; disability is an intersectional category. We are committed to promoting the accessibility of all anthropological research – whether that research explicitly addresses disability or not – within the AAA and at the AAA Annual Meeting and section meetings, and in anthropological publications and educational spaces.
The DRIG Essay Prize
We are accepting submissions for the 2025 DRIG Disability Anthropology Essay Prize!**
Click here for submission details.
**Submission deadline: September 1, 2025**
Past DRIG Award Recipients
For several years the DRIG awarded travel funding to graduate students presenting outstanding work at the AAA Annual Meeting. More recently, this shifted to an annual essay prize.
Past DRIG Essay Prize Winners
- 2024 – No award announced
- 2023 – Rachel Parks, “Disability Enters the Field: Ethnographic Insight, Painfully Come By”
- 2022 – No award announced
- 2021 – Zihao Lin, “Access as Method”
- 2020 – Hannah Quinn, “Crip Intimacy: Sockfriends, Sexuality, and Cripped Things”
- 2019 – Emily Lim Rogers, “Unwitting Patient Activism: Thinking with Brain Fog, Symptom Talk, and Exhaustion”
Past DRIG Travel Award Recipients
- 2018 – Cara Ryan, Jane Saffitz
- 2017 – Clara Devlieger, Liz Lewis
- 2016 – Zhiying Ma, Christine Sargent
- 2015 – Kylie Boazman, Michele Friedner
DRIG Sessions of Interest at AAA Meetings
Below is a list of selected past sessions of interest at the Annual Meeting of the AAA. Browsing these sessions can give you a sense of the breadth of disability anthropology. Please check back soon for upcoming sessions of interest at the 2025 meeting.
Steering Committee of the Disability Research Interest Group
Megan Moodie (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Dana Ernst (University of California, Los Angeles and University of California, Berkeley)
Kim Fernandes (University of Toronto)
Helena Fietz (Louisiana State University)
K. Eliza Williamson (Duke University)
Past members of the DRIG Steering Committee (since 2015)
Salih Can Açiksöz
Molly Bloom
Michele Friedner
Faye Ginsburg
Cassandra Hartblay
Elizabeth Lewis
Zhiying Ma
Laurence Ralph
Daniella Santoro
Christine Sargent
Heather Thomas
Zoë Wool
Tyler Zoanni
DRIG Email List
Stay up to date on the latest from DRIG leadership and members by joining the DRIG email list! To join, please send a message to Michele Friedner: michelefriedner [at] uchicago [dot] edu (no spaces).
DRIG on Social Media
Bluesky: Disability Anthropology Starter Pack (compiled by Erin Durban)
Resources