Vulnerable Bodies: An Anthropology of Disability, Contested Illness, and the Politics of Legitimacy

Harvard FAS

This seminar examines the cultural experiences and politics of disability and contested illness. Drawing on ethnography and academic scholarship alongside film and popular writing, it explores how bodies are shaped and rendered vulnerable across historical periods and social contexts. We move among distinct registers and scales, treating disability as an individual experience, a collective identity, a political movement, and a vantage point from which to probe cultural assumptions about…