Cassandra Hartblay
Dr. Hartblay joined the faculty in 2018 following postdoctoral appointments at Yale University and the University of California San Diego.
Her research is focused on the moral and cultural dimensions of disability as social difference. Her book manuscript, Global Access Friction, explores how disability advocacy takes on different meanings across global contexts, and how accessible design takes on unexpected social meanings that contribute to its spread in the specific context of Northwest Russia in the 2010s.
Dr. Hartblay’s research addresses the theoretical impact of disability studies on ethnography, in particular, examining how disciplinary modes of knowledge production reproduce ableism.
Disability ethnography presents an opportunity to critique and reimagine elements of epistemology and hermeneutics that our discipline has taken for granted. Therefore, along with critical ethnographic texts, Dr. Hartblay’s research unfolds in part through performance ethnography practice, including staging documentary theatre based on her ethnographic research. Her play, I WAS NEVER ALONE, was performed at UCSD, UNC-CH, and Yale University. Based on life history interviews with interlocutors with visible disabilities in Russia, the script and accompanying materials will be published in a volume suitable for anthropology, performance studies, and area studies classrooms. I WAS NEVER ALONE is available as a book suitable for the undergraduate or graduate classroom from University of Toronto Press (2020), and accessible for viewing on the book’s companion website, https://iwasneveralone.org/. Russian-language script available by request.
Dr. Hartblay’s undergraduate appointment is to the Department of Health & Society at UTSC, where she teaches Health Humanities and Disability Studies courses. At the graduate level, she regularly teaches graduate courses in anthropology, and contributes to the Centre for European, Russian & Eurasian Studies and the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. In addition, she has served as a committee member for graduate students in theatre, education, and other programs.
Education
Ph.D. (North Carolina Chapel Hill, 2015)
Courses
Disability Anthropology, Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality, Ethnography of Postsocialism, Performance Ethnography, Anthropology of Design, Anthropology of Names and Naming
Publications
Hartblay, Cassandra. I Was Never Alone or Oporniki: An Ethnographic Play on Disability in Russia. University of Toronto Press, 2020.
Reviews: American Ethnologist, Anthropology of East Europe Review, Disability Studies Quarterly Blog, H-Net H-Disability
“Disability Expertise: Claiming Disability Anthropology.” Current Anthropology. 62(21), 2020.
“After Marginalization: Pixelization, disability, debility, and social difference in digital Russia.” South Atlantic Quarterly. 118(3). 2019.
Keywords for Ethnography and Design a collection of 17 short essays for the “Theorizing the Contemporary” forum on the Cultural Anthropology website. Co-edited by Cassandra Hartblay, Joseph D. Hankins, and Melissa Caldwell. 2018.
Hartblay, Cassandra. “Good Ramps, Bad Ramps: Centralized Design Standards and Disability Access in Urban Russian Infrastructure.” American Ethnologist, 44(1), 2017.
Hartblay, Cassandra. “A Genealogy of (post-)Soviet Dependency: Disabling Productivity.” 2013 Zola Award Article, Disability Studies Quarterly, 34(1), 2014.
Graduate Students
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On Leave from July 2023 to June 2024
Research Keywords: Medical and sociocultural anthropology, Disability, Russia and postsocialism, performance ethnography, design, moral life, social difference
