Faye Ginsburg

The article below is an adapted excerpt from the introduction of How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic, an anthology recently published by NYU Press that chronicles experiences of ableism and diverse disability activism in New York City (and beyond) during the first four years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The anthology’s authors are a collective of disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent, and nondisabled scholars, students, activists, lawyers, journalists, artists and librarians.

It is an honor to write an afterword to this provocative and engaging collection of short essays and films by a wide range of creative anthropologists and mediamakers hailing mainly from northern Europe, who have been sharing their work at workshops throughout the Nordic Region that they have been organizing since 2022. In 2023, they officially created the Sensory Media Anthropology (SMA) Network whose innovative approach is featured in this thematic section of the Allegra Lab.