Cripping ethnography brings together disabled, mad, d/Deaf, chronically ill, neurodivergent researchers and scholars within and beyond Circle U to explore how ethnography might be done otherwise. The project especially invites people who not only have an academic interest in critical disability studies but are themselves affected.
Cripping ethnography brings together disabled, mad, d/Deaf, chronically ill, neurodivergent researchers and scholars within and beyond Circle U to explore how ethnography might be done otherwise. The project especially invites people who not only have an academic interest in critical disability studies but are themselves affected.
Ethnography
Ethnography is a qualitative research approach that seeks to build an understanding of how our shared realities are historically constituted and reproduced or changed in the present. It generates knowledge and theory through a practice of learning that entails spending extended time with others, living, working, interacting with them and paying attention to the obvious and the subtle. Its primary instrument is therefore the body, mind and senses of the ethnographer themself.
Crip (as a verb: cripping)
Cripping ethnography means rethinking how ethnographic research is done by centring disablement/debility as a lived experience, knowledge system and political standpoint of disabled researchers themselves. It challenges ableist norms in academic knowledge production, research practices, and participation. As a verb – to crip – it seeks to disrupt or reorient neoliberal assumptions about disability, productivity, time, emotion and the very structure of research itself. It prioritizes accessibility, care, and interdependence in the research process. (Source: Wechuli, Yvonne (2025): Cripping auto-/ethnography…)
Principles
The initiators of ‘Cripping ethnography’ and those wishing to join the project commit themselves to anti-ableist, decolonial and feminist principles as well as to disability justice, as much as this is possible within the university system. We are committed to creating safe, inclusive, respectful and accessible research and learning environments.