In Disability Worlds, Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp chronicle and theorize two decades of immersion in New York City’s wide-ranging disability worlds as parents, activists, anthropologists, and disability studies scholars. They situate their disabled children’s lives among the experiences of advocates, families, experts, activists, and artists in larger struggles for recognition and rights. Disability consciousness, they show, emerges in everyday politics, practices, and frictions. Chapters consider dilemmas of genetic testing and neuroscientific research, reimagining kinship and community, the challenges of “special education,” and the perils of transitioning from high school. They also highlight the vitality of neurodiversity activism, disability arts, politics, and public culture. Disability Worlds reflects the authors’ anthropological commitments to recognizing the significance of this fundamental form of human difference. Ginsburg and Rapp’s conversations with diverse New Yorkers reveal the bureaucratic constraints and paradoxes established in response to the disability rights movement, as well as the remarkable creativity of disabled people and their allies who are opening pathways into both disability justice and disability futures.

Faye Ginsburg is Kriser Professor of Anthropology at New York University, Co-director of the Center for Disability Studies, and the author and editor of several books including Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community.

Rayna Rapp is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at New York University and the author and editor of several books including Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America. 

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction: Encountering Disability Worlds  1
1. The Doubled Telos of Modernity: Genetic Screening, Atypical Brains, and Neurodiversity  27
2. New Kinship Imaginaries and Their Limits  49
3. The Paradox of Recognition and the Social Production of Moxie  83
4. Transitioning to Nowhere?  120
5. Living Otherwise: Worlding Disability Arts  154
6. Disability Worlds / Disability Futures  187
Notes  221
Bibliography  233
Index  267