Conference Agenda

This paper examines the construction of disabled subjectivity within the fissures of state paternalism, social prejudice, and visceral embodied experience in contemporary China. While the 2026 NEAA theme highlights "Collaboration, Cooperation, and Connection" as survival practices, this research critically analyzes these concepts when weaponized as mechanisms of governance. Through critical analytical autoethnography and patchwork ethnography, I argue that for the visually impaired in China, connecting with the public sphere often necessitates a forced "disability performativity"—the projection of frailty or heroism to secure social capital. Within disability studies and intersectionality, collaboration and connection function paradoxically: they reveal the universal interdependence between disabled and able-bodied worlds while simultaneously exposing the inequalities inherent in these exchanges. The prevailing discourse on cooperation remains ableist-centric, masking power asymmetries and the resulting physical and mental fatigue of the disabled subject.

This intersectional framework elucidates three constitutive forces:

First, The Chinese state manages the visually impaired through "biopolitical containment," channeling the majority of blind students into vocational massage tracks to ensure social stability. In this context, cooperation is not a choice but a state-prescribed economic and social control utility.

Second, In China, interpersonal connection constitutes the traditional core of social operation and remains a crucial support network for the visually impaired. This section contrasts the lived reality of interdependence in China with the "myth of independence" in the United States. In China, family networks facilitate "care intimacy," bridging infrastructural gaps. However, this connection is frequently mediated by a "benevolent gaze" that infantilizes the disabled subject. Public interactions—such as independent travel or communal dining—reveal a cultural logic of protective control and lowered expectations that segregates the visually impaired from the able-bodied. Consequently, the disabled subject must negotiate a precarious balance between soliciting support and managing stigma. Conversely, the American emphasis on independence often results in distinct forms of alienation and physical exhaustion.

Finally, Utilizing the concept of "Crip Time," I document the "somatic friction" of navigating an ocular-centric world. This involves significant access labor—the invisible physical and mental resources exhausted to achieve normative participation. Rather than a deficit, this friction constitutes a method of collaborating with the disabled body, exposing taken-for-granted social norms and infrastructures.

Born and raised in China with congenital blindness, my positionality challenges traditional anthropological elitism, objectivism, and extractivism in method and stance. This work instead attempts to foster an anthropological orientation centered on genuine collaboration, cooperation, and connection. By integrating the method of autoethnography with the daily practice of patchwork ethnography, this research challenges the tragedy-heroism binary. It proposes reconfiguring "health" as a fluid state and calls for an anthropological "ethics of listening" that returns the power of definition to the disability community. Ultimately, this work seeks to move beyond the supercrip narrative toward an ordinary future, where the experiential knowledge developed by disabled people in coping with non-standard environments transforms, in cooperation with anthropologists, into the foundation for designing a more inclusive society.

In an era of "digital exhaustion," how do global grassroots movements utilize technocratic tools to perform ancestral modes of relationality? This talk explores the Ecoversities Alliance’s Reimagining Education Conference (REC) as a unique site of "discursive sovereignty" where collaboration is not merely a logistical goal but a radical linguistic and embodied practice. Drawing on an ethnography of the 2026 REC 5.0 "Cycles of Change" gathering, I analyze how practitioners from over 500 transformative learning spaces reclaim education through a "grammar of the future" that deliberately clashes with the professionalized jargon of neoliberal "summits".

Centering on the 2026 conference theme of Collaboration, Cooperation, and Connection, I examine the "multimodal literacies" deployed by the Alliance to anchor pluriversal imaginaries within digital platforms like Zoom. Through a transcription analysis of the conference’s "Opening Ceremony," I demonstrate how "connection" is forged through specific linguistic mechanisms—such as the repurposing of mainstream educational terms and the use of physical iconography—to "render strange" the digital interface. By moving between the "un-making" of old systems and the "composting" of new ideas, this talk argues that the Alliance’s collaborative practices offer a model for a "stewardship of thought" that responds directly to the ecological and social needs of our current condition. Ultimately, I propose that the REC serves as a "vessel for language," where cooperation is enacted through the collective socialization of local terms into a global "mycelium" of resistance and renewal.

This article will examine the conditions, facilitators, and accessibility that shape migrants choices between legal ( e.g. student or work visas), liminally legal (e.g. asylum, Temporary Protected Status), and illegal (e.g. unauthorized crossings, visa overstays) strategies for border crossing. Central to this study is the reconceptualization of coyotes, polleros, guías, and others classified as smugglers, to facilitators of movement-- particularly for migrants from socioeconomically marginalized backgrounds-- in order to discuss how the intersections of class, race and citizenship shape migration. By exploring how these intersections, socioeconomic disparities, networks, and regimes of mobility determine access to movement and shape the moral and legal hierarchies of migration, this article will seek to discuss who can move legally, who cannot and how the infrastructures of legality themselves produce and stigmatize certain forms of movement.

Note: Included in the panel organized by Barbara Miller, Intersections, Connections, and Anthropological Explorations

This paper examines how ethnic minority communities in Ratanakiri Province, Cambodia navigate multiple therapeutic systems through relational and negotiated healthcare-seeking practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among highland minority communities, I argue that healthcare decisions are not individual, rational choices among competing systems, but socially embedded negotiations shaped by intersecting structures of ethnicity, geography, language, class, and state development policy.

Building on medical pluralism scholarship (Leslie 1976; Eisenbruch 1992), this research extends the framework through an intersectional lens. Ethnic minority communities in Ratanakiri are situated at the margins of national political and economic life: they experience limited infrastructure, difficult physical accessibility, restricted educational opportunities, linguistic barriers between Indigenous languages and Khmer, and uneven incorporation into state healthcare systems. These structural conditions intersect to shape not only access to biomedical services, but also perceptions of legitimacy, trust, and efficacy across therapeutic domains, including spirit healing, herbal medicine, and government clinics.

Based on participant observation, semi-structured interviews, walking ethnography, and soundscape documentation, this study centers lived experience. Attending to everyday encounters reveals that healthcare-seeking is relational: decisions emerge through family deliberation, intergenerational knowledge transmission, community advice networks, and negotiations with state and NGO actors. Rather than framing medical pluralism as a static coexistence of systems, I show how therapeutic choices are continuously recalibrated in response to shifting social relations, economic pressures, and development interventions.

Intersectionality is essential for understanding these processes. Ethnicity alone does not explain healthcare navigation. Instead, ethnic minority status intersects with remoteness, poverty, linguistic marginalization, and uneven state recognition to produce layered vulnerabilities. At the same time, intersectionality illuminates agency: individuals strategically mobilize different therapeutic systems depending on social position, relational obligations, and spiritual cosmology.

This paper also reflects on the positionality of the anthropologist and the ethics of collaboration. In line with the conference theme of Collaboration, Cooperation, and Connection, the research process moves beyond extractive models of knowledge production. Walking interviews and soundscape documentation function not merely as data collection techniques, but as collaborative modes of engagement that foreground community narratives and sensory worlds. By situating healthcare-seeking within relational networks, this study contributes to ongoing anthropological debates about how intersectionality reshapes research methods and challenges earlier disciplinary commitments to objectivism and distance.

Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that healthcare-seeking among ethnic minorities in Ratanakiri is best understood as a negotiated social practice embedded within intersecting inequalities and connections. Through an intersectional medical anthropology approach, it highlights the importance of relational analysis for understanding how marginalized communities collaborate, adapt, and sustain well-being in conditions of structural constraint.

I will be presenting on the panel organized by Barbara Miller, Intersections, Connections, and Anthropological Explorations. My paper foregrounds intersectionality as both analytic and method in Black queer anthropology, arguing that the field’s enduring concern with health and wellbeing emerges from attending to the inseparability of race, gender, sexuality, class, HIV/AIDS status, religion, and nation. Drawing on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s formulation of intersectionality (1991) alongside the African diasporic method of Sankofa and Edward Said’s concept of traveling theory (1983), I read Black queer anthropology as a collaborative, genealogical project that repeatedly returns to moments of crisis and care in order to rethink anthropology’s commitments to life and survival. Rather than treating intersectionality as a static framework for mapping identity, I approach it as a dynamic practice of connection—one that traces how interlocking structures of racial capitalism, heteronormativity, patriarchy, and coloniality co-produce vulnerability while also generating sites of collective resistance.

Across US, Brazilian, African, Caribbean, and digital contexts, intersectionality becomes a traveling theory that shifts as it encounters new institutional terrains. In US-based scholarship, analyses of HIV/AIDS, carceral schooling, and neoliberal abandonment demonstrate how Black queer wellbeing is shaped at the nexus of anti-Black racism, state violence, and heterosexism, while also sustained through abolitionist critique and intellectual intimacy. In Brazilian contexts, attention to Candomblé and gynecological care reveals how Black lesbian health is negotiated within overlapping regimes of phallocentrism, medical racism, and religious belonging, foregrounding alternative epistemologies of healing. African and Caribbean scholarship further expands intersectionality by situating queer survival within diasporic relationality, erotic subjectivity, and vernacular theology, challenging US-centric models of queer life. In digital and institutional “elsewheres,” Black queer anthropology exposes how racism, misogyny, and sexual commodification travel online and into the academy, while also tracing experiments in mutual aid, space-making, and collective knowledge production.

For this panel, I argue that Black queer anthropology models intersectionality not only as critique but as cooperative method. Its practitioners build theory relationally—through citation, embodied listening (Gill 2012), and sustained engagement with Black feminist thought, queer of color critique, abolitionist organizing, and diasporic studies. Collaboration emerges in ethnographic encounters, in the spiritual and affective practices of interlocutors, and in the scholarly collectives that seek to divest from exclusionary academic structures. By foregrounding intersectionality as a practice of connection rather than merely a diagnostic of oppression, this paper reframes wellbeing as something collectively produced at the crossroads of difference. Black queer anthropology thus offers both an analytic of survival under interlocking systems of power and a model for cooperative knowledge-making rooted in care, relational accountability, and the shared labor of making life livable.

Haitians, on the island and in the diaspora, face many health challenges related to centuries of colonialism. My research focuses on Haitian American women's reproductive health through their life histories and narratives of their experiences of pregnancy, birth, and the health care they received. As a background to my upcoming fieldwork, I conducted an analytical literature review of sociocultural anthropology and medical anthropology studies of health in Haiti and the United States to learn about the broader landscape and more specifically attention to women's health and especially women's reproductive health.

Any study of Haitian health must begin with Paul Farmer, medical doctor and medical anthropologist, whose doctoral research began in Haiti. His main argument, throughout all his work, is that poverty is a key factor in shaping risks to health and health outcomes. He is the father of Haitian health studies, and his work is heavily cited by a generation of medical anthropologists. He did not apply a gender lens until his later work. Nor did he use the term intersectionality, but it was implicit in all his thinking and writing. This implicit intersectional approach, with attention to race and class, was highly generative for future studies.

My analytical literature reveals how traditions and Haitian cultural frameworks are reinforced or reinterpreted, both in Haiti and the diaspora. I found an authoritative dynamic between Haitian patients and their doctors and traditional dynamics between men and women. There is also a distinction between spiritual and physical health, which determines which provider Haitians choose to seek. These traditions extended beyond Haiti into the U.S. diaspora regarding studies in South Florida.

Current anthropological research provides much insight into the field of Haitian health studies. It is valuable in their investigation of the influence traditional gender roles have on how Haitian women pursue healthcare and interact with providers. The inclusion of spirituality provides perspectives on Haitian alternative medicine seekers and how Haitians navigate medical plurality. Haitian health studies in anthropology have advanced far from the time of Paul Farmer to now, however, there are still shortcomings in the recent state of the field.

While anthropologists greatly advanced the field of Haitian health studies, there is a large gap in diaspora-centered studies. There is a lack of diaspora studies outside of the U.S. . Even in the diaspora-centered studies reviewed, the participants are largely first generation immigrants, excluding later generations of immigrant families. This absence prevents further investigation on how Haitian health beliefs (for example, acceptable practices in reproductive health, when to seek care, and who to seek) may restructure over time in the U.S. .

This review sets a foundation for anthropologists aiming to bridge the gaps in Haitian health studies. I plan to focus on reproductive and sexual health amongst Haitian women in North Florida. I hope to understand Haitian reproductive beliefs there by collecting reproductive life histories of first-generation through third immigrants. I hope these reproductive life histories and narratives contribute to increased understanding of reproductive beliefs in Haitian health studies.

Intersectionality theory, birthed by Black feminists starting in the late 1980s, was adopted more slowly by anthropologists than in sociology, psychology, and education and health fields. This pattern may be explained by a more prevalent White Possessive (Moreton-Robinson 2015) in anthropology which has been steadily changing since the 1990s due to rising numbers of non-White anthropologists and increased awareness of the power of intersectionality among White scholars. Beyond thinking about the reasons for the distinct travel history (Said 1983) of intersectionality theory to anthropology, we seek to illustrate how it is essential in our work. This panel includes papers by anthropology graduate students at George Washington University who embrace intersectionality in their research and deploy it in a variety of generative ways to inform their research methods, analysis, and community engagement. The papers are variously informed by analysis of secondary resources, primary research in the field, auto-ethnography, or all three.

Classic intersectionality theory, as first created and ensconced in academia by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw and sociologist Patricia Collins, emphasized the necessity of recognizing the simultaneous effects on people’s wellbeing of multiple structural factors or institutions such as racism, sexism, and classism. It was inspired by early critical race theory, feminist theory, and Marxist theory. For several years, race, sex, and class were the big three issues. Over time, for example, gender and sexuality have been added, along with ethnicity, age, citizenship, ability, religion, and more. These factors are important not just in terms of people that an anthropologist learns from and with, but also the anthropologist. Importantly, aspects of the researcher’s positionality must be reflected on, revealed to the reader, and understood as shaping the research topic, research methods, and forms of representation and application. In all, intersectionality theory throws in question key traditional principles of anthropology as formulated more than 100 years ago, mainly by Euro-American scholars who were mainly privileged White males. Key principles they defined for anthropology research include elitism, objectivism, and extractivism. Elitism is self-explanatory: privileged scholars studied mainly the “other” – non-White, less privileged people, often far away from Western civilization. Objectivism refers to the adherence to a scientific standard that mandates a detached stance of the researcher in relation to the people that is supposedly neutral and unbiased. Extractivism is a sense of academic entitlement by which a researcher could go to the field for a year or two and learn enough to support publications to enlighten other academics and personal career building with no thought of collaborating or sharing with the study community. Early anthropologists learned to treat living humans as lab sites in the interest of creating a discipline that was as respected as the hard sciences.

The conference theme of Collaboration, Cooperation, and Connection prompts thinking that both complements and adds dynamism to intersectionality theory and practice. And it challenges the early anthropological principles of elitism, objectivism, and extractivism. Each paper offers a unique angle on intersectionality theory and the conference theme.