Cassandra Hartblay
Areas of interest
- Ethnography
- Social theory
- Power and politics in health and medicine
- Design & infrastructure
- Gender & sexuality
- Intersectional and decolonial engaged research methods
- Digital worlds
- Ethnic minorities of Russia
- Contemporary Kyrgyzstan
- Theatre & performance
- Names & Naming practice
Biography
Cassandra Hartblay is Associate Professor in the Department of Health & Society and Centre for Global Disability Studies at UTSC and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Dr. Hartblay is a sociocultural medical anthropologist working at the intersection of queer feminist disability studies. Along with critical ethnographic texts, Dr. Hartblay creates engaged, public-facing creative research outputs. Her play, I WAS NEVER ALONE, based on life history interviews with adults with disabilities in Russia, has been performed at UCSD, UNC-CH, and Yale University, and was published with University of Toronto Press in 2020. Her second monograph Global Access Friction: Disability and Accessible Design in Contemporary Russia was published with Cornell University Press in 2025. Her current project investigates the social life of the Russophone patronymic in contemporary Kyrgyzstan.
Select publications
- Hartblay, Cassandra. Global Access Friction: Disability and Accessible Design in Contemporary Russia. Cornell University Press, 2025. https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501782831/
- Hartblay, Cassandra. “Corruption.” In The Social Properties of Concrete. Punctum Books, 2025.
- Hartblay, Cassandra and Tatiana Klepikova. “Bodyminds Online: Digitally Mediated Selves in Regional Cultural Context.” Digital Icons. Introduction to a special issue on embodiment in new media cultures in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. July 2021. https://www.digitalicons.org/
- Hartblay, Cassandra. I Was Never Alone or Oporniki: An Ethnographic Play on Disability in Russia. University of Toronto Press, 2020. https://iwasneveralone.org/
- 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.
- Rivkin-Fish, Michele, and Cassandra Hartblay. “When Global LGBTQ Advocacy Became Entangled with New Cold War Sentiment: A Call for Examining Russian Queen Experience.” The Brown Journal of World Affairs, 21 (2014): 95.