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 Assistant Professor in the Department of Health & Society at UTSC and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She is the inaugural director of the Centre for Global Disability Studies. 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 interlocutors with visible disabilities in Russia, has been performed at UCSD, UNC-CH, and Yale University, and was published with University of Toronto Press in 2020. Dr. Hartblay is completing a second ethnographic monograph on disability and accessible design in Russia titled Global Access Friction, and at work on a new project investigating the social life of the Russophone patronymic in contemporary Kyrgyzstan
Select publications
-
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.