On Disability, Infrastructure, and Shame

Platypod, The CASTAC Podcast

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Elizabeth Roberts can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/06/on-disability-infrastructure-and-shame/. About the post: Before the pandemic, I frequently went back and forth to Mexico City for work and flew regularly within the USA to give talks and workshops. The pandemic arrived just as my nerve pain made getting to a plane gate too far, which meant that, for a time, the pandemic made my immobility less noteworthy. As travel restrictions lifted, I was fearful I was no longer who anthropologists are supposed to be, hypermobile, adaptable, independent, not having to question what about my “body/mind enabled my research” (Durban 2022). Spinster partially reenabled me. Together we could smoothly manage my bag in airports, which tend to have flat floors, automatic doors, as well as working elevators. I was a gliding, many-pronged creature.