AUTHOR=Wechuli Yvonne 

TITLE=Cripping auto-/ethnography?

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Sociology

VOLUME=Volume 10 - 2025

YEAR=2025

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2025.1577749

DOI=10.3389/fsoc.2025.1577749

ISSN=2297-7775

ABSTRACT=Given the crisis of representation (of the other) and complicated histories of othering, ethnography seems to be a methodology in need of cripping. Autoethnography, then, is one approach to solve said crisis of representation. Down to classics like Robert Murphy's The Body Silent, Disability Studies often use authors' autobiographical experience in a way that may be called autoethnographic. However, Disability Study's authors rarely engage with methodological literature on autoethnography. Moreover, autoethnographic literature frames The Body Silent and others as first-person illness narratives, which I read as one indication that autoethnography might play into a tragedy narrative of disability. This paper tries to think through what it can mean to crip auto-/ethnography. To this end, I introduce cripping as an emancipatory strategy that promotes changing how one feels about disability and gather previous attempts of cripping academic knowledge production, which specifically center ableist temporal and emotional norms. In a second step, I outline ethnography and autoethnography as methodologies of interest and elaborate, which methodological development could be harnessed for cripping and in which ways both could benefit from further cripping.