Cassandra Hartblay

Biography

Cassandra Hartblay is Assistant Professor of Health Humanities in the Interdisciplinary Centre for Health & Society and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She is the inaugural director of the Centre for Global Disability Studies. Her research is focused on the moral and cultural dimensions of disability as social difference. Her book manuscript, Totally Normal, explores how the specific context of postsocialism in Russia produces particular configurations of disability as social difference, and how disability advocacy takes on different meanings across global contexts. This work is informed by critical medical anthropology and queer feminist disability studies. Along with critical ethnographic texts, Dr. Hartblay works in multimedia forms. 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. Her first book, I WAS NEVER ALONE OR OPORNIKI (University of Toronto Press) was published in 2020.

Research Interests

Ethnography, culture, power and politics in health and medicine, disability, global postsocialism, theatre & performance, design & infrastructure, gender & sexuality, digital worlds, Russia and the Russian-speaking CIS

Courses

Disability Anthropology, Ethnography of Postsocialism, Medical Anthropology

Selected 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.

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.

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.