Author Archives: Gabrielle Hanley-Mott

PhD Candidate in Cultural Anthropology. My interest areas are Disability Studies, STS, American Studies, Medical Anthropology, Medical Narratives. I worked with amputees and their experiences with acquired disability and prostheses.
ghanley1@binghamton.edu | Assemblage Profile
a right-side biological arm and hand of a prosthetist holding a prosthetic arm that's attached to an amputee

How to Imagine the Unknown: Choosing an Arm Prosthesis

Gabrielle Hanley-Mott October 12, 2023
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When amputation happens, it is an un-ignorable event. After the surgery, the person learns how to be an amputee, they learn to conceptualize their altered body. This work belongs to the inner world of the amputee, their bodily experience, and to the attitudes and environment around them. Many amputees will adopt a prosthesis. However, the journey of choosing, training on, and incorporating a prosthesis into one’s practice and identity requires the amputee to imagine future bodily experiences and knowledge. Much of this imagining happens in unfamiliar and mediated settings: in doctors’ offices that are also hi-tech device shops, or in meetings with other prosthesis users. (read more...)

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Photo of a white british bulldog looking at the camera in the backyard of a house

The Allowable Limit of Disability

Gabrielle Hanley-Mott June 22, 2022
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In February 2022 a court in Norway banned the further breeding and selling of British Bulldogs and Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. Beyond Norway, the ban has sparked conversation amongst UK and American breeders. The reason for this ban is the high rates of disability that affect the dogs; the official language is that the individuals are ‘disease guaranteed’. As a person whose work often overlaps with critical disability studies, I found myself obsessing about these news pieces. These dogs were banned because they were considered too disabled, this court was putting a limit on how disabled these dogs were allowed to be. My conclusion, after stewing on this for 6 months, is that disability is the limit of commodification and vice versa, commodification is the limit of disability. First, it is important to understand that these dogs are a commodity. And as a commodity, they have always been disabled. These (read more...)

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A placard from a climate change protest with "Disabled people for future!" written on it with a small size disability icon on bottom left of the placard and a small size world on fire icon on bottom right of it

Moving Towards Disability

Gabrielle Hanley-Mott December 2, 2021

December 3rd is the UN’s International Day for People with Disabilities. The theme of 2021 was “Building Back Better: toward a disability-inclusive, accessible and sustainable post COVID-19 World”. Of course, 2021 has hardly been a post-COVID world; and the social and health effects of the pandemic continue to place people with disabilities at risk. According to the UN, days of recognition work to celebrate, educate, and ‘mobilize political will’ (https://www.un.org/en/observances). These days of recognition are often for complex problems and, as CASTAC’s 2020 post says, the next question is What Happens The Day After? (Borodina 2020). This year I would like to present a brief case for how and why we, in STS and anthropology, can take up Disability as a lived reality and analytic for our work. I discuss disability as a category and its implications and then present two possible frameworks for its incorporation. (read more...)

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