HHS Speaker: Dr. Tyler Zoanni
This talk challenges conventional critiques of institutions within disability studies and activism by drawing on fieldwork with a Catholic home and a Pentecostal school for people with intellectual disabilities in Uganda. Rather than stop at thinking about the institutional spaces of these Christian organizations as segregating exclusions from wider social life, this talk approaches the work these institutions do in terms of inclusion – as constitutive inclusions, referring to the ways these organizations serve to underwrite not only the basic existence but also the person-hood of their residents and students. In turn, such an analysis supports rethinking conventional North Atlantic understandings of institutions.
About the Speaker
Tyler Zoanni is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Bremen. His research focuses on politics, health, religion, kinship, aesthetics, and personhood, and is based on fieldwork in East/Central Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Central Europe. Tyler grew up on a farm in Montana and studied in Chicago, Cambridge (Massachusetts), and New York. His work appears in edited volumes such as Cambridge Anthropology and Somatosphere, as well as in articles in Cultural Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, Environmental Humanities, Africa, and Anthropological Quarterly. Tyler's first film, "The Ladies" (in Ukrainian with English subtitles), is distributed by DER.
Originally published at reilly.nd.edu.