Anthropology

The Politics of Disability in a Chicago Gang

Thursday, March 24,   3:30 pm in Criser 201

This talk is an attempt to understand why disabilities are disproportionately visited on low-income, African American communities. More generally, I consider the multifaceted ideas about what injury means among disabled populations. My argument is that, while admirable, the Disability Rights movement has focused too emphatically on assuaging social difference within disabled communities; in so doing, the movement has obscured key distinctions along the axes of race and socioeconomic status. We will examine two models of disability: the social, in which there are multiple ways to view ability, and where physical capacities are not devalued (the larger community of disabled activists in Chicago tends to observe this model); and the medical, which highlights physical differences rather than seeking to diminish them (disabled ex–gang members rely on this model). That disabled black and Latino ex–gang members are willing to insist on the defectiveness of their bodies, I argue, points to the crushing burden that violence creates in low-income communities in Chicago. This burden, as well as the dilemmas of the disabled, will be examined with the following (seemingly obscure) lenses attached: notions of debt and obligation. We will see that critical aspects of gang violence revolve around what one owes, and what one is owed. 

Dr. Laurence Ralph is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Departments of Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University.  He is the author ofRenegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago (University of Chicago Press).

His scholarly work explores how the historical circumstances of police abuse, mass incarceration, and the drug trade naturalize disease, disability, and premature death for urban residents, who are often seen as expendable. Theoretically, his research resides at the nexus of critical medical and political anthropology, African American studies, and the emerging scholarship on disability. He combines these literatures to show how violence and injury play a central role in the daily lives of black urbanites.Laurence explored these diverse themes in Anthropological Theory, Disability Studies Quarterly,Transition, and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. 

Laurence earned a PhD Master of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and a Bachelor of Science degree from Georgia Institute of Technology where he majored in History, Technology and Society.