A Ms. Magazine "Most Anticipated Feminist Book of 2025"
How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic (New York University Press, 2025) tells the story of how disabled people in New York City experienced the COVID-19 pandemic.
By focusing on a single city over several years, the book documents the pandemic's impact in different settings, from prisons and immigration detention centers, senior centers in Chinatown, to hospitals in Queens and the Bronx, schools and homeless shelters, public transportation and in social media. Scholars, writers, and activist contributors offer up personal and ethnographic accounts in the book's 15 essays.
How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic depicts the disproportionate risk experienced by disabled New Yorkers, the breadth of their creative responses to the pandemic, as well as the depth of their expertise as practices they had been utilizing for years — online learning, quarantining, and creating community support networks of mutual aid — became widely adopted.
After reading this book, it’ll leave you wondering what could have happened if our ableist society centered disabled people and took them seriously.
As an early epicenter of the virus, NYC disabled communities were among the hardest hit, suffering not just from Covid but also from unfair work and housing policies, stigma, and marginalization. The book's editors set out to capture this reality while also archiving the ephemera of what they refer to as 'crip pandemic cultural production:' "social practices as well as disability art media, and aesthetics that circulated widely but informally through events, social media, zines, and other formats that are at risk of being lost to longer-term collective memory."
How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic is edited by Media Culture, and Communication (MCC) Associate Professor Mara Mills, MCC alum (and current Assistant Professor of Public and Applied Humanities at the University of Arizona) Harris Kornstein, NYU David B. Kriser Professor of Anthropology Faye Ginsburg and NYU Anthropology Professor Emerita Rayna Rapp.
The work is part of a larger project, supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, that the editors undertook to collect stories, artwork, and other materials, and archiving these items for the public in what became known as the Disability COVID Chronicles.
Minor
Disability Studies
This interdisciplinary undergraduate minor introduces students to the historical, social, and legal circumstances that shape the experience of disability.
Award Highlights Impact on Disability and Communication
Media, Culture, and Communication Associate Professor Mara Mills was recognized by the National Communication Association for outstanding achievement and enduring impact in disability and communication studies.
A Beat of Her Own: Alum Amanda Morris (BS '18) Shapes How The Media Reports on Disability
Amanda Morris, a graduate of NYU’s Media, Culture, and Communication and Journalism departments, is a reporter for The Washington Post and considered a trailblazer on the national disability beat.
Related Department
Media, Culture, and Communication
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