Rayna rapp biography sample
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You have to make the institutional change, whatever the struggle, exactly where your workplace, your community and your family are.
Faye: And it demands action. Summarizing those endeavors is a task for another author; the rather obvious point here is that mentorship, much like building community and revolution, takes many forms and by dint of necessity is more often strategic than time-intensive.
I believe that I’m not alone in thinking about Rayna as someone in the center of major anthropological and multi-disciplinary discussions, garnering diverse audiences and occupying much of her time, as well as about my appreciation for the powerful moments when we were able to have substantive conversations.
“Comment on Margaret Lock, ‘Comprehending the Body in the Era of the Epigenome’.” Current Anthropology 56(2), 169-170.
Cite as: Anglin, Mary. She has contributed over 80 published works to the field of anthropology, independently, as a co-author, editor, and forward-writing, including Robbie Davis-Floyd and Carolyn Sargent's Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge.
“Gender, Body, Biomedicine: How Some Feminist Concerns Dragged Reproduction to the Center of Social Theory.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 15(4): 466-477.
__. All of that was part of reflecting on our own lives and the politics of what was going on around us, and being porous to those critiques rather than to some kind of defensive upholding of the expertise of anthropology.
And then Faye’s daughter Sam is born in 1989 with this mysterious set of symptoms, and we just kept in a constant conversation as Faye and Fred (her husband, anthropologist Fred Myers) had to figure out how to enable their daughter to both be diagnosed and flourish.
Faye: And because by then we were very close friends, our families were very connected from the beginning, from the birth of Sam who had a rare degenerative Jewish genetic disease, Familial Dysautonomia, and then later Rayna’s son, Teo was born…
Rayna: …who had a mild disability, dyslexia. It kept the conversation going about how to deal with the bureaucracy of special education, and all the injustices our disabled kids experienced, whether they were microaggressions, bullying, or the way in which children who are different are excluded from so many public events and venues; their lives are not necessarily cherished or valued by the larger community.
Faye: Rayna was looking at the early days of genetic testing; disability was inherently part of that conversation, which wasn’t always being addressed in the research going on in reproduction.
People respect us for the fact that we support our children and try to find and make opportunities for them and many of their peers. Ginsburg and Rapp identify the cultural innovations and “accessible futures” engendered by disability activists as new forms of world-making (2020:179, 190). So, we have to talk, and I have to peer at the screen, and she always knows if I’m getting upset about something she’s putting on the keyboard because I stand up and I go closer to the screen!
So that’s the kind of knowledge that we have learned really goes right back into the world – to disability worlds — in a variety of ways.
Rayna Rapp
Anthropology, New York University
Rayna Rapp (former Rayna R. Reiter) is a professor and associate chair of anthropology at New York University, specializing in gender and health; the politics of reproduction; science, technology, and genetics; and disability in the United States and Europe.
That’s really what brought us together in the first place. We continue to hope that anthropology will change and recognize the significance of disability –a fundamental form of human difference — to our field.
And what advice would you give to those of us attempting to use our own lived experiences to bridge the research/activism nexus?
Faye: When we started this work many years ago, we thought, where is disability in anthropology? And that’s part of a long relationship.
Faye: There are parts of the book where Rayna did more of the research or I did more of the research… But we have just combined everything in the book
Rayna: …because, as we often said, we don’t know where one brain ends and the other begins.
Bridget: Disability Worlds is an incredibly accessible book, that will appeal to a wide range of readers including disability scholars, activists, and allies.
Actually, it’s all about editing [laughter].
Faye: We know a lot of people who work together who alternate writing: “You do Chapter One, I’ll do Chapter Two”, but we just sat down together from the beginning and wrote everything together.
Rayna: …and we don’t know why but we just started writing, and we’re always in this office, which means only Faye can type because she uses a trackball mouse that I can’t use.
And even though there were some fantastic pioneering folks who did some really important door-opening books and conversations which we wrote about in an Annual Review essay in 2013…
Rayna: …there was a bias against it. Good things are happening but there is an ongoing struggle for recognition of this area. It is important to us that this be in a language and in a set of familiar research categories for anthropologists who might read the book and say – “Oh, this belongs in my introductory course”, or “Oh, this belongs in my course on the arts”.
Those students usually are strong activists by the time they’re in college.