Literature
Intellectual disability has been a neglected topic in ethnographic research - and the works that exist are often scattered across different conversations. This database brings together all the publications in one place so that you can find writing on the themes, regions, and life-stages relevant to you (or discover that no-one has published any such research yet!)
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Authors | Year | Title | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
Angrosino | 1998 | Opportunity House: Ethnographic Stories of Mental Retardation | |
Angrosino | 1994 | On the Bus with Vonnie Lee: Explorations in Life History and Metaphor | |
Angrosino | 1999 | Mental Disability in the United States: An Interactionist Perspective | |
Aspler | 2019 | Making Research More Ethical for Adults with FASD: A Story of Stakeholder Engagement, Accommodation, and Inclusion | |
Avery | 2020 | An Ethnography of Severe Intellectual Disability: Becoming 'Dirty Little Freaks’ | |
Banks | 2018 | Working through ethical and emotional concerns and uncertainties in ethnographic research with people with learning disabilities | |
Barnbaum | 2019 | Research Cohorts: Diverse Research Subjects, Similar Remedies to Errors in Consent | |
Block | 2002 | Sexuality Parenthood and Cognitive Disability in Brazil | |
Block | 2007 | Institutional Utopias: Eugenics and Intellectual Disability in Brazil | |
Bogdan & Taylor | 1982 | Inside Out: The Social Meaning of Mental Retardation | |
Booth & Booth | 1999 | Risk, Resilience and Competence: Parents with Learning Difficulties and their Children | |
Campoy | 2019 | Bridging Worlds: Can Anthropology Be a Communicational Therapy? | |
Cascio & Racine | 2019 | Research Involving Participants with Cognitive Disability and Differences: Ethics Autonomy Inclusion and Innovation | |
Chetan | 2024 | Illustrating the experiences of students with learning disabilities in higher education: Comics‐based representation of fieldwork findings | |
Choudhary, Ranganathan | 2025 | Rethinking disability, care, and motherhood: lived experiences of disabled mothers in India | |
Cobigo, Potvin, Fulford, Chalghoumi, Hanna, Plourde & Taylor | 2019 | A Conversation with Research Ethics Boards about Inclusive Research with Persons with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities | |
Cox, Orchard, Cushing & Kinsella | 2019 | Mediators of Inclusion: Challenges to Including Adults with Mild Intellectual Disability in Qualitative Research | |
Davies | 1999 | Constructing Other Selves: (In)competences and the Category of Learning Difficulties | |
Dawson | 2025 | Long COVID vs. Functional Neurological Disorder: Punching Down | |
Devlieger | 1999 | (In)competence in America in Comparative Perspective | |
Edgerton | 1993 | The Cloak of Competence | |
Edgerton | 1970 | Mental Retardation in Non-Western Societies: Toward a Cross-Cultural Perspective on Incompetence | |
Edgerton | 1984 | Lives in Process: Mildly Retarded Adults in a Large City | |
Edgerton | 1986 | A Case of Delabeling: Some Practical and Theoretical Implications | |
Edgerton & Gaston | 1991 | I've Seen It All!: Lives of Older Persons with Mental Retardation in the Community | |
Faubion | 2018 | On Misfitness: Reflections in and out of Fashion | |
Fonseca &Fietz | 2018 | Collectives of care in the relations surrounding people with ‘head troubles’: family, community and gender in a working-class neighbourhood of southern Brazil | |
Friedner | 2018 | Beyond the Social | |
Ginburg & Rapp | 2018 | Cognitive Disability: Towards an Ethics of Possibility | |
Gleason | 1989 | Special Education in Context: An Ethnographic Study of Persons with Developmental Disabilities | |
Howell & Shogren | 2019 | Differing Understandings of Informed Consent Held by Research Institutions, People with Intellectual Disability, and Guardians: Implications for Inclusive, Ethical Research | |
Hubert | 1991 | Home-Bound: Crisis in the Care of Young People with Severe Learning Difficulties | |
Jackson | 2021 | Worlds of Care: The Emotional Lives of Fathers Caring for Children with Disabilities | |
Jackson | 2024 | Building strong foundations: listening to and learning from people with intellectual disabilities and their families | |
Jackson | 2024 | Beyond a logic of choice: the role of family narratives in ethical, person‐centred support for individuals with intellectual disabilities | |
Jackson | 2023 | Between us: Facilitated decision-making in the relational experience of profound intellectual disability | |
Jacobs, Quayle, Wilkinson, MacMahon | 2021 | Relationships Matter! Utilising Ethics of Care to Understand Transitions in the Lives of Adults with Severe Intellectual Disabilities | |
Jenkins | 1999 | Towards a Social Model of (In)competence | |
Jenkins | 1999 | Culture, Classification and (In)competence | |
Johnson | 1998 | Deinstitutionalising Women: An Ethnographic Study of Institutional Closure | |
Kaufman | 1986 | Life History in Progress: A Retarded Daughter Educates Her Mother | |
Kernan, Hubbard & Kennan | 1986 | Living in the Real World: Process and Change in the Life of a Retarded Man | |
Klein | 2019 | Informed Consent for Closed-Loop DBS Psychiatric Research: Engaging End Users to Understand Risks and Improve Practice | |
Koegel | 1986 | You Are What You Drink: Evidence of Socialized Incompetence in the Life of a Mildly Retarded Adult | |
Koegel | 1986 | Social Support and Individual Adaptation: A Diachronic Perspective | |
Kohler | 2019 | Assuming Capacity: Ethical Participatory Research with Adolescents and Adults with Down Syndrome | |
Korbin | 1986 | Sarah: The Life Course of a Down’s Syndrome Child | |
Kulick & Rydström | 2015 | Loneliness and Its Opposite: Sex, Disability, and the Ethics of Engagement | |
Kulick & Vehmas | 2025 | Clashing Vulnerabilities, Disability and Conflict | |
Langness & Levine | 1988 | Culture and Retardation: Life Histories of Mildly Mentally Retarded Persons in American Society | |
Langness & Turner | 1986 | It Wasn't Fair: Six Years in the Life of Larry B | |
Levine & Langness | 1986 | Conclusions: Themes in an Anthropology of Mild Mental Retardation | |
Levinson | 2010 | Making Life Work: Freedom and Disability in a Community Group Home | |
Lundgren | 1999 | Learning to Become (In)competent: Children in Belize Speak Out | |
Maastricht | 1999 | Work, Opportunity and Culture: (In)competence in Greece and Wales | |
Manor-Binyamini | 2018 | Reasons for Marriage of Educated Bedouin Women to Bedouin Men with Intellectual Disability | |
McDermott | 1993 | The Acquisition of a Child by a Learning Disability | |
McKearney | 2020 | What Escapes Persuasion: Why Intellectual Disability Troubles 'Dependence' in Liberal Societies | |
McKearney | 2018 | Receiving the Gift of Cognitive Disability: Recognizing Agency in the Limits of the Rational Subject | |
McKearney & Zoanni | 2018 | Introduction: For an Anthropology of Cognitive Disability | |
McKearney & Zoanni | 2023 | Intellectual Disability | |
McKearney & Zoanni | 2018 | Cognitive Disability | |
McKearney & Zogas | 2021 | Mentally Fit: Negotiating the Boundaries of Cognitive Disability | |
Mehmood | 2019 | Using Ethnographic Methods to Determine Capacity to Consent amongst Individuals Diagnosed with Chronic Mental Illnesses | |
Mercieca | 2013 | Living Otherwise: Students with Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities as Agents in Educational Contexts | |
Montreuil, Teachman & Carnevale | 2019 | Recognizing the Voices of Children with 'Cognitive Impairments' in Research | |
Nuttall | 1999 | States and Categories: Indigenous Models of Personhood in Northwest Greenland | |
Pattadath | 2025 | Re-Engaging with the ‘Aging Body’: A Feminist Disability Perspective | |
Pattadath, Ranganathan & Hussain | 2024 | Aging, caregiving, and disability futurities: Challenging policy frameworks | |
Patterson & Block | 2019 | Disability, Vulnerability, and the Capacity to Consent | |
Pols, Althoff & Bransen | 2017 | The Limits of Autonomy: Ideals in Care for People with Learning Disabilities | |
Quinn | 2023 | Crip Intimacy: Sockfriends, Sexuality, and ‘Cripped Things’ | |
Quinn & Long | 2024 | Consent-as-Method: Capacity to Consent of Cognitively Disabled People and Research Ethics Review | |
Rapp & Ginsburg | 2011 | Reverberations: Disability and the New Kinship Imaginary | |
Rapp & Ginsburg | 2001 | Enabling Disability: Rewriting Kinship Reimagining Citizenship | |
Reno | 2024 | Home Signs: An Ethnography of Life beyond and beside Language | |
Richard Jenkins | 1999 | Questions of Competence: Culture Classification and Intellectual Disability | |
Rutherford | 2025 | Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World | |
Sankary & Ford | 2019 | Ongoing Consent in Situations of Cognitive Vulnerability: Special Considerations in Implanted Neural Device Trials | |
Sargent | 2026 | Making Down Syndrome: Motherhood and Kinship Futures in Urban Jordan | |
Sargent | 2020 | Kinship, Connective Care, and Disability in Jordan | |
Sargent & Kahana | 2019 | Challenges of Participating in Research about Living with MCI among Disabled Veterans | |
Stentiford, Koutsouris & Allan | 2023 | They think it's trendy to have a disability/mental-illness': disability, capital and desire in elite education | |
Trammell | 2019 | Shifting Identities: Research on Macro and Micro Aspects of ID College Programs | |
Vaidya | 2023 | From problem-centered to centering relationalities: Engagements with disability and sexuality in India | |
Vaidya | 2026 | Affordances of Fun: An Ethnography of Special Educators and Intellectually Disabled Adults in India | |
Vehmas, Bredewold, Mietola & Weele | 2025 | Inherent vs. Contingent Vulnerabilities in the Care for People with Profound Intellectual and Multiple Disabilities | |
Walmsley & Johnson | 2010 | Inclusive Research with People with Learning Disabilities: Past Present and Futures | |
Whittemore | 1986 | Theodore V. Barrett: An Account of Adaptive Competence | |
Whittemore, Langness & Koegel | 1986 | The Life History Approach to Mental Retardation | |
Whyte | 1999 | Slow Cookers and Madmen: Competence of Heart and Head in Rural Uganda | |
Wolf-Meyer | 2020 | Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age | |
Wright | 2019 | Who Decides? Legal Changes to Facilitate Inclusion of Participants with Impaired Cognition in Research | |
Zoanni | 2018 | The Possibilities of Failure: Personhood and Cognitive Disability in Urban Uganda | |
Zoanni | 2020 | The Ecology of Disabled Minds in Urban Uganda | |
Zogas | 2018 | Thinking about Thinking: Mild Traumatic Brain Injury and Finding Continuity in US Military Veterans' Embodied Minds | |
Zogas | 2020 | Leveraging Ambiguity in the Clinic: Mild TBI and Veterans' Forgetting |