About

Megan Colleen Moodie is a Professor of Anthropology in the Social Sciences Division at UC Santa Cruz. She holds a B.A. from Skidmore College and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include feminist theory, disability justice, medical anthropology, and creative ethnographic methods, with geographical focus areas in South Asia, East Europe, and the United States. Moodie has contributed to the understanding of aspiration within Indian Scheduled Tribes, gender and chronic illness, and disability anthropology, integrating feminist and Black feminist perspectives into her work. She is the principal investigator of the UC Humanities Research Institute Residential Research Cluster on disability justice and has published extensively on topics related to gender, illness, and ethnographic methodology.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Medicine
• Public relations
• Anthropology
• Gender studies
• Medical education
• Literature
• Engineering
• Epistemology
• Engineering ethics
• Aesthetics
• Art
• Multimedia
• Psychology
• Immunology
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Autoethnography, Undone: Toward a Crip Critique of Ethnographic Realism

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2025-02-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How to be disabled in a pandemic By MaraMills, HarrisKornstein, FayeGinsburg, and RaynaRapp, New York, New York: New York University Press. 2025. 392 pp.

  Medical Anthropology Quarterly · 2025-11-18

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic, edited by Mara Mills, Harris Kornstein, Faye Ginsburg, and Rayna Rapp (hereafter Mills et al.), is a polyvocal yet intensely-local, documentary yet future-imagining, and timely yet historically-expansive view of the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. Its contributors, many of whom first convened in a documentation project called the “Disability Covid Chronicles” that met regularly via Zoom at the height of the city's shelter-in-place order, represent a wide swath of what Mills et al. call—after the work of Cassandra Hartblay (2020)—“disability expertise.”1 That is, their knowledge is constructed both “as and with” people with disabilities, including “autistic adults, people living with chronic illness, blind accessibility experts, Black pregnant people experiencing mental health challenges, people with mobility impairments, adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their supporters, anti-racist activists, and incarcerated and unhoused disabled people” (11–12). Given the grinding ableism of higher ed spaces, it is still rare for any academic collection to collectively lay claim to the authors’ disabled identities; also unusual, many of the essays could be seen as examples of what is now being referred to commonly as “autotheory” (Borstoff & Cooppan, 2025).2 For these reasons alone the volume is a unique contribution to medical anthropology and cultural studies more broadly. But in addition to the disability expertise of each author, what emerges from the collection is a robust picture of a complex social phenomenon, what Mills et al. call “the disability dialectic” (4). The dialectic they describe is the simultaneous fear and hope of people with disabilities navigating a hostile world made more complex by the arrival of a highly contagious pathogen. It is the provocation of what contributors Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp describe as “both existential dilemmas and unexpected catalysts for creativity” (168). At the same time that “crisis standards of care guidelines” saw the quiet part of eugenics spoken out loud in hospitals (as described in Mara Mills’ chapter on New York State Ventilator Allocation Guidelines), people living with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) felt like pandemic conditions gave them new opportunities for socializing (Kornstein and Rogers), and blind New Yorkers experienced increased awareness about basic access measures online (Coklyat and Fleet). Palpable anxiety and joy about what will happen in various futures—tomorrow, decades from now—throb between the lines of the entire collection. For medical anthropology in particular, How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic is a watershed in that the chapters deal with medical questions, structures, and personnel in the same frame as disability without medicalizing disability itself. A look at the volume bookends makes the point clearly: an introduction by Pulitzer-Prize-winning science writer Ed Yong, who is known for his ability to translate complicated medical research for more general audiences, and a coda by well-known disability activist Judy Heumann (depicted in the film “Crip Camp,” released in 2022 and discussed by several of the authors)— who crystallized resistance to the medicalization of disability, with its singular insistence upon “cure,” in her famous refusal to see herself as “sick.”3 If at some point the medical model of disability, which focuses on impairment and its amelioration, and the social model of disability, which stresses the way that people with disabilities are excluded from full participation in built environments and social life, may have seemed at odds, How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic reflects and helps to create a new political world for health and healing. This is a world in which suffering—pain, impairment, disease—can be addressed as the subject of justice pursuits, but disability is not imagined only as illness in need of cure, erasure, or improvement. While it is hard to survey such a far-reaching publication, representing different disciplines, methods, and subject positions, the editors usefully identify three patterns that run across the chapters. (While the patterns emerge and are brought to bear in the specific constellations of New York City, their wider implications are obvious). First, many chapters describe a “hierarchy of disability vulnerability” (Mills et al., 6), with pre-extant vulnerabilities such as incarceration (Bordelli, Thomas, and Brown), residence in group-care settings (Ginsburg and Rapp), lack of housing (Bhaman), and anti-Blackness (Mbonde) all being exacerbated under pandemic conditions. Second, disability and discourses of “care” were also used to justify greater surveillance and population management, such as in the allocation of ventilators to those judged to have higher quality of life (Mills) or the violent detention of undocumented residents (Salyer). Third, in many cases authors saw examples of what Mills et al. call “crip pandemic cultural production.” This refers to everything from daily techniques for getting by to bed-bound imagination to dramatic public artworks (Kornstein and Rogers; Watlington; Mbonde; Mohapatra, Sharma, Ngyuen, and Kuo), usually rooted in notions of crip joy and connection. Those teaching courses in medical anthropology, disability justice, abolition, Covid-19, or the rise of 21st-century fascism in the United States will find this volume useful for discussion. The prose is consistently accessible and contextualized in both deep study and experiential knowledge; students will undoubtedly appreciate these materials. It is, of course, impossible to read this volume in the final quarter of 2025 without the benefit of hindsight, knowing that many of the fears it conveys are being realized. Anxiety has grown, and hope can seem rare. I would suggest that this volume encourages us to remember the myriad ways community and beauty are made in the face of danger. Not long after the publication of How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic, I found myself in the Musée national Picasso-Paris, limping through an exhibit called “Degenerate Art: Modern Art on Trial Under the Nazis.” Comprised of works from the infamous 1937 Nazi exhibition “Entartete Kunst” (translated as “Degenerate Art”), which toured Germany to “prove” that modern art represented the decline of national culture, and set against press clippings and biographical materials about the artists (not just Pablo Picasso, but also Paul Klee, Vincent Van Gogh, Vassily Kandinsky, and many others), the show stunned, overwhelmed, and terrified its contemporary audience.4 As I sat to catch my breath, I realized that most viewers were probably not viewing “degeneracy” through a disability lens, as I was. But of course, the eugenic mathematics of those deemed “unfit”—people with disabilities being at the top of the list—was an essential piece of Nazi rhetoric. And the art was fighting back. Surrealist and modernist works were challenging (parts of) the status quo and standing up to fascism; they were cripping the triumphant able-bodied march of history, much like those creative New Yorkers who wrote and spoke with the contributors to this volume. Given that Mills et al. relate in the Introduction that “a primary motivation of this project has been to archive ephemeral evidence of this important [crip] cultural work, much of which circulates widely but informally” (8), I suggest that even if that had been the only aim, to archive artistic “ephemeral evidence” is itself important, even radical, and worth publishing and reading. Putting How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic on my shelf, I think of the words of Egyptian surrealist artists, written first in Arabic, then translated into French and printed on the Picasso Museum wall: “O [people] of art, [people] of letters! Let us take up the challenge together! We stand absolutely as one with this degenerate art. In it resides all hopes of the future.”5

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Coproduction of Medical Knowledge

  Annual Review of Anthropology · 2025-10-21

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  What is the relationship between experiential knowledge and the categories, etiologies, and treatment modalities of medical science? When do patients form social movements and demand participation in medical research? This article reviews trends in how medical anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, and the history of medicine approach the coproduction of medical knowledge. Coproduction is used as a wide-ranging idiom to capture how knowledge building happens across social-material domains and as an aspirational vision for the ways that collaborative knowledge making can be intentional, improved on, and reimagined. I begin with an intellectual and social history of voluntary self-help organizations, patient advocacy movements, citizen science, lay expertise, and the era of intentionally patient-led research. I then offer thoughts about how abolition medicine and Indigenous science offer a radical vision for the coproduction of medical knowledge, especially in an era of antiscience, when strong political forces threaten public well-being.

  PublisherDOI

• Introducing How We Make It: Disability Justice, Autoimmunity, Community, a Multimedia Project

  Catalyst Feminism Theory Technoscience · 2024

  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  How We Make It: Disability Justice, Autoimmunity, Community is a born-digital multimedia piece that lives on the Scalar platform and that was submitted and eventually accepted into the Special Section on Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19. The text below is a close reproduction of the Navigation page within the Scalar piece. While reading this text, one cracks open the door to glimpse the ten-person collective behind this project. However, we invite the reader to go directly to the website (link provided below) to fully partake of the variety of paths—including embedded sound and video files, image annotations, and links to other sites—that perform a listening to and reflecting upon crip knowledge and joy as it was catalyzed and recorded by this ten-person collaborative ruminating on chronic illness, long COVID, anti-Asian violence, incarceration, care burdens, mental distress, electromagnetic fields, and deep listening. After going to the Scalar website, please make sure to turn your speaker volume up. Lingering over key images (while in Scalar) will also reveal pop-up annotations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Patients as knowledge partners in the context of complex chronic conditions

  Medical Humanities · 2024-07-18 · 13 citations

  articleOpen access

  This article conveys how taking patient knowledge seriously can improve patient experience and further medical science. In clinical contexts related to infection-associated chronic conditions and other complex chronic illnesses, patient knowledge is often undervalued, even when clinicians have limited training in diagnosing and treating a particular condition. Despite growing acknowledgement of the importance of patients as 'stakeholders', clinicians and medical researchers have yet to fully develop ways to evaluate and, when appropriate, meaningfully incorporate patient knowledge-experiential, scientific, social scientific, historical or otherwise-into clinical practice and research. We argue that there are opportunities for clinicians and researchers to collaborate with patients and colleagues from the social sciences and humanities. We use two examples to demonstrate why patient knowledge should inform medical engagement with chronic and complex conditions. The first comes from a disability studies scholar who describes the social biases that can sideline patient expertise, and the second is from an anthropologist whose reading in medical humanities led to an effective treatment for her recovery. Rather than merely acknowledging 'lived experience', clinical and research teams should include patients with complex chronic conditions as 'knowledge partners'. These patients occupy unique and valuable epistemological positions, and their knowledge should be considered with as much openness and rigour as other forms of medical knowledge. As more medical schools, residency programmes and hospitals emphasise the need for 'deep listening' and patient input, we encourage meaningful engagement with patients whose insights can provide crucial knowledge for clinical and scientific advancement.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Community voices: broadening participation in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine among persons with disabilities

  Nature Communications · 2022 · 7 citations

  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  • Engineering ethics

  Disability has too often been peripheral to efforts to widen the STEMM pipeline, hampering research quality and innovation. Inspired by change in education delivery and research collaborations during the pandemic, we offer a structure for efforts to recruit and retain disabled scientists and practitioners.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Pluck the Stars from the Sky

  2022-10-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter discusses the India’s Adivasi communities and the field of Indigenous studies in South Asia. It shows how a consideration of the grave health inequalities faced by Adivasi communities in India can benefit from discussions about Indigenous worlds in the Americas, though these two fields are often portrayed as belonging to oppositional “post-colonial” and “decolonial” approaches. The chapter examines a highly successful novel, The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey, written by Adivasi author Hansda Sowendra Shekhar, who is also a medical doctor in the tribal state of Jharkhand. It argues that understanding the problem of Adivasi ill-health requires a perspective beyond questions of bare survival and health metrics as they are usually posited in developmentalist health paradigms. Indigeneity is a vexed concept in South Asian studies.

  PublisherDOI

• "The Eye, The Finger, and the Foot": Methodological Sententiae for Embodied Research Creation

  Feminist Studies · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Aesthetics
  • Sociology

  "The Eye, The Finger, and the Foot":Methodological Sententiae for Embodied Research Creation Megan Moodie (bio) Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, "It feels right to me," acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding. —Audre Lorde, "The Uses of the Erotic," Sister Outsider, 1984 The materialism in this book lives in the flesh of these women's lives: the exhaustion we feel in our bones at the end of the day, the fire we feel in our hearts when we are insulted, the knife we feel in our backs when we are betrayed, the nausea we feel in our bellies when we are afraid, even the hunger we feel between our hips when we long to be touched. —Cherríe Moraga, "La Jornada, Preface, 1981" This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 1981 "We write—think and feel—(with) our entire bodies rather than only (with) our minds or hearts . . . thought is as much a product of the eye, the finger, or the foot as it is of the brain. —Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman/Native/Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, 1989 invocations As a field of inquiry and activism, feminist studies has always prided itself on its interdisciplinarity. Unlike more traditional academic formations such as history, literature, anthropology, or psychology, feminist work is not defined by its topics, sources, or its methods; it has thus flourished [End Page 287] books discussed in this essay Experiments in Joy. Gabrielle Civil. Fairfax, VA: Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2019. Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity. Dorinne Kondo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation. Natalie Loveless. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Jenny Odell. Brooklyn, NY, and London: Melville House, 2019. in all of these fields and beyond. This is its great strength: feminist spaces foster a mode of engagement in which eclectic, hybrid work might flourish. Forced to be neither this nor that, feminist scholars and artists are free to challenge and upend expectations. The lack of a unifying object or methodology is also a stumbling block, however, particularly when feminist production becomes an explicit site of pedagogy. How does one know when they are doing feminist work? And what about teaching something like "feminist methods"? As anyone who has tried to create a seminar in feminist research methodologies will attest, this is not a question for which there is a ready-made corpus. Many would probably agree that feminism is a mode of (positive) critique as well as a life project,1 and feminist work a necessary collage of archival analysis, ethnography, textual criticism, and even artistic or poetic production: pick the right tool for the job. But the selection of a methodological toolkit more often than not pushes scholarship and creative work back into the arms of a discipline that will take for granted the "how to" of knowledge production in problematic ways that made many practitioners flee disciplinary conventions to begin with. [End Page 288] Complicating the methodological picture even more, doing feminist studies—including in this very journal—means valuing "other" ways of knowing and creating that may not reproduce the forms and interests of traditional scholarship. In fact, many would argue that feminist work should not reproduce those forms or interests. From influential collections such as This Bridge Called My Back to the pages of Feminist Studies today, which includes color-print artwork, poetry, and fiction, "feminist studies" has always included projects and problematics that are equally art and scholarship. It could perhaps not be otherwise—outsider knowledge is by definition often not recognizable as such. As Ruth Behar says of This Bridge Called My Back and the work it birthed, feminist cultural production by those despised by and excluded from the western male canon were never going to create knowledge in one approved modality for one idealized academic audience. The creative and the critical would never be separate but would live together to "challenge the distancing and alienating forms of...

  PublisherDOI

• 8. Feminist Theory Redux: Neoliberalism’s Public-Private Divide

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020-10-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Feminist Theory Redux:

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2019-10-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Charles L. Briggs

  2 shared

• Lisa Rofel

  2 shared

• Rachel Lee

  2 shared

• Logan E. Gin

  Arizona State University

  2 shared

• Nikita Simpson

  University of London

  1 shared

• Siobhán M. Mattison

  University of New Mexico

  1 shared

• Ilana Löwy

  Centre de Recherche Médecine, Sciences, Santé, Santé Mentale, Société

  1 shared

• Lisa Cliggett

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Principal Investigator, UC Humanities Research Institute Res…