Entangled ethnography: Imagining a future for young adults with learning disabilities

Our article draws on one aspect of our multi-sited long-term ethnographic research in New York City on cultural innovation and Learning Disabilities (LD). We focus on our efforts to help create two innovative transition programs that also became sites for our study when we discovered that young adults with disabilities were too often “transitioning to nowhere” as they left high school. Because of our stakes in this process as parents of children with learning disabilities as well as anthropologists, we have come to think of our method as entangled ethnography, bringing the insights of both insider and outsider perspectives into productive dialog, tailoring a longstanding approach in critical anthropology to research demedicalizing the experience of disability.