Rayna Rapp

Professor Emerita of Anthropology

Education

Ph.D. 1973, M.S. 1969, B.S. with honors, 1968, University of Michigan.

Areas of Research/Interest

Gender, reproduction, health and culture, science and technology, United States and Europe.

Selected Publications

2017    "Imagining Disability Futures” in Anthropological Futurities.Juan Salazar et al, eds. Bloomsbury (with Faye Ginsburg).

2017    “Worlding the ‘New Normal’ for Young Adults with Disabilities. Gareth Jones et al eds. In Disability, Normalcy, and the Everyday. Palgrave. (with Faye Ginsburg)

2017    “Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing in the Non-Western Context”. Hastings Center Report March-April 2017 (with Jessica Mozersky et al).

2016      “#cripthevote.org: What’s the Crisis in Neoliberalism Got to Do with It?” Current Anthropology “Crisis in Liberalism” Hot Spot (with Faye Ginsburg).

2016     “Dispatches From the Ground: NIPTs in Global Perspective” BioNews UK http:/www.bionews.org.uk/page609274.asp (with Jessica Mozersky, Marsha Michie, Megan Allyse, Shuba Chandrasekharan

2016    “Prologue” Ellen Lewin & Leni Silverstein, eds. Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the 21st Century. Rutgers UP: 1-5

2015    Cherchez la femme: Reproductive CRISPR and Women’s Choices (with Megan Allyse, Marsha Michie, Jessica Mozersky,) American Journal of Bioethics, special issue on CRISPR 15 (12) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15265161.2015.1103808

2015      “Not Your Mother’s Amniocentesis: genome-based blood screens in pregnancy. (with Jessica Mozersky) GeneWatch. 28/2. June-September.

2015     “Fieldwork on the Spectrum: No Judgments” Somatosphere (with Faye Ginsburg) http://somatosphere.net/2015/07/no-judgments-fieldwork-on-the-spectrum.html

2015      “Making Disability Count: Demography, Futurity and the Making of Disability Publics” Somatosphere (with Faye Ginsburg)   http://somatosphere.net/2015/05/making-disability-count-demography-futurity-and-the-making-of-disability-publics.html

2015    Review, Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy (Cooper & Waldby). Bulletin of the History of Medicine 89 (2): 370-71.

2015      “Big Data, Small Kids: the Globalization of Neuroscience” BioSocieties 

http://ezproxy.library.nyu.edu:3576/biosoc/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/biosoc201533a.html

2015    “’Not Dead Yet’: Changing Disability Imaginaries in the 21st Century” in Veena Das and Clara Han, eds, An Anthropology of Living and Dying. Univ. California Press: 525-541. (with Faye Ginsburg).

2015      Comment following Margaret Lock’s “Comprehending embodiment in the Age of the Epigenome” Current Anthropology, 56 (2) 175-6.      

2015   “Families” in Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss eds. Keywords in Disability Studies. NYU Press: 81-84. (with Faye Ginsberg)

2015    “Screening Disabilities: Atypical Minds in the early 21st Century” in Nancy Hoffman et al eds, Civil  Disabilities, Univ Penn. Press, pp103-122. (with Faye Ginsburg)

2013      “ Entangled Ethnography: Imagining a Future for Young Adults with Learning Disabilities” (with Faye Ginsburg) special issue of Social Science & Medicine 99: 187-193.

2013      “ Disability Worlds”, Annual Rev Anthropology (with Faye Ginsburg).42: 53-68.

2012      “Disability Worlds” in Marcia Inhorn and Emily Wertzel, eds. Medical Anthropology at the Crossroads.  Duke Univ. Press: 163-182.. (with Faye Ginsburg)

2011      “ Reproductive Entanglements: Body, State and Culture in the Dys/Regulation of Child-Bearing” (Review Essay). Social Research 78: 693-718.

2011      “ A Child Surrounds This Brain: the Future of Neurological Difference According to Scientists, Parents, and Diagnosed Young Adults in Martyn Pickersgill & Ira Vankeulen eds., Sociological Reflections on the Neurosciences. London: Emerald: 3-26.

2011      “ Reverberations: Disability and the Kinship Imaginary”. Anthropological Quarterly, 84 (2): 379-410. (with Faye Ginsburg)

2011      “ Chasing Science: Children’s Brains, Scientific Technologies, Family Participation” Science, Technology & Human Values, 36 (5): 662-684.

2011      “The Paradox of Recognition: Success or Stigma for Children with Learning Disabilities”.  In Janice McLaughlin et al, eds. Recognition and Citizenship. Palgrave. (with Faye Ginsburg), pp 166-186.

2010      “ The Human Nature of Disability”. American Anthropologist Dec. 112 (4) 518. (with Faye Ginsburg).

2010      “ The Social Distribution of Moxie” Disability Studies Quarterly June 30 (2): 1-12. (with Faye Ginsburg)

2010      “ Enabling Disability: Rewriting Kinship, Reimagining Citizenship” in Lennard J. Davis, ed, The Disability Studies Reader, 3rd ed. NY: Routledge, pp. 237-253 (with Faye Ginsburg). Reprint of 2001.

2007      “Anthropologists Are Talking About Feminist Anthropology: Louise Lamphere, Rayna Rapp, Gayle Rubin”. Roundtable, Ethnos 72 (3): 408-426

2007:     “ Enlarging Reproduction, Screening Disability” in Marcia Inhorn, ed. Disrupted Reproduction.BergenHahn Press: 98-121. (with Faye Ginsburg).

2007      “Imagining Gender Futures”. Anthropology Newsletter May 48 (5) 5-6.

2006      “Reason to Believe”, special issue on IVF & religion, Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry  30 (4):

2006      “The Thick Social Matrix for Bioethics: Anthropological Approaches ” in Christoph  Rehmann-Sutter et al, eds. Bioethics in Cultural Contexts: Reflections on Method and Finitude. Springer, pp. 341-351

2005      “Commentary: The Eclipse of the Gene and the Return of Divination” by Margaret Lock.  Current Anthropology 46: S64-65.

2005      “Race Variables in Genetic Studies: Complex Traits and the Goal of Reducing Health Disparities” (with Alexandra Shields, Michael Fortun, Evelynn Hammonds, Patricia King, Caryn Lerman, and Patrick Sullivan) American Psychologist, January, pp 77-103.

2004     “Genetic Citizenship” (with Deborah Heath and Karen Sue Taussig) David Nugent & Joan Vincent, eds. A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics. Blackwells, 152-167.

2003     “Cell Life and Death, Child Life and Death: Genomic Horizons, Genetic Disease, Family Stories” In Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock, eds.2003.  Remaking Life and Death. School of American Studies Press, 129-164.

2003     “ Flexible Eugenics: Technologies of the Self in the Age of Genetics”. In Alan Goodman, Deborah Heath and Susan Lindee, eds. Genetic Nature/ Culture:  Anthropology and Science Beyond the Two Culture Divide (with Deborah Heath and Karen Sue Taussig), University of California Press, 58-76.

2001     “Genealogical Dis-ease: Where Hereditary Abnormality, Biomedical Explanation, and Family Responsibility Meet”.  In Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, eds. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Duke University Press, pp. 384-409. (with Deborah Heath and Karen Sue Taussig)

2001     “Gender, Body, Biomedicine: How Some Feminist Concerns Dragged Reproduction to the Center of Social Theory”.  Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 15 (4): 466-477.

2001     “ Enabling Disability: Rewriting Kinship, Reimagining Citizenship”  Public Culture 13: 533-556 (with  Faye Ginsburg)

Current News/Projects

Updated June 2017

For the last decade, Faye Ginsburg and I have pursued research and writing project the rising public presence and consciousness of disability as an aspect of US culture since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Initially funded by the Spencer Foundation and NYU’s Institute for the Study of Human Development and Social Change, we later received support from NYU’s Humanities Institute, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  In addition to our joint work among family, media, legal, and educational innovators in this growing sector, I am now conducting fieldwork in scientific laboratories on brain research about learning, memory, childhood cognitive, emotional, ad behavioral diagnoses and epigenetics.  Of course, kinship relations lie at the heart of our project, and we are interviewing families across a wide array of social locations who have had the experience of having a child diagnosed with special educational categories and services.  Now, aging out of the public education system into a transition to adulthood makes the life course of disability a compelling locus of investigation. We see this as a particularly promising arena for understanding unanticipated cultural activism around gender, racial-ethnic, class and kinship claims on citizenship.  Our fieldwork concerns the rise of disability consciousness. We argue for an explicitly anthropological perspective on the growing public awareness and mediated diversity of “All Kinds of Minds” (to quote a famous and popular book on the subject) in U.S. families and communities.  One of my contributions to this research involves intensive fieldwork at a pediatric neuroscience laboratory, where theories about childhood ADHD, Learning Disabilities, Autism Spectrum Disorders and other conditions are increasingly being folded into collaborations to produce “Big Data” on “Small Kids”.

Forthcoming article co-authored with Faye Ginsburg: 2018 “Cripping the New Normal: Making Disability Count”. ALTER: European J Disability Studies