This talk will use examples from Devva Kasnitz's experience as a speech impaired person, an anthropologist, and a long-term promoter of disability studies and activism to celebrate opportunities and to identify potential fault lines and quagmires to map in the further development of disability studies.

Devva Kasnitz, Ph.D., Kate Welling Scholar in Disability Studies at Miami University, trained as a cultural geographer and a medical anthropologist with research on health policy and disability. Her current work focuses on speech impairment and the politics of social participation, and on disability services in higher education. She has mentored a generation of disability studies scholars in the US, Australia, and Guatemala. She has worked in the area of disability studies for the last 39 years while still maintaining an interest in ethnicity and immigration. She was on the founding board of the Society for Disability Studies (SDS) and is now the Executive Director. She was also a founding board member of the Anthropology and Disability Research Interest Group and the Association of Programs for Rural Independent Living, has directed research at the World Institute on Disability and the Association of Higher Education and Disability, was the Director of a California independent living center, and teaches for the City University of New York in their MA program in Disability Studies and for Miami University of Ohio. She was a 2000 NIDRR Switzer Fellow and the 2014 recipient of the SDS Senior Scholar Award. She lives in Northern California, behind the redwood curtain, surrounded by family and by chickens, spinning wheels, looms, and baskets full of fleece and fiber waiting to become yarn.