Disability Covid Chronicles

From 2020 to 2024, the Disability Covid Chronicles, a project of the NYU Center for Disability Studies, documented the experiences of disabled and chronically ill people during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Disabled people, especially people of color and those living in nursing homes or other congregate housing, have been at greatest risk of infection and death from COVID-19. Our team is finalizing an edited volume based on four years of research and living in New York City in a state of pandemic. The fifteen chapters document disability communities that have been disproportionately impacted by city and national policies, work and housing conditions, stigma, racism, and violence as much as the virus itself. In the shadow of “risk,” we report on a variety of disability experiences including incarceration, low wage and essential work, maternal mental health, anti-Asian violence, senior centers, migrant detention centers, Long Covid, public schools, the MTA, blindness and digital accessibility, caregiving, arts workers, and the Black Lives Matter protests.

In collaboration with community members, we have built a publicly-accessible archive to preserve memories, stories, artworks, and other materials in a range of accessible formats. We are preserving conversations on social media, records of digital public meetings, and photographs of street art and actions that are otherwise ephemeral. Our goal is to chronicle not only vulnerabilities, but creative initiatives for survival under these new conditions that are structured by old inequalities.

Research

How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic

Edited by Mara Mills, Harris Kornstein, Faye Ginsburg, and Rayna Rapp

NYU Press, forthcoming February 2025

How to be Disabled in a Pandemic documents the pivotal experiences of disabled people living in an early epicenter of COVID-19: New York City. Among those hardest hit by the pandemic, disability communities across the five boroughs have been disproportionately impacted by city and national policies, work and housing conditions, stigma, racism, and violence—as much as by the virus itself. Disabled and chronically-ill activists have protested plans for medical rationing and refuted the eugenic logic of mainstream politicians and journalists who “reassure” audiences that only older people and those with disabilities continue to die from COVID-19. At the same time, as exemplified by the viral hashtag #DisabledPeopleToldYou, disability expertise has become widely recognized in practices such as accessible remote work and education, quarantine, and distributed networks of support and mutual aid. This edited volume charts the legacies of this “mass disabling event” for uncertain viral futures, exploring the dialectic between disproportionate risk and the creativity of a disability justice response.

Essays & Interviews from Research-in-Progress

Fieldnotes

Our Fieldnotes section highlights notable ephemera and other materials — photographs, posters, artwork, event documentation, social media campaigns, and beyond — encountered during our research that document the experiences of diverse disabled people during the Covid-19 pandemic.