My Biography
Dr. Kasnitz went from psycogeography at Clark to medical anthropology at Michigan to critical disability studies with Northwestern and UCSF postdocs building research, curriculum, and advocacy disability-focused infrastructure within AAA, and SfAA. Dr. Kasnitz founded the Society for Disability Studies, where she currently serves as Executive Director, when not teaching in the CUNY-SPS graduate program in disability studies. Research projects include geographic place perception, urban informal economic network analysis, and the phenomenology and politics of health and disability in the Italian diaspora in Australia. She worked in the non-profit sector on disability rights and justice assurance while also creating national pedagogy opportunities for young disabled activists and scholars via community and university curriculum development projects. Dr. Kasnitz recent work is an autoethnography on communication impairment. Her first AAA meeting was in 1968 at the age of 18 with her Clark geography faculty, with notable changes being the feminizing of anthropology and increasing diversity.