The Crip Archaeology Lab (established 2020) is directed by Katherine Kinkopf, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cal Poly Pomona.

What is Crip Archaeology?

Crip Archaeology is an orientation to bio/archaeology that draws on crip theory and critical disability studies (CDS) to think with and about disability and the past. And ultimately, to think about corporeality and bodily variation beyond the limits of disability identity formations in contemporary societies. “Crip Archaeology” is an emerging area of scholarship in archaeology outlined by Laurie Wilkie and Katherine Kinkopf (publication in review).

The work of disability and Crip Archaeology need not be limited to the study of disease, disability, or impairment, nor should it be relegated to the study of disability culture alone (although it certainly can do all of this). Crip Archaeology is an ontoepistemology—a way of being and knowing through being—that liberates the study of disability from eugenic modes of thinking.

What does Crip Archaeology do?

Students in the Crip Archaeology Lab explore issues of:

• Reproductive health justice, incarceration, institutionalization, and disability in the 19th and 20th century

• Skeletal health and mobility (through the emancipatory framework of disability justice) in recent and historic populations

• Disability cultural heritage (in the broadest sense of disability)

Recent publications from our lab can be found here: Publications

Get in touch with our lab at criparchaeology (at) gmail (dot) com