Research & Writing

How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic

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

NYU Press, 2025

A chronicle of ableism and disability activism in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic. 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. 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.

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“So many forces want us to forget about the pandemic, to say that it’s over and not a concern anymore. How To Be Disabled in a Pandemic documents the wisdom of disabled oracles who resisted and challenged the system during the first three years of the pandemic in New York City. After reading this book, it’ll leave you wondering what could have happened if our ableist society centered disabled people and took them seriously.” —Alice Wong, author of Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life

“Required reading for anyone who wants to understand the impact of COVID-19 in the United States. To be living with a disability in this country is to be a disposable person in the eyes of the state, even with the rights struggled for by generations of people living with disabilities. Over the past half-decade, New York City and the US implemented policies that made life more dangerous for disabled people, but disabled communities, of which there are many, figured out ways forward together to fight for their own survival—they will not be silent.” —Gregg Gonsalves, Yale University