Disability Disclosures and the Ethics of Autoethnography: A Disabled Theologian’s Approach
Presented by Angela Molloy
Date and Time
2025 Including Disability Global Summit
Pre-recorded Session
Presentation Materials
Link to be provided.
Abstract
Building on Jay Dolmage’s Academic Ableism, Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez’s Crip Authorship: Disability as Method, and Tiffany Yu’s The Anti-Ableist Manifesto, this presentation will look at the ethics of autoethnography as a resource for uplifting disabled stories which are too often viewed as “not academic enough.” Integrating the lived experience of the author, a congenitally-disabled scholar-activist who has regularly been told that her work to create an anti-ableist, queer-affirming future for religious and higher educational institutions is not “serious scholarship,” this presentation will challenge preconceived notions of what the academy should look like. This presentation will offer practical steps for those seeking to employ an accessible autoethnographic method in their writing. Suggestions will be offered about the complicated ethics of disability disclosure, always centering the knowledge that disabled people know their own bodies and their own experiential narratives best.
About the Speaker
Angela Molloy (she/her)
Angela Molloy (she/her) is a congenitally disabled scholar-activist and public theologian whose work sits at the intersection of disability theology, queerness, and moral injury. She received her undergraduate degree in Comparative Religion from the University of Washington, earned her MDiv from the Iliff School of Theology, and is currently studying in the Iliff/DU Joint Doctoral Program. Having been deeply harmed by ableism within the institutional church, Angela seeks to imagine alternative constructive possibilities for disabled and not-yet-disabled folx within communities of faith. Her work examines moral injury, specifically around the ways that queer and disabled bodies have been controlled by and cast out from religious spaces. Angela serves on various state and national committees, including as Disability Ministries Committee Chair for the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Methodist Church and as a Coordinating Council Member for the Institute on Theology and Disability.
