An Interview with Scot Danforth, Author of An Independent Man: Ed Roberts and the Fight for Disability Rights
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Keywords
Ed Roberts, biography, independent living movement, Berkeley, disability history
Abstract
This interview features Scot Danforth, author of An Independent Man: Ed Roberts and the Fight for Disability Rights (University of California Press, 2025). Conducted on March 19, 2026, via Zoom, the interview explores Danforth’s motivations for writing the biography, his eight-year research and writing process, and what he learned about Ed Roberts and the broader disability rights movement. Topics include the origins of the disability rights movement in Berkeley, the creative and political legacy of Roberts, and the ongoing urgency of disability rights advocacy.
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Raphael Raphael, Center on Disability Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Raphael Raphael, editor-in-chief of Review of Disability Studies, is a film and media researcher on issues of disability and film and media. Writing includes Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque (with Sophia Siddique), contributions to Modern Language Association's Teaching Film (2012) and Encyclopedia of American Disability History (2009), as well as the co-edited Transnational Stardom: International Celebrity in Film and Popular Culture (with Russell Meeuf) (2013). Raphael lectures at the Center on Disability in the College of Education at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His scholarship is also informed by his own practice as film + media maker. He tweets @raphaelspeak.