Advocates of embodied or carnal ethnography, including Loïc Wacquant and others, argue that researchers must immerse themselves in the physical and social worlds of their participants to the fullest extent possible. This methodological stance privileges procedural or practical knowledge over so-called cerebral or passive knowledge, and assumes that, with enough persistence, any researcher can undertake such immersion despite potential risks. But what happens when the researcher has limitations—physical, cognitive, or emotional—that prevent full participation or immersion? Bridging literature on disability in the academy, reflexivity, and embodiment, I develop a framework of six dimensions that shape how disabled researchers challenge the “imperative” of immersion as they navigate their fields: access, physicality, temporality, disclosure, support, and emotion. Drawing specifically on autoethnographic reflections from my own fieldwork as a researcher with an invisible disability, I show how each dimension forced me to reconsider traditional ethnographic expectations and instead embrace a research approach that accounted for my embodied constraints. Rather than seeing this as a failure of ethnographic rigor, I argue that these limitations generate unique epistemic insights, fostering reflexivity, critical distance, and methodological creativity.

I further critique the binary of “participant-observer” versus “observant-participant,” demonstrating how disabled researchers often occupy a liminal position that preserves analytic distance while remaining relationally engaged. This stance reveals subtleties invisible to both fully immersed and fully detached observers and underscores that immersion alone cannot resolve “insider/outsider” dilemmas. Ultimately, I call for a pluralistic ethnographic practice that treats disability not as a methodological obstacle but as an epistemic resource. Recognizing multiple pathways to knowledge production moves the discipline beyond a universal imperative of embodiment and toward more inclusive, ethically attuned forms of qualitative inquiry.