Omolara Funmilo (Funmi) Akinpelu

funmiakinpelu2000@yahoo.com

Dr. Omolara Funmilola (Funmi) Akinpelu earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Special Education from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. She received her Ph.D. in Guidance and Counseling at the University of Ilorin, Nigeria. She was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Ilorin where she taught and supervised research projects at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Funmi currently works as Project EMERGE Advocate at ARISE in Syracuse. The project is in collaboration with VERA HOUSE also in Syracuse. The aim of this project is to identify specific gaps in service, barriers to safety and accessible support, and system inadequacies for women with disabilities and deaf women who are survivors of domestic and sexual violence. Funmi worked as a Research Project Coordinator with Burton Blatt Institute (BBI), Syracuse University. Prior to joining the BBI, Funmi was a Visiting Research Scholar in the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Program at York University, Canada. She also participated in the Advanced Research Rehabilitation Training (ARRT) at the Center on Human Policy, Law, and Disability Studies, Syracuse University. Funmi  has a strong background in Special Education in Nigeria. Her research interests are in special education, rehabilitative counseling, and disability studies. She is particularly interested in disability policies, human rights of persons with disabilities, gender equality, and empowerment of women with disabilities. Funmi has presented conference papers in Nigeria, Canada, and United States. Funmi is also a member of International Association of Special Education (IASE), Council for Exceptional Children (CEC), American Psychological Association (APA), Counseling Association of Nigeria (CASSON), and Nigerian Association of Special Education Teachers (NASET).  She is also a recipient of the 2011 Syracuse University Martin Luther King (Jr.) Unsung Heroes Award http://bbi.syr.edu/events/2011/docs/press_release/011311_unsung_hero_Funmi_Akinpelu.pdf

Frank Wyman

chips314@aol.com

Dr. Wyman began his career as an attorney in private practice in New York and New Jersey, first with large firms and later in solo practice for a decade. His solo practice included substantial work, both in court and as an advisor, on behalf of persons with disabilities and their families. He has served as a Director of SDS since 2008. He served as Treasurer of SDS for two years and is now Vice-President. He has served as a Trustee of the Community Health Law Project, a New Jersey statewide legal services organization, since 1995.  He has taught at the University level since 2000 in both the Disability Studies Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the Medical Humanities Program at Drew University. He holds a bachelor’s degree in History from Yale University, a J.D. from George Washington University, an LL.M. in Taxation from New York University, and his M.A., M. Phil., and Ph.D., all in History, from Drew University. He has published five articles in The Encyclopedia of American Disability History and has other publications pending in various stages of development, including an intellectual history of blindness discussing both Enlightenment and present day thought on that topic.

Sunaura Taylor

Sunaurataylor@gmail.com

www.sunaurataylor.org

I have been a board member of SDS since 2010. SDS has become not only a yearly intellectual experience for me, but also a powerful environment for community building and friendship making. I am an artist, writer, activist and scholar. I graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in the department of Art Practice with my MFA in May, 2008. My artworks have been exhibited at venues across the country, including the CUE Art Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution and the Berkeley Art Museum. My written work has been printed in numerous edited collections as well as in publications such as the Monthly Review, Yes! Magazine, and Qui Parle. In 2007 I worked with philosopher Judith Butler on Astra Taylor’s film Examined Life (Zeitgeist 2008). I’m currently completing a book on animal ethics and disability studies, forthcoming from the Feminist Press, NY. I bring to SDS a background in curating, grant writing, event organizing, and a deep love for the arts and creativity. Over the years SDS has shown a strong commitment to the arts. My goal as an SDS board member is to help SDS remain dedicated to sharing creative and alternative forms of research and work within disability studies.

Gregor Wolbring

gwolbrin@ucalgary.ca

Dr. Gregor Wolbring is an Associate Professor at the University of Calgary, Faculty of Medicine, Dept. of Community Health Sciences, Stream Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies.  He is also a Part-Time Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, Canada; Founding Member and Distinguished Scholar, Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University, USA; Adjunct Faculty in Critical Disability Studies at York University Toronto and Fellow: Institute for Science, Policy and Society, University of Ottawa,.  His research interests are manifold: ability and ableism ethics and governance, history of thalidomide and thalidomiders, disability studies, social, ethical, legal, economic, environmental, cultural and governance issues of new, emerging and converging sciences and technologies (S&T) such as nanoscale S&T, molecular manufacturing, aging, longevity and immortality research, cognitive sciences, neuromorphic engineering, genetics, synthetic biology, governance of bodily enhancement S&T, in vitro meat, artificial intelligence and robotics; impact of S&T on marginalized populations, especially disabled people; sports; human security, human rights, personhood, sentient rights; concept of disability impairment, ableism and transhumanism; models and determinants of health; global health, tele-health, health- (technology assessment, law, care and policies); medical anthropology; foresight studies, climate, water and energy issues,  history, bioethics issues, biochemistry.

More about him and his students can be found at http://www.crds.org/research/faculty/Gregor_Wolbring.shtml

Michael Rembis

mrembis@gmail.com

Dr. Mike Rembis is the Director of the Center for Disability Studies, a UB Civic Engagement Research Fellow, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of History. He came to Buffalo from the University of Notre Dame, where he was a visiting scholar in the Department of American Studies and the Department of History. His work, which has appeared in many journals and edited collections, has won several awards, including the 2008 Irving K. Zola Award, awarded annually by the Society for Disability Studies to emerging scholars. His first book, Defining Deviance: Sex, Science, and Delinquent Girls, 1890-1960, is available from University of Illinois Press. He is currently working on a disability history anthology co-edited with Susan Burch, forthcoming from University of Illinois Press. In fall 2012, Rembis and co-editor Kim Nielsen launched the Disability Histories book series also with University of Illinois Press. Since completing the PhD in history, Rembis has served as co-founder and member of the Disability Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona, where he helped to create an undergraduate curriculum in Disability Studies. He also spent two-years working with faculty and administrators at the University of Notre Dame, building their Disability Studies Forum. Most recently, Rembis has been fortunate to benefit from a close collaboration with David Gerber (Distinguished Professor of History) at the University at Buffalo, where they have worked to establish the Center for Disability Studies and create a formal master’s level (MA) degree concentration in Disability Studies. He serves on the American Historical Association’s Task Force on Disability and the Board of Directors of the Society for Disability Studies.

Sami Schalk is a doctoral candidate at Indiana University in Gender Studies. Her research focuses on the representation of (dis)ability in black women’s fiction. Her academic work has been published in theDisability Studies Quarterly and the Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology. Sami Schalk is also poet and received her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. In addition to being an SDS board member, Sami is a Cave Canem fellow and program coordinator for Young Women Writing for (a) Change of Bloomington.

Phil Smith

psmith16@emich.edu

Dr. Phil Smith describes himself as being post-everything and after boundaries. He teaches at Eastern Michigan University – there, he slips disability studies stuff and the occasional cranky rant into courses he teaches, and hopes the bureaucrats and curricula police won’t notice. Phil received the Emerging Scholar Award in Disability Studies in Education in 2009, has been a member of the Society for Disability Studies for several years, and has had papers published in Disability Studies Quarterly, Taboo, Qualitative Inquiry, Review of Educational Research, and Health and Place, among other journals, as well as a variety of book chapters. Phil has published a book in the Peter Lang Disability Studies in Education series, Whatever Happened to Inclusion? The Place of Students with Intellectual Disabilities in Education. He is a published poet, playwright, novelist, and visual artist, and works as a critical scholar, teacher educator, and autoethnographer. For more than 20 years, in a variety of contexts and roles, he has worked as a disability rights activist, and served on the boards of directors of a number of regional, state and local organizations. He identifies as a person with a disability, and as the parent of someone with a disability. He rides his bicycle to work most days, and tries to remember to wear his socks. A transplanted Yankee, he now spends most of his time beside Lake Superior, where loons, wolves, moose, and bald eagles peek in the windows of his cabin.

Devva Kasnitz

devva@earthlink.net

Trained as a cultural geographer at Clark University and then as an anthropologist at The University of Michigan, Devva Kasnitz did postdoctoral work at Northwestern and at the University of California, San Francisco in urban and medical anthropology. She has worked in the area of disability studies for the last 30 years while still maintaining an interest in ethnicity and immigration. She was on the founding board of the Society for Disability Studies, the Anthropology and Disability Research Interest Group, and has mentored a generation of disability studies scholars in the US, Australia, and Guatemala. She currently works with the Association of Higher Education and Disability. She lives in Northern California surrounded by her family and by spinning wheels and baskets full of yarn and wool waiting to become yarn.

Dr. Liat Ben-Moshe is currently a Postdoctoral research associate at the department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her dissertation “Genealogies of resistance to incarceration: prison abolition and de-institutionalization activism in the US”, looks at demands to close down repressive institutions that house those labeled as criminals, mentally disabled and mentally ill. Her academic interests are in activism, coalition building and intersectionality, Critical Disability Studies, representations of dis/ability, inclusive pedagogy and more. Liat has written on such topics as the International Symbol of Access; inclusive pedagogy; academic repression; disability, anti-capitalism and anarchism; queerness and disability; deinstitutionalization and incarceration and the politics of abolition.  She is also a co-founder of IDSN, the Israeli Disability Studies Network.