Society for Disability Studies

Elaine Gerber

Tri Do — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 02:26:50 +0000

Dr. Gerber is an assistant professor of Anthropology at Montclair State University in New Jersey, where she teaches courses in Medical Anthropology, the Anthropology of Food & Nutrition, and Multicultural America. Her academic work focuses on the relationship between culture and the body, with particular attention to the cultural construction of blindness. Ongoing research includes: Active Living (How physical, social, and cultural environments facilitate or impede physical activity for people with impairments); Audio Description (its importance in cultural literacy, in emergency preparedness, and in shaping cultural forms of identity, such as race); Blind in Theater (with particular emphasis on the biannual blind theater festival in Croatia and with the off-Broadway theater troupe, Theater By the Blind.) Most recently, she served as Guest Editor, Disability Studies Quarterly Special Theme Issue entitled, “Eat, Drink & Inclusion: The Politics of Disability & Food.” (Summer 2007, Volume 27, Issue 3.) Prior to her academic career, she served for five years as the Senior Research Associate at the American Foundation for the Blind. She likes biking uphill and has recently become a “dog person.”

gerbere@mail.montclair.edu

Celestine Willis

Tri Do — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 02:26:03 +0000

Based in Chicago, IL Celestine Willis is the Director of training for the Center for Capacity Building on Minorities with Disabilities Research in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is working with the Center’s Director to increase understanding of cultural competence and to develop models and self-assessment instruments measuring cultural competence.

Celestine’s primary focus is conducting research on issues of diversity and cultural competence, exploring how race, disability, and discrimination intersect.

Christine Komoroski-McCohnell

Tri Do — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 02:25:28 +0000

Ms. McCohnell has a B. A. in Psychology, an M. A. in Counseling (she is a licensed counselor), and post Masters credits at Temple University in Disability Studies. While teaching at Ramapo College in New Jersey, she proposed and developed a course in Disability Studies. In the spring of 2007, her Disability Studies course received approval as a requirement for the General Education Course, under the category of Intercultural North America. McCohnell is the only adjunct to receive this accomplishment in the history of Ramapo College. She also serves on the Diversity Action Committee at Ramapo, where she is currently researching a Disability Studies Certificate for undergraduate students. As a proud woman with cerebral palsy, she is writing her memoirs that will hopefully be published soon. Surrounding the academic arena, she is in the midst of writing an article, which analyzes disability identification formation as symbolized in the novel Wicked. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with her spouse, traveling worldwide, and constantly realizing how important the roles of daughter, sister, aunt, and step mom are. McCohnell’s top priority is her health due to her philosophy that “everything does not matter, if you don’t have your health.”

Petra Kuppers

Tri Do — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 02:24:38 +0000

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist and a community artist. She teaches in performance and disability studies at the University of Michigan. She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias Performance Research Series, and Olimpias workshops, installations, performances and exhibitions have been created and shown in Europe, the US, New Zealand and Australia. The Olimpias projects are community-based, collaborative, and deal with disability culture issues (more info at www.umich.edu/~petra). Petra’s books include Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (Routledge, 2003), The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (Minnesota, 2007) and Community Performance: An Introduction (Routledge, 2007). She has also co-edited with Gwen Robertson The Community Performance Reader (Routledge, 2007).

Current research projects include an essay collection on disability culture poetry; a book manuscript provisionally entitled ‘Touching Time: Disability/Culture, Body Histories, Performance’; the dance/poetry/video shows Tiresias, on disability and erotics (next gigs: workshop at MLA 07, performance in February at Michigan, workshop in Rotterdam, March, then at Dance under Construction, UC Berkeley, April) and Alchemy, on cyberplay (in development); polishing a collaborative poetry manuscript with Neil Marcus called ‘The Metaphor of Wind in Cripple Poetics: In Pursuit of a Kiss’; her own first poetry collection called ‘Disabled Lilacs’; a special co-edited issue of the Journal of Literary Disability on Deleuze, Difference and Disability; and hanging out in sunny places having cups of coffee with interesting people.

Noam Ostrander

Tri Do — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 02:24:07 +0000

Noam Ostrander is an Assistant Professor in the Social Work Program at DePaul University. Dr. Ostrander received his PhD in disability studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2006. Dr. Ostrander also holds masters degrees in social service administration from the University of Chicago and in comparative religion from Western Michigan University. Prior to joining the faculty at DePaul, he worked in various community agencies as a social worker and a licensed clinical therapist. Dr. Ostrander’s research foci include violently-acquired disabilities, psychiatric disabilities, disability and religion, and the intersections of disability, masculinity, and sexuality. Throughout his work, Dr. Ostrander combines interdisciplinary approaches from the social sciences and the humanities.

Bruce Henderson

Tri Do — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 02:23:37 +0000

Bruce Henderson is Professor of Speech Communication and Coordinator of the Program in Culture and Communication and the Minor in Health Communication at Ithaca College. He has his B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. in Performance Studies (formerly Interpretation) from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. in Disability Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His primary teaching areas include performance of literature, folklore and storytelling, health communication, and interdisciplinary courses in disability studies, cultural studies, and aging studies. He is the current Editor in Chief of the premiere scholarly peer-reviewed performance studies journal in the United States, Text and Performance Quarterly, and is co-editor with Noam Ostrander of a forthcoming (January/April 2008) double issue of that journal, devoted to the intersection of performance studies and disability studies. He is co-author (with Carol Simpson Stern) of the textbook Performance: Texta and Contexts (Longman) and is currently under contract with Northwestern University Press, to write a second textbook in Performance Studies (also with Stern), titled Learning to Perform. His previous textbook was the first performance textbook to address disability issues. He has also published widely in such fields as 20th century literature, children’s literature, and LGBT/Queer studies. In addition, he is a frequent performer and director. He recently completed a term as Chair of the Performance Studies Division of the National Communication Association.

Pamela Block

Tri Do — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 02:23:07 +0000

Pamela Block is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Occupational Therapy Program at Stony Brook University teaching in the areas of disability studies, qualitative research design, human subjects research ethics and grant writing. Dr. Block received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Duke University in 1997. Her dissertation “Biology, Culture and Cognitive Disability: Twentieth Century Professional Discourse in Brazil and the United States ” addressed the influence of cultural beliefs and professional theories on disability policy and treatment. She served as PI of a multi-year study funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) entitled “Project Shake It Up! Health Promotion and Capacity Building for persons with Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury and other Neuromuscular Disabilities,” (2002-2005).

Dr. Block has studied multiple marginalization and the intersections of gender, race, poverty, and disability. Current disability studies research involves capacity building and health promotion through participatory intervention research with community non-profit organizations. Current and Recent funded research involves peer mentoring and overcoming barriers to physical and recreational activity for youth and adults with Multiple Sclerosis. Recent publications discuss eugenics and disability in Brazil and teaching disability studies in community health and rehabilitation programs.

Pamela Block, Ph.D.
Clinical Associate Professor
Occupational Therapy Program
SUNY Stony Brook
HSC – SHTM (ECC)
Stony Brook, NY 11794-8206
631-444-3197 (phone)
631-444-6305(fax)
Pamela.Block@stonybrook.edu
www.projectshakeitup.org

Michele Friedner

Tri Do — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 02:22:29 +0000

Michele Friedner is a PhD student in Medical Anthropology in the University of Caljfornia, Berkeley- University of California San Francisco Joint Medical Anthropology program. Michele studies the myriad ways that deaf young adults living in Bangalore negotiate kinship and belonging across family, caste, gender, religion, and caste. She is especially interested in the constitutive roles that vocational programs and corporate social responsibility initiatives play in this negotiation and her work is attentive to what she calls “global deafness” or the ways that specific discourses around deafness can be hegemonic and uni-directional. Michele has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the UC Regents, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the UC Regents to conduct her research. Prior to starting graduate school, Michele worked within the field of disability advocacy as an Outreach Coordinator at Disability Rights Advocates and as a program manager and social service provider at Toolworks, Inc, both in the San Francisco bay area. Michele is excited about expanding the international scope of SDS and bringing international perspectives to its conferences.

Susan Baglieri

Tri Do — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 02:21:59 +0000

Susan Baglieri became a board member of the Society for Disability Studies (SDS) in June 2008. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Long Island University’s Brooklyn, New York campus. Her professional studies are in curriculum and teaching and areas of interest include inclusive education and teacher education. Baglieri served as the assistant editor for Disability Studies Quarterly during 2005-06. In addition to her involvement with SDS, she is an active member of the American Educational Research Association’s special interest group in Disability Studies in Education and received the Junior Scholar Award at the group’s Eighth Annual Second City Conference in 2008.

Allison Carey

Tri Do — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 02:21:29 +0000

Allison C. Carey, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of Sociology at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on civil rights for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She is the author of On the Margins of Citizenship: Civil Rights and Intellectual Disability in 20th Century America (Temple University Press, Forthcoming 2009), and has published articles on topics including social networks and employment; access to assistive technology; victimization; eugenics; and compulsory sterilization.