Visiting Scholars

Philippa Mullins is an Assistant Professor at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences of the American University of Armenia (AUA), where she teaches on their MA in Human Rights and Social Justice. Prior to taking up this position, she completed a PhD at LSE's Department of Social Policy supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council. Philippa's PhD research explored disability organising in Russia, looking particularly at notions of vulnerability and resistance. Her primary research interests revolve around disability identities and civil society organising. She cares a lot about teaching and is a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy.

Efrat Gold is a postdoctoral fellow engaging in mad and disability studies. Using interpretive and critical theory and methods, Gold critiques the psy-complex, moving toward contextualized and relational understandings of suffering, crisis, and distress, and foregrounding those most vulnerable and marginalized by psychiatric power, discourse, and treatments. Her scholarship focuses on constructions of psychiatric legitimacy that naturalize and reproduce medicalized understandings of human suffering, thereby casting off all other possibilities. Through explorations of norms and meaning-making, Gold unsettles psychiatric ideology by unearthing the present absences of those deemed mad and exploring life-affirming possibilities for mad inclusion. Gold’s publications appear in scholarly and community venues, indicating her commitment to producing research and pedagogy that is accessible to and includes mad and disabled people through consultation, activism, and solidarity. Using archival material and artefacts related to mad and disabled people’s history, Gold’s unique scholarly approach unearths the often-overlooked active role of mad and disabled people in pushing back against oppressive boundaries of normalcy and creating affirmative alternatives and potentials. Motivated by social justice-informed approaches to madness and disability, Gold works across difference, moving towards an emancipative politics that recognizes the entwined landscape of oppression within efforts to build different futures. 

Past Visiting Scholars:

Marie Sépulchre is a postdoc researcher at the Department of Sociology of Lund University, Sweden, and a visiting researcher at UB CDS. Her research interests center on disability, citizenship, activism, social inequality, social justice, and the right to non-discrimination. Marie received her PhD from Uppsala University, Sweden. She recently published the book Disability and Citizenship Studies (Routledge), which analyzes Swedish disability activism as a question of citizenship. Her current research project compares how the principle of nondiscrimination based on disability is understood in Sweden and the United States, with a focus on the sector of higher education. To find out more about Marie Sépulchre and her most recent publications please visit her website. 

David A. Gerber The UB CDS is pleased to welcome accomplished historian and disability studies scholar, David A. Gerber, as its inaugural Senior Fellow. To find out more about Prof. Gerber and his most recent projects please visit his website.

Ryan C. Parrey The SDS 2015-2016 affiliated scholar is Ryan C. Parrey. Parrey is a lecturer in disability studies at Eastern Washington University. He received his PhD in Disability Studies from the University of Illinois, Chicago, with a certificate in Gender and Women's Studies, in Spring 2014. Parrey's dissertation, "Encountering Disability: Orientation, Disorientation, and Ethics," is a phenomenological analysis of moments in which the meaning of disability, and our relation to it, is an open question. These moments, he argues, are significant not only because they reveal the variety of meanings that disability accrues but also because they offer the possibility of ways of knowing and doing disability. While these encounters have been explored in social psychology as well as anecdotally in scholarly and life-writing, neither the lived experience of disorientation nor its generative potential have been taken up in disability studies. During his tenure as SDS Affiliated Scholar, Ryan will be working to expand his ongoing research as well as to develop a related project on disability counter narratives.

Andrew Marcum is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Center for Disability Studies and the Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Marcum is the recipient of two prestigious dissertation research fellowships including a fellowship with the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. and a Bilinski Educational Foundation Fellowship. His current research explores the lived experiences of people with disabilities and the dialectical relationship between the built environment and the disability rights movement in the United States. His scholarship has been featured in the Smithsonian Magazine and he is a contributor to the forthcoming volume Disabling Domesticity from Palgrave McMillan Press. His education includes a Master's Degree in American Studies from the University of Alabama and a PhD in American Studies from the University of New Mexico.

Hanita Putra Djaya completed her undergraduate degree in physical therapy in Indonesia, where she worked as a physical therapist in a clinic for children with physical and sensory disabilities. Working with them was an eye-opening experience, as there were more things to contend with beyond their disabilities. It is a truth that people with disabilities in Indonesia are a minority group who receive the least attention from society. That was why Hanita decided to do her master's degree in disability studies at the University at Buffalo; to further enhance her knowledge about persisting problems and to learn how to solve them.

Miranda Terry, PhD is an Assistant Professor and the Health Science Program Coordinator at Stephen F. Austin State University. She received her BA in Psychology from Eastern Illinois University, her MS in Rehabilitation Counseling and PhD in Community Health at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Terry has diverse research interests that span disability, gender, and women's studies, and include accessibility, the intersections of abuse, disability, and health, and policy research. During her fellowship year at the University at Buffalo, Terry will be working closely with the Family Justice Center (Buffalo, NY) to analyze the health consequences of intimate partner violence among people with disabilities.

Sandhya Limaye, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Disability Studies and Action and the School of Social Work at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India. She will be a Fulbright Research Fellow in the UB Center for Disability Studies for the academic year 2012– 2013. Dr. Limaye’s professional fields of interest include: women with disabilities, youth having parents with disabilities, community education, intervention with people with disabilities and their families, disability rehabilitation research. Dr. Limaye’s CV