We have agreed to provide within the journal a list of completed theses in the field of Disability Studies. This will be an important resource for readers to follow through as well as provide the names of colleagues who are new entrants to the discipline.
This is an open invitation for theses completed within two years of conferment which fit with the Aims and Scope of Disability & Society.
Please provide the following information:
Name of the author
Thesis title
University awarding degree
Degree awarded and year
A 100-word synopsis of the thesis
Email address
Please forward this information to Helen Oliver, Disability & Society Editorial Office. Email: [email protected]
We will include this call for Doctoral Announcements in forthcoming issues of the journal.
Executive Editors
Name of the author: Gemma L. Williams
Thesis title: Talking Together at the Edge of Meaning: Mutual (Mis) Understanding between Autistic and Non-autistic Speakers
University awarding degree: University of Brighton, UK
Degree awarded and year: PhD, 2021
A central diagnostic and anecdotal feature of autism is difficulty with social communication. Traditionally, these difficulties have been regarded as autistic impairments, related to proposed cognitive and social deficits. This interdisciplinary thesis, threaded with autoethnographic writing, takes the double empathy problem – which resituates a lack of mutual understanding between autistic and non-autistic speakers as a two-way affair – as its starting point. The thesis asks whether relevance theory – a cognitive account of utterance interpretation – can help to make sense, in cognitive terms, of why mutual understanding can sometimes break down.
Email: [email protected]