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 to provide the names of colleagues who are new entrants to the discipline.
This is an open invitation for theses completed from 2014 which fit with the Aims and Scope of Disability & Society.
Please provide the following information:
Name of 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 author:Lisa Hamilton
Thesis title:Within these Walls: An Ethnography of Home at Lake House
University awardingdegree:Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Degree awarded and year:PhD, 2018
Emerging from an institutional history, the group home model has a legacy never far from the surface. An ethnographic study was undertaken with six housemates with intellectual disability from a group home we called Lake House. Findings indicated a paradox of service delivery; the more service providers tried to make home for the housemates, the less homelike Lake House became. The findings contested dominant knowledge of the group home only as a site of staff practices. The study learnt from the agency of the housemates who resisted and subverted the authoritarian stance to produce meanings of home for themselves.
Email: [email protected]
Name of author:Gili Yaron
Thesis title:Doing Facial Difference: The Lived Experiences of Individuals with Facial Limb Absence
University awarding degree:Maastricht University, the Netherlands
Degree awarded and year:PhD, 2018
‘Doing Facial Difference’ interrogates the meaning of ‘disfigurement’ by drawing on interviews with individuals who lack part(s) of the face and theories of embodiment, technological mediation, and disability. This empirical–philosophical approach complements current medical and psycho-social perspectives on ‘disfigurement’. The dissertation highlights the embodied dimensions of facial difference, the social functions of prosthetics, and stigma as a social recognition issue. It thereby demonstrates how ‘disfigurement’ impacts the way affected individuals inhabit their body and world, and describes new ways they develop to ‘do’ their altered face. This embodied, material, and social ‘doing’, the thesis concludes, involves ongoing, daily work.
Email: [email protected]