Announcement of doctoral theses

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 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 author:Maria Victoria Gauci

Thesis title:Enabling Technology in the Workplace: Exploring the Dis/ability Assemblage

University awarding degree:University of Leeds, UK

Degree awarded and year:PhD, 2019

This qualitative study is informed by the aspirations of emancipatory research and new materialism. It deploys the concept of the ‘network’ and the ‘assemblage’ to analyse technologies that support Maltese disabled employees at the workplace, as components of complex ‘entanglements’ of human and non-human entities. Twenty-five participants with physical and sensory impairments took part in focus groups, one-to-one interviews and observations. The findings indicate the persistence of multiple barriers and to ‘dis/ability’ as a shifting, relational concept, which is as material as it is social. A more sophisticated analysis of the relations within assemblages/networks that disabled people form part of at the workplace is called for. Stakeholders in the field are urged to shape their policies and practices around the ‘good’ capacities that are produced within these relations, thus affecting new possibilities and ‘becomings’ for disabled people–technology–work assemblages.

Email: [email protected]