I earned my PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Washington, with department support in Geography, History, and Disability Studies and I received my BA in Interdisciplinary Studies and M.A. in Cultural Studies from the University of Washington Bothell. I am keenly interested in the cultural politics of global development and developmental and intellectual disabilities and in my research, I explore culturally, politically, and historically produced images, videos, marketing campaigns, news stories and government documents to understand how they come together to create social understandings across time and place. I work with digital tools including digital maps and the Scalar II publishing platform to create interactive visualizations of my projects.
I frequently return to these lingering questions about the cultural production of difference, the meanings and values that constantly churn in, around and throughout the seemingly never-ending histories, political cycles and global economies that reproduce distant ‘others,’ and the insatiable social appetites that continue to consume them. I am deeply invested in locating the politics of representation and in understanding how dominant cultural industries, media outlets, journalists, online platforms, histories, governments, and institutions govern identities at the intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and multiple axes of difference. While topics of power and representation are a key focus in my research, I am also interested in exploring why consumers and societies embrace and recirculate dangerous notions about geographies, cultures, and identities of 'difference.' Why are people outraged when a presidential candidate mocks a disabled reporter yet they turn out in record numbers to watch movies like "Dumb and Dumber?"
My dissertation study approaches disability, and developmental and intellectual disabilities in particular, as a category of historical analysis with a central focus on comparing how U.S. domestic charity and international humanitarian aid institutions have drawn upon, reinforced, or contested what I conceptualize as ‘the exemplary feebleminded subject’. In this work, I explore the cultural politics and the histories of developmental and intellectual disabilities through postcolonial and transnational disability studies, comparative history, and cultural studies frameworks.
I illustrate how the historically specific classification of feeblemindedness, and the sub-categories imbecile, idiot, and moron brought forth a universally recognizable object of degeneracy that remains a potent discursive force today. Newspaper stories at the onset of the twentieth century normalized the exemplary feebleminded subject, and magazines, print advertising, books, science journals, and motion pictures popularized the idea that the so-called feebleminded class was both a burden and a threat to national progress and international development.
Institutions linked the feebleminded, idiot, imbecile, and moron classifications to physical, mental, developmental, and intellectual disabilities and the exemplary feebleminded subject was endlessly adapted[1] in discourses of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. This dissertation is a political and intellectual project that seeks to explain the material ways in which the cultural discourses that conjured the ‘exemplary feebleminded subject’ have influenced current-day legislative policies and cultural practices.
I am currently working on a book manuscript that addresses questions of power, representation, and the cultural production of identities of difference with an emphasis on postcolonial approaches to the geopolitics of disability, and intellectual and developmental disabilities in particular. I have analyzed discourses of developmental and intellectual disabilities in the United States and located the relationships between representations in early twentieth-century nationalist ideologies of race-purity, national prosperity and ‘properly developed’ citizens, and global development and humanitarian representational strategies that formed during the emergence of the Cold War Era.
In 2009, Autism Speaks, the self-proclaimed world's largest autism advocacy organization released I am Autism for audiences in attendance at the second annual United Nations Autism Awareness Day. The fundraising and autism awareness video also appeared across television, radio and online platforms and its representational frame situate autism as a metaphorical living entity that destroys lives, bankrupts families and, as the foreboding narration warns, "will make sure your marriage will fail" (cited in Thibault, p. 22). Early in my study of cultural theory, I became aware of the emerging efforts of a group of autistic activist known as the Neurodiversity Movement and highly publicized controversies surrounding their efforts to contest I am Autism and other non-autistic produced representations of autistic life. I found the lens of cultural studies uniquely suited for exploring the political struggle over autistic autonomy, justice, and self-determination and Stuart Hall's influential works brought me to ask new questions concerning the specific practices, ideologies, and histories that construct what society has come to know as autism. Is autism an idea or a diagnosis? A proud identity or a metaphorical destroyer of families? Who gets to decide and who is left out of the conversation altogether?
The resulting research article, Can Autistics Redefine Autism? The Cultural Politics of Autistic Activism appears in the Spring 2014 University of California Irvine Journal Trans-Scripts: Constructing (Dis)Ability. The four-year project draws on media, textual, image, and narrative analysis to explore how contemporary cultural industries, practitioners, and institutions reproduce stigmatizing views about autism, and whether Autistic activists are shifting these externally imposed assumptions about their lives.
My research concentration on the cultural formation of autistic representation emerged alongside my study of the cultural politics and economic histories of humanitarianism and global development. While researching the political, social, economic and cultural formations of child subjectivities across time and place, I began to consider whether the structures that frame the cultural politics developmental and intellectual disabilities in the United States share or intersect with how humanitarian and global development agencies represent regions, cultures, and individuals located in the global South.
I have called Seattle and the Pacific Northwest region my home since 1983 when I moved here from where I was raised near the Colorado mountains. I currently live with my husband, 20-year-old son, 2 dogs, and 2 cats, just outside of the Seattle area in the small town of Monroe. In addition to my teaching and research, I am an avid sci-fi fan, voracious reader, and love to tend my pollinator garden and photograph the many bee species that visit. I consider myself an activist for disability rights and social justice across multiple and intersecting identities.
