Nirmala Erevelles

Last updated

Nirmala Erevelles is a Professor in the Social Foundations of Education and Instructional Department of Education Leadership, Policy, and Technology Studies at the University of Alabama. [1] She publishes about various topics related to disability, in particular the ways social oppression is pervasive due to differences in race, socioeconomic status, and bodies.

Contents

Erevelles earned her bachelor's degree in mathematics from Stella Maris College (Chennai), India in 1985. She earned an M.S. in special education from Syracuse University in 1989, and a Ph.D. in 1998 from Syracuse University in the "Cultural Foundations of Education".

Contributions

Erevelles relies on Historical Materialism which suggests that economic inequality determines other forms of inequality - an issue which is evident in her Ph.D. dissertation. In her Ph.D., which was entitled "Bodies that do not matter: Social policy, education, and the politics of difference", Erevelles suggested that children with disabilities who are institutionalized in India are actually more privileged than the workers who help them. She commented in her dissertation that "many service providers, particularly the poor, single, lower caste women, spoke of lives of destitution that often seemed to outstrip by far the destitution experienced by many of the disabled children who received services there." [2]

In an article co-authored with Andrea Minear entitled "Unspeakable Offenses: Untangling Race and Disability in Discourses of Intersectionality," Black and Latin@ urban students were more likely to be classified with learning disabilities. [3] This illustrates how stereotyping and racism are coupled with an additional minority identification (disability) to relegate the students further.

Areas of research

Significant works

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Disability</span> Impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions

Disability is the experience of any condition that makes it more difficult for a person to do certain activities or have equitable access within a given society. Disabilities may be cognitive, developmental, intellectual, mental, physical, sensory, or a combination of multiple factors. Disabilities can be present from birth or can be acquired during a person's lifetime. Historically, disabilities have only been recognized based on a narrow set of criteria—however, disabilities are not binary and can be present in unique characteristics depending on the individual. A disability may be readily visible, or invisible in nature.

The term 'minority group' has different usages, depending on the context. According to its common usage, the term minority group can simply be understood in terms of demographic sizes within a population: i.e. a group in society with the least number of individuals, or less than half, is a 'minority’. Usually a minority group is disempowered relative to the majority, and that characteristic lends itself to different applications of the term minority.

Dorinne K. Kondo is a professor of American studies and Ethnicity and Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is a scholar, playwright, and has over 20 years of work experience in dramaturge; her work shows the structural inequality of race and ethnicities in the world of contemporary theatre. Her creative performances are shedding light on racism and power in the theatre industry but her work mostly focuses on discrimination and racism towards Asians, which makes a link to art and politics. Kondo's writings discuss issues on power, gender inequality, the discourses in a Japanese workplace, and racism in the fashion industry. She is an activist against racism in America as she has openly discussed and teaches about racism and inequality of the sexes as she thinks that there is a chance for social transformation.

Disability studies is an academic discipline that examines the meaning, nature, and consequences of disability. Initially, the field focused on the division between "impairment" and "disability", where impairment was an impairment of an individual's mind or body, while disability was considered a social construct. This premise gave rise to two distinct models of disability: the social and medical models of disability. In 1999 the social model was universally accepted as the model preferred by the field. However, in recent years, the division between the social and medical models has been challenged. Additionally, there has been an increased focus on interdisciplinary research. For example, recent investigations suggest using "cross-sectional markers of stratification" may help provide new insights on the non-random distribution of risk factors capable of acerbating disablement processes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Intersectionality</span> Theory of discrimination

Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how a person's various social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage. Examples of these factors include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, weight, and physical appearance. These intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing. However, little good-quality quantitative research has been done to support or undermine the theory of intersectionality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Critical race theory</span> Intellectual movement and framework

Critical race theory (CRT) is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing how laws, social and political movements, and media shape, and are shaped by, social conceptions of race and ethnicity. CRT also considers racism to be systemic in various laws and rules, and not only based on individuals' prejudices. The word critical in the name is an academic reference to critical thinking, critical theory, and scholarly criticism, rather than criticizing or blaming individuals.

Christopher Sandy Jencks is an American social scientist.

Ableism is discrimination and social prejudice against people with physical or mental disabilities. Ableism characterizes people as they are defined by their disabilities and it also classifies disabled people as people who are inferior to non-disabled people. On this basis, people are assigned or denied certain perceived abilities, skills, or character orientations.

Jasbir K. Puar is a U.S.-based philosopher and queer theorist. She is a professor and graduate director of women's studies and gender studies at Rutgers University, where she has been a faculty member since 2000. Her most recent book is The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017). Puar is the author of award-winning Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), which has been translated into Spanish and French and re-issued in an expanded version for its 10th anniversary. She has written widely on South Asian diasporic cultural production in the United States, United Kingdom and Trinidad, LGBT tourism, terrorism studies, surveillance studies, biopolitics and necropolitics, disability and debilitation, theories of intersectionality, affect, and assemblage; animal studies and posthumanism, homonationalism, pinkwashing, and the Palestinian territories.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rosalind Gill</span>

Rosalind Clair Gill is a British sociologist and feminist cultural theorist. She is currently Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at City, University of London. Gill is author or editor of ten books, and numerous articles and chapters, and her work has been translated into Chinese, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.

Carla Rice is a Canadian educator, project director, consultant, speaker and author on women's body image issues. She is a Tier II Canadian Research Chair in care, gender and relationships in the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. This role includes the challenging of stereotypes through the investigation of ways that perceptions of women's bodies can be changed through images and stories.

Christopher M. Bell was a disability studies scholar working in the area of HIV/AIDS, race and ethnicity. He was the former president of the Society for Disability Studies and contributed to national discussions about race, ethnicity and disability studies. His posthumously published anthology, Blackness and Disability: Critical Examinations and Cultural Interventions, grew from his early critique of disability studies as a "white discipline" that ignored the racial dimensions of studying disability. His 2006 essay, "Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal," was published in the second edition of the Disability Studies Reader and established him as a notable disability studies scholar.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chandra Talpade Mohanty</span> Indian-American Feminism and womens studies professor

Chandra Talpade Mohanty is a Distinguished Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Sociology, and the Cultural Foundations of Education and Dean's Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse University. Mohanty, a postcolonial and transnational feminist theorist, has argued for the inclusion of a transnational approach in exploring women’s experiences across the world. She is author of Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, and co-editor of Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, Feminism and War: Confronting U.S. Imperialism,, and The Sage Handbook on Identities.

V. Spike Peterson is a professor of international relations in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona, and affiliated faculty in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies, the Institute for LGBT Studies, International Studies, Human Rights Practice Program, and the Center for Latin American Studies. Her cross-disciplinary research and teaching are focused on international relations theory, gender and politics, global political economy, and contemporary social theory. Her recent publications examine the sex/gender and racial dynamics of global inequalities and insecurities and develop critical histories of ancient and modern state formation and Anglo-European imperialism in relation to marriage, migration, citizenship and nationalism. Peterson is "considered to be among the most internationally important senior scholars currently working at the intersections of International Relations, Feminist and Queer Theory, and of International Political Economy."

Heidi Safia Mirza is a British academic, who is Professor of Race, Faith and Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, Professor Emerita in Equalities Studies at the UCL Institute of Education, and Visiting Professor in Social Policy at the London School of Economics (LSE). She has done pioneering research on race, gender and identity in education, multiculturalism, Islamophobia and gendered violence, and was one of the first black women professors in Britain. She is author and editor of several notable books, including Young, Female and Black (1992), Black British Feminism (1997), Tackling the Roots of Racism: Lessons for Success (2005), Race Gender and Educational Desire: Why Black Women Succeed and Fail (2009), Black and Postcolonial Feminisms in New Times (2012), and Respecting Difference: Race, Faith, and Culture for Teacher Educators (2012).

Raka Ray is an American sociologist and academic. She is a full-time professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the departments of Sociology and Southeast Asian Studies. She became the Dean of Social Sciences at UC-Berkeley in January 2020. Ray's research interests include gender and feminist theory, postcolonial sociology, emerging middle classes, South Asia, inequality, qualitative research methods, and social movements. Her current project explores changes in the meanings and relations of servitude in India. Ray is also an editor of the publication Feminist Studies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexandre Baril</span> Canadian disability and gender studies academic

Alexandre Baril, is a Canadian writer and since 2018 an associate professor at the School of Social Work, at the University of Ottawa. He researches sexual and gender diversity, bodily diversity, and linguistic diversity. He considers his work to be intersectional, involving queer, trans, feminist and gender studies, as well as sociology of the body, health, social movements, and of critical suicidology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Romero</span> American sociologist

Mary Romero is an American sociologist. She is Professor of Justice Studies and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University, with affiliations in African and African American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Asian Pacific American Studies. Before her arrival at ASU in 1995, she taught at University of Oregon, San Francisco State University, and University of Wisconsin-Parkside. Professor Romero holds a bachelor's degree in sociology with a minor in Spanish from Regis College in Denver, Colorado. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Colorado. In 2019, she served as the 110th President of the American Sociological Association.

Nancy A. Naples is an American sociologist, and currently Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut, where she is also director of graduate studies. She has contributed significantly to the study of community activism, poverty in the United States, inequality in rural communities, and methodology in women's studies and feminism.

Liat Ben-Moshe is a disability scholar and assistant professor of criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ben-Moshe holds a PhD in sociology from Syracuse University with concentrations in Women and Gender Studies and Disability Studies. Ben-Moshe's work “has brought an intersectional disability studies approach to the phenomenon of mass incarceration and decarceration in the US”. Ben-Moshe's major works include Building Pedagogical Curb Cuts: Incorporating Disability into the University Classroom and Curriculum (2005), Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada (2014), and Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (2020). Ben-Moshe is best known for her theories of dis-epistemology, genealogy of deinstitutionalization, and race-ability.

References

  1. Faculty profile, University of Alabama.
  2. Erevelles, Nirmala (January 1998). "Bodies that do not matter: Social policy, education, and the politics of difference". Teaching and Leadership - Dissertations.
  3. Erevelles, Nirmala; Minear, Andrea (2010). "Unspeakable Offenses: Untangling Race and Disability in Discourses of Intersectionality". Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies. 4 (2): 127–145. doi:10.3828/jlcds.2010.11. S2CID   145702060.