DISABILITY STUDIES - Key Persons

Ashley Cowan D

as..@cripriot.com

Job Titles:

CEO and Founder, Crip Riot and COVID - 19 & Higher Education Program Manager, AAPD

Ashley Cowan D'Ambrosio is a Mad/Mentally Ill, Chronically Ill, Disabled activist, educator and entrepreneur. She is a graduate of the UW Disability Studies program (class of 2019) and a current student at the City University of New York (CUNY) pursuing a Masters of Arts in Disability Studies. She is the founder and CEO of Crip Riot, a disabled-owned and led company committed to bringing expressions of disability pride to the world, through unapologetic clothing, media, education and activism. She is also the founder of Myers Fork Consulting, providing support to businesses and organizations interested in building scalable solutions to systemic challenges with accessibility, equity and growth. As of January 2023, Ashley serves as the COVID-19 & Higher Education Program Manager at the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), where she is building out AAPD's advocacy program to ensure access to education for people with disabilities across the nation. Her research interests center around incorporating theories of "Crip Spacetime" into higher education instructional design (Universal/Inclusive Design), through distance learning integration, self-paced, asynchronous instruction, etc. It is her experience as a non-traditional, first-gen, chronically-ill, mad/mentally-ill high school-dropout, which has motivated a desire to explore the narratives and contexts of disabled students who have been criminalized, pathologized, and/or traumatized as part of their educational journey.

Carli Friedman

cf..@thecouncil.org

Job Titles:

Director of Research for CQL
Director of Research for the Council on Quality and Leadership

Carli Friedman is the Director of Research for CQL | The Council on Quality and Leadership. CQL is an international not-for-profit organization that is dedicated to the definition, measurement, and improvement of personal quality of life, through a world of dignity, opportunity, and community for all people with disabilities. Carli's research at CQL works to promote meaningful community participation and empowerment of people with disabilities by exploring the impact policy, service systems, and providers can have on quality enhancement and quality of life. Carli, who has a Doctorate in Disability Studies, is the author of over 230 journal articles, book chapters, research briefs, and reports, focusing on ableism, community integration of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, Medicaid, and social determinants of health.

Clara Berridge

Job Titles:

Associate Professor, School of Social Work

Danbi Lee

da..@uw.edu

Job Titles:

Assistant Professor, Division of Occupational Therapy, Department of Rehabilitation Medicine

Danbi Lee, PhD, OTD, OTR/L is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Occupational Therapy, Department of Rehabilitation Medicine. She earned a PhD in Disability Studies and Doctor of Occupational Therapy from University of Illinois at Chicago and a Bachelor's degree in Occupational Therapy from Yonsei University, South Korea. Her scholarly interests include self-management interventions and outcome measures for people with stroke with a focus on community living and participation. She is also one of the founding members of the Occupational Therapy and Disability Studies Network advocating for integration of disability studies perspectives into the field of occupational therapy.

Dr. Kat M. Steele

Job Titles:

Assistant Professor
Associate Professor, College of Engineering Director of AMP Lab

Dr. Kat M. Steele is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington. Her research focuses upon using novel computational and experimental tools to understand human movement and improve treatment and quality of life individuals with cerebral palsy, stroke, and other neurological disorders. Her research group strives to connect engineering and medicine to create solutions that can advance our understanding of human ability, but also translate research results to the clinic and daily life. She has previously worked as an engineer in multiple hospitals including the Cleveland Clinic, The Children's Hospital of Colorado, and Lucille Packard Children's Hospital. She also co-directs AccessEngineering, an NSF-supported program to encourage individuals with disabilities to pursue careers in engineering and integrate topics on universal design and accessibility into the engineering curriculum. She has been awarded an NIH K12 Career Development Award in Rehabilitation Engineering, NSF CAREER Early Faculty Development Award, and the American Society of Biomechanics Young Scientist Award.

Ellie Vainker

el..@gmail.com

Job Titles:

Deputy Director of Northwest Access Fund

Ellie Vainker is the Deputy Director of Northwest Access Fund, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and Community Development Financial Institution with the mission of offering people with disabilities customized loans, financial coaching, and other resources to promote access to assistive technology, independence, financial resilience, and life opportunities. Ellie's doctoral research incorporates disability studies, anthropology of development, and nonprofit studies in parsing the complications around fundraising for a disability organization given the legacies of harm and trauma around charity and disability. She outlines the ambivalences involved in meeting needs under capitalism to highlight both the individual financial costs of living with disability as well as the fraught position that nonprofit organizations must navigate in addressing unmet needs. She argues that far from being mercenary or naïve, as nonprofit fundraising is often portrayed, fundraising for nonprofit work involves balancing visionary politics with pragmatic action. Ellie has professional experience in media production, academic publishing, and nonprofit administration. Between 2009 and 2013, she worked in the television and film industry in London on a range of productions, including Our War (BBC), Transgenders: Pakistan's Open Secret (Clover Films for Channel 4), Opium Brides (Clover Films for PBS Frontline), and Leave to Remain (Infinity Films). Between 2014 and 2018, she served as a digital content editor for Cultural Anthropology, providing manuscript editing for Hot Spots and Theorizing the Contemporary pieces. Since 2017, she has worked in nonprofit administration and programming in the Pacific Northwest.

Enrico Doan

Enrico Doan is a union organizer, racial justice advocate, and disability educator. He currently works as the Associate Director of the University of Washington Housestaff Association (UWHA), the union that represents medical residents and doctors-in-training in the King County region. As a member of the non-profit organization Rooted in Rights, Enrico helps manage community outreach projects to ensure that the disabled community has access to legislative and civic institutions. Enrico also serves on the leadership of various Democratic organizations, where he brings a disability lens to all conversations, promoting critical conversations about accessibility, inclusion, and equity."

Frank C. Newman

Job Titles:

Lecturer, School of Law, University of California, Berkeley

Heather Clark

Job Titles:

Lecturer, Anthropology

Heather Evans

Job Titles:

Acting Assistant Professor, Department of Rehabilitation Medicine Research Director, Northwest ADA Center

Heather is a socio-legal scholar who focuses on the ways in which institutions such as the law, higher education, and the medical field interact with marginalized populations. She has conducted statistical analyses, ethnographic fieldwork, and evaluation research. Heather's current work is in the field of Critical Disability Studies examining disclosure, identity management, and workplace accommodations among people with physical, mental, and sensory differences that are not readily apparent. She is also committed to community based research and does consulting work for local social justice organizations, primarily focusing on disparities within the criminal justice system. Heather earned a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Washington and spent 8 years teaching courses in the Department of Sociology; Disability Studies Program; and the Law, Societies & Justice Department at UW. She joined the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at UW in July 2021 as an Acting Assistant Professor and Research Director for the Northwest ADA Center serving Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.

Heather Feldner

hf..@uw.edu

Job Titles:

Assistant Professor, Division of Physical Therapy, Department of Rehabilitation Medicine

Dr. Feldner focuses on advancing participation and health together with people with disabilities and their families by examining early, equitable access to mobility and assistive technology within home and community environments. Her research centers on the design and implementation of assistive technology and the effects of technology upon activity and participation, and within a variety of personal and environmental contexts, including how perceptions of disability and identity emerge and evolve through technology use. She is especially interested in conceptualizations of accessibility and how technology design facilitates or hinders access. Her current work incorporates a multidisciplinary, mixed methods approach rooted in a participatory action framework and draws from her background as a pediatric physical therapist, doctoral work in disability studies, and postdoctoral research in user-centered rehabilitation and design in mechanical engineering.

Ian Johnson

Job Titles:

Assistant Professor, University of Tennesse

Jason Naranjo

jn..@uw.edu

Job Titles:

Associate Teaching Professor, School of Educational Studies, UW Bothell

Jennifer Mankoff

jm..@cs.washington.edu

Job Titles:

Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Richard E. Ladner Professor

Jennifer Mankoff is the Richard E. Ladner Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on assistive technologies for equal access, health and wellness, and takes a multifaceted approach that includes machine learning, 3D printing, and tool building. Jennifer applies a human-centered approach that combines empirical methods and technical innovation. For example, she has designed 3D-printed assistive technologies for people with disabilities. Jennifer received her PhD at Georgia Tech, advised by Gregory Abowd and Scott Hudson, and her B.A. from Oberlin College. Her previous faculty positions include UC Berkeley's EECS department and Carnegie Mellon's HCI Institute. Jennifer has been recognized with an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, IBM Faculty Fellowship and Best Paper awards from ASSETS, CHI and Mobile HCI. Some supporters of her research include Autodesk, Google Inc., the Intel Corporation, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft Corporation and the National Science Foundation.

Joanne Woiak

jw..@uw.edu

Job Titles:

Associate Teaching Professor

José Alaniz

Job Titles:

Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages

José Alaniz, professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Comparative Literature (adjunct) at the University of Washington - Seattle, authored Komiks: Comic Art in Russia in 2010 and Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond in 2014 (both published by the University Press of Mississippi). He chaired the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF) from 2011 to 2017. His research interests include Cinema Studies, Death and Dying, Disability Studies, Critical Animal Studies and Comics Studies. Current book projects include Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia and a study of history in Czech graphic narrative.

Kat Eli

ka..@uw.edu

Kat completed her B.S. in Psychology & International Studies from Baldwin-Wallace College and her M.A. In Higher Education and Student Affairs from Bowling Green State University. She brings higher education experience from Pacific Lutheran, Seattle Vocational Institute, and from UW-Seattle. Many folks may already know Kat because she is an active and engaged colleague on campus serving on APAC and on the PSO. Kat has twin 2 year-olds, Addison and Avery and loves essential oils and practicing mindfulness through coloring and journaling.