Announcing Our Visiting Scholars and Postdoctoral Fellows

Laura Mauldin is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Human Development and Family Sciences, with an affiliation in the Department of Sociology, at the University of Connecticut. She is also a nationally certified American Sign Language interpreter. Her work examines disability, illness and caregiving. A sociologist by training, her work is also informed by the interdisciplinary fields of feminist disability studies and science and technology studies. She is currently working on a new book project that centers stories of spousal caregiving in the context of illness, disability, and aging. The book is supported by a Social Science Research Council Rapid-Response Grant on Covid19 and the Social Sciences. Twitter: @mauldin_laura

Pooja Rangan is author of Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (2017) and an associate professor of English in Film and Media Studies at Amherst College. Her affiliation with the Center for Disability Studies is made possible by a 2020-21 ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship at the Center for Media, Culture, and History. The main focus of Rangan’s research during her residency is a book, Audibilities: Documentary and Sonic Governance, that rethinks the humanist tenets of documentary speech and listening from the perspective of social theories of accent, disability, and abolition. Rangan is also at work on two collaborative projects: an anthology of essays titled Thinking with an Accent (co-edited with Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Akshya Saxena, and Pavitra Sundar), and a co-authored book with Brett Story that explores the role of documentary in the history and contemporary practice of prison abolition by tracking the parallel expansion of the documentary and the prison as indexes and repositories of social death, neglect, and organized abandonment. 

Yan Grenier is a post-PhD scholar at NYU’s Center for Disability Studies. Holding a masters’ in political science and a Phd in anthropology from Laval University, his research interests are concerned with dwelling, mobilities and becomings of people with disabilities in relation to the physical ecology of urban assemblages and their associated governmentalities. Funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec Société et culture (2020-2022), his current post-doctoral position is focused on the situated interactions between the New Yorkers with disabilities and the city’s transportation infrastructure and services, and how these relations produced certain modes of existence. As the COVID-19 pandemic drastically modified the spatial distribution and rhythm of life habits of people in the city, the study also documents in situ the lived experiences of the recent disturbances to the ways people interact with others and their environment.

Alexis Kyle Mitchell is an artist and scholar working across methods and mediums. She often collaborates with artist Sharlene Bamboat under the moniker ‘Bambitchell’. Mitchell completed a PhD in Human Geography at the University of Toronto (2018) where she held a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. She was artist-in-residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude (2015-2017) and at the MacDowell Colony (2018), and a fellow at Sommerakademie Paul Klee (2017-2019). Recent screenings and exhibitions include Mercer Union (Toronto), Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival & The International Film Festival Rotterdam. Bambitchell have an upcoming solo exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle). Writing and research can be read in ‘Digital Lives in the Global City’ forthcoming from UBC Press (Fall 2020). In 2020-2022 Mitchell will hold a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Disability Studies and Anthropology at New York University where she will be researching and creating an experimental film exploring intimacies and kinships built in relation to a multi-symptom, degenerative genetic disease called Myotonic Dystrophy.