We don’t suffer these days from any lack of communication, but rather from all the forces making us say things when we’ve nothing much to say.
— Gilles Deleuze
My Latest Research
I am the Principal Investigator for the Stuttering Commons (funded as a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant, 2023-2026). With co-directors Chris Constantino (Florida State University), Daniel Martin (MacEwan University), and Maria Stuart (University College Dublin), and integral community consultants Patrick Campbell, Sam Simpson (Redefining Stammering), Bart Rzeznik and Conor Foran (Take Courage), Stuttering Commons aims to establish dysfluency studies as a recognized and accessible field of knowledge. Specifically, we will mobilize critical emancipatory insights towards social change in three areas: 1) training a network of dysfluency researchers, 2) education for members of disability communities, and 3) education for clinicians and Speech-Language Pathologists. Thus, this project will facilitate sustained dialogue and collaboration between social-cultural and biomedical models, especially in the form of resources for clinicians, speech-language therapists, and, most importantly, people who stutter. We will facilitate the training of future dysfluency scholars and activists through conferences, travel grants, student co-authorship opportunities, and the hiring of two research assistants over three years. We will moreover progressively address the lack of accessible knowledge through workshops, online speaker series, academic publications, videos, and the creation of a online educational platform that will make dysfluency studies accessible to both a general and professional audience
Cheap Talk: Disability and the Politics of Communication
In Cheap Talk: Disability and the Politics of Communication, I flip the script on communication disability, positioning the unruly, disabled speaker at the center of analysis to challenge the belief that more communication is unquestionably good. Working with Gilles Deleuze’s suggestion that “[w]e don’t suffer these days from any lack of communication, but rather from all the forces making us say things when we’ve nothing much to say,” I bring together the unlikely trio of the dysfluent speaker, the talking head, and the troll to show how speech is made cheap—and produced and repaired within human bodies—to meet the inhuman needs of capital. The book explores how technologies, like social media and the field of speech-language pathology, create smooth sites of contact that are exclusionary for disabled speakers and looks to the political possibilities of disabled voices to “de-face” the power of speech now entwined with capital.
Teaching
POLS 298:
Introduction to Critical Disability Studies
POLS 404/515: Advanced Critical Disability Studies
Winter 2024
Themes of POLS 298: Cure, Disability Justice, Crip
Themes of POLS 404/515: Crip Politics & Religious Ableism
Students
Hussein Alaeddin Alhussainy, Honours Thesis, Political Science
Maddie Dempsey, MA
Maddie Dempsey, Honours Thesis, Political Science
On supervisory committee: HeunJung Lee, PhD candidate, Neither Here Nor There: Temporality of Living with Dementia, Performing Deviance
About
I am Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Critical Disability Studies and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Alberta. I work at the intersection of critical disability studies, contemporary political theory, and feminist theory, and my research focus on the interplay of communication and disability within information societies. I live in Edmonton, AB and am gardening whenever possible.