My research seeks to cultivate institutional access by analyzing, interrogating, and (re)envisioning institutional discourse and design practices intended to promote access. My research specifically draws from and intersects with scholarship in technical and professional communication, rhetoric and composition, disability studies, rhetorics of health and medicine, digital rhetorics, gender studies, and legal studies. Examining the circulation of ableism across institutional spaces, my research has demonstrated that when institutions are motivated by neoliberal goals like productivity, they often confuse access with normative assimilation by offering accommodations to individuals with disabilities that encourage them to align with existing normative structures. By equating access with the overcoming or erasure of disability, such efforts foster conditional understandings of inclusion based on disability’s exclusion. Recognizing the problematic impacts of such conditional inclusion, my research utilizes transdisciplinary theory and diverse qualitative methods to examine the influence of ableist rhetoric across institutions and to cultivate more just practices across academic and professional spaces.
My research is transdisciplinary and intersects with the following fields:
- Rhetoric
- Technical and professional writing
- Business communications
- Intersectionality
- Disability justice
- Rhetorics of health and medicine
- Digital rhetorics
- Composition
- Writing studies
- Writing center studies
- Gender and feminist studies
If you would like to read more about my publications, please visit: PUBLICATIONS
If you would like to read more about my conference presentations, please visit: CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS.
If you would like to read more about my dissertation, please visit: DISSERTATION
Kristin C. Bennett, Ph.D. 