Dr Emma Sheppard

Lecturer in Sociology

Department of Geography and Earth Sciences

Contact Details

Email: ems83@aber.ac.uk
ORCID: 0000-0001-7341-7542
Office: J6, Llandinam Building
Personal Website: https://dremmasheppard.wordpress.com/
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=YBCwDCoAAAAJ
Research Portal Profile
Personal Pronouns: she / her

Profile

Emma is a Sociologist working in Critical Disability Studies. Her work explores disability and time alongside queer and crip theories. Her broader research interests encompass accessible and trauma-informed approaches to teaching and research, and creative research methods.

Emma gained her undergraduate degree in Geography from QMUL in 2010, and then her MA in Gender, Sexuality, and Society from Birkbeck. Her PhD, in Sociology, was awarded by Edge Hill University in 2017; between 2005 and 2018 she worked as an English as an Additional Language teacher and Director of Studies.

Her doctoral work, which was published as a monograph ("Chronic Pain, BDSM and Crip Time") in 2023 explored how embodied experiences of chronic pain were understood by people who engaged in BDSM play - and challenged normative expectations of what it means to live with pain. Having been a Teaching Fellow at City, University of London, and a Lecturer in Sociology at Coventry University, she joined DGES in 2023.

Teaching

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Lecturer

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Research

Emma's current projects include:

Autistic Spaces of Welfare - developing community involvement to understand and improve autistic people's experiences of welfare and housing.
Trauma-informed pedagogy and research, framing trauma as a social justice and EDI issue.
Exploring notions of “a good life” through the lens of queer-crip futurity, using with creative methods in the form of an asynchronous quilting circle.
Bringing the Body into Policy - exploring resistance to BMI-based measurements of health
Explorations of crip time, the crip killjoy, and development of queer-crip theory.

Emma is also a member of CASPR (Critical Approaches to Scholarship in Pain Research).

Publications

Sheppard, E 2025, 'Spite (and the aesthetic), or, reasons for disclosure', Paper presented at RGS-IBG 2025, 26 Aug 2025.

Sheppard, E 2024, 'Disability Praxis by Bob Williams-Findlay: Reviewed by Emma Sheppard', The Sociological Review Magazine, vol. August. <https://thesociologicalreview.org/search/?query=Disability+Praxis+by+Bob+Williams-Findlay>

Sheppard, E 2024, 'Stigma Stories: Rhetoric, Lived Experience, and Chronic Illness by Molly Margaret Kessler', Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 103-105. <https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/105/article/918888>

Bê, A & Sheppard, E 2023, 'Chronic Illness and Representation', Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 133-139. 10.3828/jlcds.2023.11

Sheppard, E 2023, Chronic Pain, BDSM and Crip Time. Interdisciplinary Disability Studies, 1st edn, Taylor & Francis. 10.4324/9781003006237

More publications on the Research Portal