Dr Emma Sheppard

MSc, PhD, PgCAP, FHEA

Emma is a Sociologist working in Critical Disability Studies, an interdisciplinary field which centres a critical commitment to social justice. 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 is currently working on a number of projects, including: 

• 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.
• Disability and employment in Wales - improving employers' capacity to employ disabled people
• Queer-crip and neurodivergent community in rural space
• Explorations of crip time, the crip killjoy, and development of queer-crip theory.

Emma gained her undergraduate degree in Geography from QMUL in 2010, and then her MSc in Gender, Sexuality, and Society from Birkbeck in 2012. 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, eventually running an EU-sponsored EAL school for teenagers as Director of Studies. Having been a Teaching Fellow at City, University of London, and a Lecturer in Sociology at Coventry University, she joined DGES in 2023. 

Her doctoral work, explored experiences of pain for people who live with chronic pain and engage in BDSM, challenging normative conceptions of pain. The research explored notions and contestations of control and containment, and experience of living with a painful self; it exposed how normative constructions of pain are a part of the performance and construction of able heterosexuality. This has developed into her current work which explores time, futurity, and queer-crip resistance to normativity. 

To express interest in persuing PhD research with Emma, please contact her.