ABOUT ME
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My name is Hailee Yoshizaki-Gibbons. I am an Assistant Professor in Biomedical Humanities at Hiram College. My research employs an intersectional lens to examine the ways gender, race, class, and immigration status further mediate the lives of old disabled people and those who care for them. As a scholar activist, I advocate for greater inclusion of old disabled people, particularly those with dementia, in society.
I have a Ph.D. in Disability Studies with a Concentration in Gender and Women's Studies from University of Illinois at Chicago. Prior to earning my Ph.D., I graduated from Miami University of Ohio in 2008 with a Bachelor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Studies and in 2013 with a Master of Science in Student Affairs and Higher Education. As a person with a psychiatric disability, I am passionate about Disability Studies because it has empowered me personally as well as inspired me academically. My current project is tentatively titled, "'In the Time of Dementia': Temporality, Disability, and Aging in Carceral Care." This research centers the care relationships between institutionalized old women with dementia and the immigrant women of color employed to care for them. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic research in the dementia unit of a nursing home, I focus on temporality as a framework to understand the complex ways care is conceptualized, structured, and enacted within the confines of the unit. I analyze how time simultaneously operates to reproduce gendered, racialized, classed, aged, and disability oppressions and serves as a site of solidarity, community-building, and resistance among old women with dementia and their caregivers. I argue that while bureaucratic and institutional time serve as a nexus of power and a pervasive organizing principle of care structures and relations within nursing homes, old women with dementia and their caregivers disrupt these normative, dominant, and linear approaches to temporality. They do this by slowing institutional time to “make time” for connectivity, engaging in circular and repetitive forms of relationship building, and existing together in what I term “dementia time,” which is a temporal dis/orientation that explores alternate spacetimes and realities and finds meaning and value in self-contained, nonlinear, intermittent, irrational, and idiosyncratic moments. My work has been published in Review of Disability Studies, Research in Aging, Alzheimer's and Dementia, The Hastings Center Report, and Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, among others. I also have chapters in several anthologies, including Critical Dementia Studies: An Introduction, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film, Handbook of Aging with Disability, The Image of Disability: Essays on Media Representations, and Manifestos for the Future of Critical Disability Studies. In my free time, I love to spend time with my family and my dogs, Izzie and Ginnie and my cat, Tommie. I love animals and have been a vegetarian for over fifteen years. I also enjoy reading, binging Netflix, and engaging in hobbies such as origami, knitting, word games, and logic puzzles. |
Me with my Mentors, Dr. Kathy McMahon-Klosterman, Dr. Tammy Schwartz, and Monica Ways
Me with Colleagues at the 2019 National Women's Studies Association Conference
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INTERESTS
Disability and Aging | Dementia | Institutionalization/Incarceration | Abolition | Feminist Disability Studies
Care Work | Intersectionality | Mental Disabilities and Neurodivergence | Higher Education | K-12 Education
Media/Representation | Civic Engagement | Service-Learning | Social Justice | Qualitative Methodology
Care Work | Intersectionality | Mental Disabilities and Neurodivergence | Higher Education | K-12 Education
Media/Representation | Civic Engagement | Service-Learning | Social Justice | Qualitative Methodology
ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL CAREER
To learn more about my academic and professional career thus far, view my Curriculum Vitae.
