Laura Mauldin

Associate Professor

Department of Social and Critical Inquiry

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Biography

My work spans various fields such as sociology, feminist disability studies, deaf studies, and science and technology studies. I am also a creative nonfiction writer, where I blend memoir, reportage, and cultural criticism. Everything I do, whether traditional academic work or public facing writing, is about exposing ableism as a central organizing principle of society. I document how ableism structures all of our lives (disabled or not), that it intersects with various other systems of oppression, and that we can resist it. You can find my work across scholarly journals and books in both sociology and disability studies; I proudly work across both the humanities and sociology.

 

My forthcoming book, In Sickness and In Health: Love Stories From the Frontlines of America’s Caregiving Crisis, will be published by Ecco on Feb 10, 2026.

 

I am also the creator of Disability at Home, which documents the creativity and ingenuity of disabled people and their caregivers as they seek to make home accessible.

 

I teach classes at both the undergraduate and graduate levels that weave together disability studies, science and technology studies, medical sociology, and other fields. I’m a deeply engaged qualitative methodologist and teach and write about methods, and I love to mentor students as they become writers and scholars, so I teach classes on writing for publication (whether academic or public work) as well

Education

Ph.D., Sociology, City University of New York – Graduate Center
M.A., Deaf studies, Gallaudet University
B.A., Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin

Areas of Specialty

• Social, cultural, and ethical aspects of health, illness and healthcare
• Disability studies/Deaf studies
• Science and technology studies (STS)
• Impact of medical knowledge and medical technologies on caregiving
• Disability/chronic illness and care negotiation in the family
• Feminist theory, the body, and identity