On December 2nd, Heather D. Evans successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation in the Department of Sociology! Heather has been a stalwart member of the UW Disability Studies community for several years. In 2016, she organized the Disability Studies Graduate Interest Group through the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and she co-organized our latest Pacific & Western Disability Studies Symposium at UW. She has been a Fellow in the Comparative Law & Society Studies Program and a graduate instructor at UW Bothell teaching Disability & Human Rights and Disability in Popular Culture. 

Heather has been honored with several awards in disability studies:

• 2014 and 2015 Harlan Hahn Endowment Fund Grants
• 2016 Pamela E. Yee Gender and Disability Studies Award 
• 2016 Dennis Lang Student Award

Heather has conducted both statistical analyses and ethnographic fieldwork. Her master’s thesis explored how a local homeless encampment's participation in direct democracy impacts its residents and their perceptions of themselves as community members and citizens. In her Ph.D. dissertation, she expands her research on membership, rights claiming and identity. The project examines the paradox of ‘invisible disability’, focusing on legal consciousness among people who have acquired non-evident impairment as adults. Broadly, she is interested in processes of marginalization, how new social spaces are created, and perceptions of citizenship among marginalized people. Heather received BAs in Anthropology and Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington in 2005.

We haven't lost her yet: she'll be working at UW Seattle as Part-Time Lecturer in 2017.  And check out her latest publication in Disability Studies Quarterly
http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5556/4550.