Ronnie earned her PhD in the UW Interdisciplinary Individual PhD Program, with support from the departments of Geography, History, and Disability Studies. She completed her MA in Cultural Studies and her Bachelor of Arts at the University of Washington Bothell, where she focused on the social and political histories of disability and global development. In her current teaching and research, Ronnie explores the cultural politics of developmental and intellectual disabilities in the United States through comparative history, cultural studies, and postcolonial and transnational disability studies frameworks. Ronnie’s dissertation is a digital histories project with a central focus on comparing how domestic charity and humanitarian aid institutions in the U.S. have drawn upon, reinforced, or contested common misunderstandings about developmental and intellectual disabilities. She gives specific attention to how the stigmas attached to these identities of difference intersect with systemic oppressions based on race, class, gender, sexual identity, ethnicity, and nationality.
Areas of scholarly interest: Postcolonial/transnational disability studies, critical cultural geography, cultural studies, global development and humanitarianism
Research methodologies: discourse analysis, historical archive analysis, systems of representation
