Assistant Professor of Higher Education

The Scholar

Dr. Kat Stephens-Peace is an Afro & Indo Guyanese, neurodivergent scholar whose intellectual universe bridges the personal and the otherworldly. Her work sits at the intersection of Critical Dis/Ability Studies, Black Disability Studies, Critical & Intersectional ADHD Studies, Higher Education, Caribbean Studies, Literature, Poetry, and Visual Arts.

She doesn't study these intersections from a distance — she inhabits them. Her positionality is not a disclaimer of salient identity markers appended to a methodology section; rather, a declaration of personal positioning as both intellectual thought, academic movement building, and the action of making new things. As a Crip scholar and Caribbean-born woman navigating the academy, she brings lived knowledge to every research question she poses.

Her scholarship is animated by a refusal to separate the intellectual from the embodied, the scholarly from the poetic, the analytical from the creative. This is not interdisciplinarity as a decorative buzzword — rather, it is a necessary response to the inadequacy of any single framework for understanding complex lives, systems, cultures, and languages that Dr. Kat Stephens-Peace intentionally protects, and introduces to academia in the Western world.

The Educator

Teaching, for Dr. KSP, is not "banking" — it is about becoming (for her and her students). Her pedagogy draws on critical disability pedagogy, universal design for teaching and learning, culturally sustaining practices, and arts-based engagement to create classrooms where everybody and every way of knowing is valued.

Students don't just learn about disability studies or historical educational pathways — they experience these frameworks as living, breathing tools for interrogating the world they move through daily, while preparing to enter into it as professionals.

The Poet and Painter

Poetry is not a hobby — it is a method. Dr. KSP's poetic practice is inseparable from her scholarly work. She uses poetic inquiry as a research methodology, crafting verse that functions simultaneously as data, analysis, and theory.

Her poems have been performed at academic conferences, community events, and public lectures — each time demonstrating that the line between art and scholarship is not a boundary but a bridge.

Similarly, painting is not a hobby — it is an affirming method. Dr. KSP's visual arts practice is bound to her scholarly contributions. She uses painting, color theory as wellness, and fashion studies to illustrate and extend beyond traditional research practices. Her visual contributions have been featured in art exhibits, and hold increasing importance in her methodological toolkit.