Research
Three converging streams of inquiry — each shaped by lived experience, each demanding new forms.
Critical Dis/Ability & ADHD Studies, Black Disability Studies
How and who is Crip? Who benefits from erasing the Crip? What happens when we center Crip Time, people, histories, and legacies in contemporary scholarship?
Dr. KSP's work in Critical Dis/Ability Studies interrogates the institutional, cultural, and epistemological mechanisms through which disability is made legible — and the ways disabled people resist, reimagine, and create beyond those mechanisms. This does not excuse institutions such as higher education from an obligation to disability and its people.
With particular attention to the intersections of race, gender, and geography, this work rejects the single-axis analyses that have historically dominated disability scholarship. Disability can and does exist — albeit dependent on country and geographic norms — differently than in the Western models linked to capitalism and productivity.
Caribbean Studies Scholarship
Drawing on the intellectual traditions of Caribbean intellectuals — from Walter Rodney to Edouard Glissant, to Sylvia Wynter — to theorize resistance, knowledge production, and the politics of existence within public and global spaces. Dr. KSP roots her scholarly inquiry in Caribbean ways of knowing, where diaspora, creolization, Caribbeanness, and #islandbrilliance (Stephens, 2019) produces distinct frameworks for understanding power, belonging, and identity.
Geographies of Space and Place
How do we account for ever-changing geographies? What is left behind in the wake of a constantly changing landscape? Where are space and place in the conversations, with the additions of linguistics, innovative technologies, migration, and spatial realities? Dr. KSP's thinking here is grounded by the scholarship of Katherine McKittrick and others.
Publications
A selection of peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and creative scholarship.
Liming As Black Methodology: Black Early Career Scholars Engage Black Humanity in Research
Read →Sisters Doing it for Themselves: When Neurodivergence, Race, Gender, and Graduate School Collide
Read →The Second Wave is Here: Grounding Disability Justice in Higher Education
Read →"Blackness Distorts:" A Qualitative Exploration of Race and Disability in Black Women's Graduate Studies
Read →(Guest Editor) Disabled, Racially Minoritized, and Invisible: The Intersectionality of Race and Disability in Higher Education
Read →Research Projects
Current studies shaping the next phase of the work.
Crip Time on The Tenure Clock: Faculty Life and Neurodivergence in Higher Education
Study in Progress
Exploring Campus Disability Community and Culture at Predominantly Black Institutions via the Lens of Disability Staff Members
Study in Progress