Associate Professor Diane Shinberg presented a paper at the American Sociological Association's 118th annual meeting in Philadelphia, PA, on August 19, 2023. Her paper, "Toward More Inclusive Structural Intersectionality: Contextual Measurement of Structural Ableism," calls for the development of measures on structural ableism for application in quantitative intersectionality research.
Ableism is an underappreciated socioecological construct related to other axes of inequality, such as racism, sexism, and classism. Shinberg discussed the history of disability in the US Census from 1830 onwards and suggested contemporary, contextual measures of disability inequity at the macro level.
Shinberg's paper was part of a session on Technologies of Disability Representation and Identification, jointly sponsored by two of the Association's sections: Disability and Society; and Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology.