Elizabeth Ribet
Lecturer-in-Law
Beth Ribet is the Research Director at the Center on Intersectionality and Social Policy in the School of Law. She is simultaneously appointed as an adjunct professor and is team-teaching "Intersectionalities" with Kimberle Crenshaw, in the 2011-2012 academic year.
She holds a PhD in Social Relations from the University of California-Irvine, and a JD from UCLA with a concentration in Critical Race Studies. Her doctoral dissertation was grounded in interviews with Jewish daughters of Holocaust survivors in the U.S. Her additional areas of teaching interest in Law include disability law, international law, prison law and policy, torts, labor law, and various areas of critical theory. She writes primarily about the production of new or "emergent" disabilities and illnesses, produced by intersecting dynamics of racial, gender, economic, sexual, ethno-religious, age, and citizenship based stratification and subordination. That is, her research interrogates the injuring and sickening of the bodies and minds of vulnerable populations as a consequence of systemic violence and inequity (such as genocide and warfare, mass incarceration, commercial sexual exploitation, and poverty), and also explores prospects and obstacles to using law and policy as a point of intervention.
Recent publications include:
"Emergent Disability and the Limits of Equality: a Critical Reading of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities", 14 Yale Hum. Rts. & Dev. L.J. 155. (2011)
“Naming Prison Rape as Disablement: a Critical Analysis of the Prison Litigation Reform Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Imperatives of Survivor-Oriented Advocacy”, 17:2 Virginia J. of Social Pol'y & the L. 282. (2010)
