Ambrose McMonagle they/them

Working title of PhD: Containment, Cure and Crip Futurity: Understanding Ableism as Normative Violence.

Institution: University of Glasgow

Year Commenced: 2024

Funding Source: ESRC

Full or part-time: Full-time

Supervisors: Phillippa Wiseman and Caitlin Gormley

Synopsis: 

Ambrose is a disabled, non-binary and queer academic, artist and activist. They have spent the past three years as a Policy and Research Officer for the SNP at the Scottish Parliament. Whilst there, they covered a variety of portfolios including Criminal and Civil Justice; Equalities and Human Rights; Culture; and Education. This enabled them to work on core projects such as Gender Recognition Reform.

Alongside politics, they have a background in arts and archival based work. The former informed by working with Scottish theatre company Aulos Productions, for Edinburgh Fringe and UK Touring productions. The latter informed by their time as an archivist for the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH).

They hold a first-class degree in Law, and a Master of Science in Criminology with Distinction from the University of Edinburgh. They are currently undertaking a PhD in Sociology at The University of Glasgow, situated between two research centres: the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, and the Disability Research Centre. Alongside this, Ambrose holds a position as a Stuart Hall Foundation Fellow.

Their PhD seeks to interrogate the violence of ableism through an archival case study of Scotland’s largest long-stay institution for learning disabled people, Lennox Castle. It will explore how ableism underpins a society unwilling to imagine, let alone build, disability futures.

Their research interests lie in Disability, Queer, and Gender Theory; Research Ethics; Body Politics and Institutional Power. They are also interested in alternative and accessible approaches to research from methodology to presentation.

Keywords: Disability, Deinstitutionalisation, Structural Violence