Dissertation Timeline
Janelle passed their comprehensive examinations in April 2023. She then passed her dissertation proposal defense in November 2023. Janelle is currently writing their autoethnographic dissertation and is on track to complete by the end of Spring 2025.
Dissertation Focus
Janelle's dissertation is titled "Human-Generated Accessibility in Composition Studies & Pedagogy." In this dissertation, Janelle explores human-generated disability accommodations as partnerships in the writing classroom as taught by disabled writing instructors and students who have access to this kind of accommodation. Building from Zdenek’s (2015) concept of humanistic rationale for closed captioning (p. 7) and captioning studies, Janelle pivots to specifically focus on captioning as Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) in the writing classroom as a mindful human-generated service. Throughout this dissertation, Janelle defines CART captioning as services rendered at the institutional level for a largely hard of hearing (self) identified group, but I also acknowledge that CART services are used by a myriad of other Deaf, disabled, and neurodivergent populations. This dissertation project engages with the nuanced experience of auditory disability and captioning: exploring the access to the soundscape as provided by a human captioner in the room while teaching.