Kate Caldwell
Kate Caldwell
University of Illinois UCE
University of Illinois, IL
Kate Caldwell, is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where she received her doctorate in disability studies and currently works on the Chicagoland Entrepreneurship Education for People with Disabilities project (www.CEEDproject.org). Having also received a master’s degree from the University of Chicago in interdisciplinary social sciences, she brings this expertise to approaching complex issues where various fields intersect and facilitating dialogue across disciplines. Her research in the area of employment and social policy has focused on the experiences of people with disabilities, and Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (I/DD) in particular, in entrepreneurship. This is a topic that allows her to bridge the fields of disability studies and entrepreneurship studies by integrating theoretical advancements that have been made in feminist theory, citizenship theory, and social justice. Kate is serving on the National Task Force on Workforce Development and Employability for People with Disabilities as an advisor for the Subcommittee on Entrepreneurship, Tax Incentives & Procurement. For two and a half years she served as the Editorial Coordinator for the AAIDD journal, Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, and is currently a board member for the Society for Disability Studies and co-founder of the interest group on Work Employment & Society.
Kate is a theorist, having written on the intersection of bisexuality and disability. Her work has contributed to the inclusion of disability in The Bisexuality Report and the inclusion of bisexuality in the Global Disability Rights Library. She is also a methodologist and developed the technique for conducting Dyadic Interviews with individuals with intellectual disabilities, which is informed by critical disability studies. She also developed the best practice recommendation for the Association of University Centers on Disabilities, and currently in use by the Institute on Disability and Human Development at UIC, for creating plain language summaries for academic articles.