We’re thrilled to be joined by Angela Frederick on Tuesday 20th May 2025, 7-8.30pm BST (12-1.30pm Central Time).
Angela Frederick is Associate Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at El Paso. She earned her doctorate in sociology from The University of Texas at Austin in 2012. Frederick is a qualitative researcher whose expertise spans the areas of medical sociology, the sociology of disability, STEM and higher education, and, more recently, environmental sociology. Her prior scholarship in the sociology of disability has garnered awards from multiple sections of the American Sociological Association, including the Sex and Gender Section, Race Gender and Class Section, and Disability in Society section. Frederick is passionate about improving disability representation in the discipline of sociology. And when her home state of Texas experienced a bulk power failure during a massive winter storm in 2021, she knew this was the next disability story she was called to tell using the tools of qualitative sociology.
Frederick is author of the forthcoming book, ‘Disabled Power: A Storm, A Grid, and Embodied Harm in the Age of Disaster’, which will be published by NYU Press later this year. In the book, Frederick shares findings from interviews she conducted with 57 Texas residents with disabilities and parental caregivers who endured the 2021 Texas power crisis. She demonstrates how people with disabilities and chronic health conditions bear unique forms of harm when basic infrastructure, such as power and water systems, are "disabled." She argues the vulnerability people with disabilities experienced during Winter Storm Uri was not an inevitable consequence of individual disabled bodies. Rather, disability vulnerability was "produced" through a policy process that "disabled" vital infrastructure, including power, water, and emergency services. These preventable infrastructure failures required disabled Texans to endure unique forms of embodied harm.
Frederick also emphasizes another meaning of the term "disabled power," that is, the individual and collective resilience Texans with disabilities exercised to survive the disaster. Contrary to dominant tropes that portray disabled people as passive victims or as objects of rescue in disaster contexts, she reveals how Texans with a wide range of disabilities employed remarkably creative strategies to survive the disaster, while simultaneously providing and receiving care within their networks of loved ones, neighbors, and disability advocacy organizations. This combination of resilience and care, however, often required physical and emotional sacrifices from disabled individuals that are not always legible to nondisabled people.