Rebecca Maskos

Rebecca works as a doctoral researcher and research assistant at City University of Applied Sciences Bremen, Germany, with research advisor Prof. Marianne Hirschberg. Her qualitative research project looks at disabled people‘s personal mobility choices and their relations to internalised ableism and stigma. She focuses on the reasons for the use or non-use of wheelchairs in people with walking impairments and their reconstructions of
what it means to be disabled to them.

For data gathering she uses narrative interview and Grounded Theory methodologies. Besides her Ph.D. work she is active in the German Disability Rights Movement and works as an occasional journalism freelancer on disability issues. Rebecca comes from a background of Psychology (earning a degree in 2004 at University of Bremen) and Disability Studies (spending a year as a Fulbright student in Chicago at University of Illinois in 2000/ 2001).

Prior to starting her Ph.D. she worked as an NGO staff member and empowerment trainer in the field of violence prevention for women and girls with disabilities and as a full time radio and TV producer. Rebecca lives in Berlin.