Doctoral Student Fellow
Ph.D. Candidate, Media, Culture, and Communication
Sasha Kurlenkova (he/she) is a researcher of communication and disability, disability activist, non-disabled ally. She is interested in topics of care and assistance, family interactions, ways to give, ask for, and receive care.
In the first two chapters of her PhD dissertation, based on interviews and observations in families, she studies the work of mothers of children and adolescents with cerebral palsy related to procuring and using eyetrackers and relative software for communication, education and play in two large Russian cities. In the last two chapters, she uses Conversation Analysis of video-recorded interactions to explore ways of reaching understanding of a 10-year-old boy with cerebral palsy with his closest communication partner, his mother, and his less familiar partners (his teacher and the researcher herself) with the help of low-tech (scaffolding techniques) and high-tech (eyetracker) methods.