Dr. L.J. Jaffee’s research explores disability justice, anti-imperialist feminism, and political movements in higher education. Her work sits at the intersection of critical disability studies, critical university studies, and transnational feminist theory. She studied history and philosophy of education in the Cultural Foundations of Education program at Syracuse University, where she earned her PhD in 2020. She was awarded distinction and a certificate of recognition for a feminist dissertation upon successfully defending her dissertation, “Access Washing at the Imperial University: Militarism, Occupation, and Struggles Toward Disability Justice.” She has Concentrations of Advanced Study in Women’s and Gender Studies and Disability Studies. Her dissertation explores how U.S. empire, through institutions of higher education, deploys rhetoric about disability access and inclusion to conceal imperial and settler-colonial complicities, a practice she names “access-washing.” Her research also analyzes unfolding histories of anti-imperialism and student protest within universities to chart an alternative genealogy of struggles for disability justice within higher education.

Jaffee was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at Colgate University from 2019-2023. She taught courses including “Democracy and Education,” “The American School,” “Critical and Feminist Disability Studies,” and courses she created titled “Empire and Social Movements in U.S. Higher Education” and “Education for Abolition.” For the 2023-2024 academic year, she worked as a labor organizer in higher education and successfully organized over one thousand international student workers into a labor union. Jaffee is currently a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Critical Design Lab at Vanderbilt University. During her postdoctoral year, she is revising her dissertation into a book, helping edit the Critical Design Lab’s Critical Access Primer, and supporting other creative and collaborative projects through the Lab.