In her dissertation on wheelchair avoidance and wheelchair appropriation, Rebecca Maskos sheds light on the wheelchair not only as a practical aid, but also as a complex symbol in a society that is permeated by ableist structures, i.e. structures that reduce disabled people to their impairments. To this end, she combines different theoretical approaches and shows how inadequate the purely medical view of disability is. A central merit of the work is, for example, the illumination of "hybrid wheelchair use", in which people switch back and forth between walking and using a wheelchair. Rebecca Maskos impressively shows how such forms of use can lead to new individual freedoms on the one hand, but also to new forms of stigmatisation on the other. In this sense, the findings of this study are not only of academic interest, but also have direct practical relevance - especially in view of demographic change.
The work was jointly supervised by Prof. Dr Henning Schmidt-Semisch (Institute for Public Health and Nursing Research IPP, Department 11, University of Bremen) and Prof. Dr Marianne Hirschberg (University of Kassel). Dr Maskos took up a professorship for Disability Studies at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences in Berlin in July 2024.
The Bremen Study Prize is awarded by the Society of Friends of the University of Bremen and the Constructor University (unifreunde) and honours outstanding dissertations, Master's or state examination theses.
Prof Dr Henning Schmidt-Semisch
University of Bremen|Faculty 11:
Human and Health Sciences
Institute for Public Health and Nursing Research IPP
Department of Health & Society
