Emese Ilyes Robert L. Bernstein Institute for Human Rights; Global Justice Clinic at NYU Law

Emese is a critical social psychologist whose scholarship excavates the history of constructs that group people into categories. Her research, writing, and organizing has sought to understand the systems that define capacity and impose labels like intellectual disability on select bodies and minds. As an educator and researcher – working with participatory methodologies that make room for poetic and non-textual ways of knowing – she continues to work in collaboration with communities who most deeply understand structural violence and who can most clearly articulate visions of a just world. With this commitment to participatory methodologies led by those most impacted, Emese continues to work in solidarity with communities to interrogate systems of power and to name radical possibilities.