In 2015, I was in New South Wales, Australia, participating in the Fulbright Specialist Program. In the picture, I am at the Cambewarra Mountain Lookout, and the Pacific Ocean is in the background.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is co-director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (GADIM) with Patricia Almeida of Brazil, a journalist and mother of a daughter with Down syndrome, and Catia Malaquias of Australia, a lawyer and mother of a son with Down syndrome. The three co-founded the organization in 2016. It is now a registered non-profit in Fort Worth, Texas, USA. Find out more about GADIM here: https://www.gadim.org/
Haller developed some of the first Disability and Media courses in North America, at Towson University in Maryland, where she was full-time in the Mass Communication Department from 1996-2020, at the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Disability Studies master’s and undergraduate programs, at York University’s Critical Disability Studies graduate program in Toronto, Canada, and at the University of Texas-Arlington for its Minor in Disability Studies.
Haller is the author of Disabled People Transforming Media Culture for a More Inclusive World (Taylor & Francis, 2024). She is co-editor of the 2020 Routledge Companion to Disability and Media (with Gerard Goggin of the University of Sydney and Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is the author of Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She was formerly co-editor of the Society for Disability Studies’ scholarly journal, Disability Studies Quarterly, (2003-2006).
In 2022, Temple University named Haller the Klein-Carnell Distinguished Fellow in recognition of a record of distinguished scholarship. She received her Ph.D. in Mass Media and Communication from the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University in 1995. Haller was the 2020 winner of the Jim Ferris Award for Outstanding Achievement in Communication from the Disability Issues Caucus of the National Communication Association. In 2017, she won the Towson University Diversity and Inclusion Faculty Award for Research.
She was a Fulbright Specialist at the University of Sydney, Australia, and Curtin University Australia in February 2015 for the project, “Disability, the Media, and Digital Technology: Issues, Challenges, and Future Research.” In 2013-14 Haller participated in the MIUSA Empower Partnerships for Inclusive Communities Professional Exchange Program, a state department-funded project to partner with a disability organization in Serbia, Centre LIVING UPRIGHT, and a journalism school in Serbia, Novi Sad School of Journalism (NSSJ).
Haller has provided media and disability content and mentoring of participants of the Professional Fellows Program for Inclusive Civic Engagement run by the Institute for Community Inclusion in Boston. She consulted on the Open Society Institute Disability Rights Initiative for media training for the African Youth with Disabilities Network, on the University of Russian Academy of Education, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia for its center training journalists to cover disability issues, on the media monitoring project of Disability Rights Promotion International, Toronto, Canada. Haller gave research support for the Center for an Accessible Society, San Diego, Calif., 1998-2003.
Haller currently maintains a blog on disability issues in the news, Media dis&dat. She has been researching media images of disability since 1991, when she did a master’s thesis at the University of Maryland-College Park on the coverage of Deaf persons in The Washington Post and New York Times. Her Ph.D. dissertation at Temple University investigated elite news media coverage of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Her media and disability research has been published in Disability Studies Quarterly, Communication Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, Disability & Society, Journalism Studies, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Research in Social Science and Disability, Journal of Comic Art, Journal of Magazine and New Media Research, Mass Comm Review, and Journalism History.
Haller is a native of Fort Worth, Texas, and received her undergraduate degree in journalism from Baylor University. She worked as a print newspaper journalist covering health, medicine and the environment in the 1980s in Texas and Illinois.
Contact information:
E-mail: bhaller@towson.edu
Mailing address:
GADIM, 3540 Wosley Dr., Fort Worth, TX 76133 U.S.A.
Beth Haller's website 