Elizabeth DePoy, professor of social work, interdisciplinary disability studies, and cooperating faculty in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maine conducts scholarship focused on methods of inquiry, legitimacy and disjunture theory, and design and branding of humans as categories members. Most recently, DePoy has expanded her work to examine how impaired bodies illuminate values that challenge the boundaries of humanness. Along with her co-author, Gilson, she has suggested that embodied impairment can be thought of as a violation of humanness, begetting responses of revision, reinvention or denial.