Jude Schofield
PhD candidate, Disability Equity Consultant, Graduate Teaching Assistant, Study Skills Tutor, former SOAS Board of Trustees student representative
About
Jude (they/them) is a PhD candidate researching accessibility and assistive technology in the workplace in Japan. Their home institution is SOAS, University of London, where they are housed primarily within the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, although their research training and supervisors are from a variety of interdisciplinary backgrounds. From January 2023 until July 2023, they conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Tokyo. Jude is also a former visiting fellow at Tokyo College, University of Tokyo.
Projects
Alongside Jude's research, they were a member of SOAS’ Board of Trustees as a postgraduate research student representative. They were also the 2021-2023 Research Students' Association President, which is an organisation associated with the Student Union, and involves representing the postgraduate research student body on a variety of panels and boards.Jude taught in a Graduate Teaching Assistant role within the East Asian Languages and Cultures department at SOAS until 2024, before teaching a Doctoral School training course for first-year PhD students from 2024-2025. At the forefront of their pedagogy is inclusivity and accessibility for all students, especially for disabled and neurodiverse students.Through their representative roles, Jude has found themselves consulting with teams tackling accessibility of physical spaces and facilities, providing input from the perspective of a disabled person. This led to their role as a Disability Equity Consultant.Currently, Jude is in the process of writing their first monograph, Embodied Experiences of Disability in Japanese Workplaces, which will be published with Palgrave Macmillan as a part of their upcoming series, Palgrave Studies in Disability in Asia and the Pacific. They are sharing their journey on their Substack, The Writer’s Block.
Publications
Schofield, J. (2023) バリアフリー職場 ー日本の福祉用具と障害への対応、働き方の変化に関してー [Accessible ‘workplaces’: Assistive technology, disability, and the changing working landscape in Japan] in 神園 明治神宮国際神道文化研究所紀要 [Kamizono; Journal of the Meiji Jingu Intercultural Research Institute]. 30. November 2023. ISSN: 1883-2725.Schofield, J. (2025) Inclusion or Segregation? The Specialist Subsidiary System for Accessibility in Japanese Workplaces, in Review of Disability Studies (20, 1). Available here: https://rdsjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1354Schofield, J. (2026) "To be recognised as human is enough": Tales from the intersection of queerness and disability, in Metttasphere: Narrating identities across borders and media (eds. Janz, Facius and aliwen). Torch Press.Schofield, J. (forthcoming) Embodied Experiences of Disability in Japanese Workplaces: Robots, Social Media, and Segregation. Palgrave Macmillan.
Contact
If you would like to contact Jude, please use the links below.