Brian Le Lay

Dr. Le Lay's research broadly explores how people working in organizational contexts, ranging from instructional designers to vision care professionals, use language, images, documents, methods, and technologies in ways that prioritize the needs, interests, values, and wellbeing of people with radically diverse bodies and minds. Dr. Le Lay is particularly interested in better understanding the successes and challenges involved in doing disability-inclusive work given the dynamic complexity of stakeholders' embodied experiences and the many constraints upon our time, knowledge, skills, resources, and mind/body capacities.

In one ongoing project, Dr. Le Lay examines institutional arrangements that both enable and constrain disability-inclusive work. The project draws on interviews with university-based advocates for disability inclusion, including teachers, researchers, administrators, and practitioners. The focus includes aspects such as learning management systems, training programs, policies, committees, and communities of practice.

Dr. Le Lay has presented his individual and collaborative research at conferences such as the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Design of Communication; the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine Symposium; the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine; and the National Communication Association.

As a teacher (and forever student) of critical disability studies, Dr. Le Lay strives to equip current and aspiring change-makers with the professional development practices, systems thinking tools, and communicative strategies needed to build cross-functional coalitions and transform organizational structures.

Prior to joining the CUNY SPS faculty, Dr. Le Lay taught courses in first-year writing, science communication, rhetoric and the media, technical writing, and visual rhetoric and document design. He earned a doctorate in Rhetoric, Scientific & Technical Communication from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.