Gareth M. Thomas

I am a Reader in the School of Social Sciences. I am a sociologist interested in disability, health and illness, care, reproduction, and stigma. My primary empirical focus in recent years has been the experiences of disabled people and their families / allies, and configurations of disability in different spaces (e.g., prenatal screening; popular media; the arts). My work has been supported by the British Academy, Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Health and Care Research Wales, and the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness, among other organisations.

My research has been published across disciplines in journals including - but not limited to - Sociology of Health and Illness, The Sociological Review, Sociology, Medical Humanities, The British Journal of Sociology, Sociological Research Online, Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, Health and Place, Health Risk and Society, Current Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, cultural geographies, Journal of Consumer Culture, and Men and Masculinities.

I have published 3 books: 1) Down's Syndrome Screening and Reproductive Politics: Care, Choice, and Disability in the Prenatal Clinic (2017); 2) Disability, Normalcy, and the Everyday (2018, with Dikaios Sakellariou); 3) Recalibrating Stigma: Sociologies of Health and Illness (2025, with Oli Williams, Tanisha Spratt, and Amy Chandler). This last book is available open-access with Bristol University Press.

I am currently Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Sociology of Health and Illness with Janice McLaughlin. I am co-founder and co-convenor of the Cardiff Interdisciplinary Network on Disability (CIND) at Cardiff University.