News

For older news and updates, see the news archive.

October 2025

We held another successful online symposium with fantastic speakers from Spain on the 3rd October. The papers and recording are available here.

Our Singapore-based Research Assistant Kerri Heng presented a paper with Prof Rachel Chen at the NTU Medical Humanities Satellite Conference on communicating with patients with disabilities as part of the Singapore Health and Biomedical Conference.

Ankita Mishra published a blog post for the Centre for Equity and Inclusion exploring the everyday challenges faced by chronically ill and disabled women of colour in academia through the composite narratives of Nyra and Maya. Read the blog post here.

September 2025

It's been a busy month!

Disability Matters's Christina Lee and Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril from WAARC presented at the London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research conference  “Beyond Labels”: International Conference on Disability, Different Ability and Neurodiversity at Birkbeck College, London. 

On 17th September, Disability Matters and WAARC attended and showcased at the 'Building Inclusion for Disabled Researchers in Science' event hosted at the Wellcome Trust in London. Following the recent White Paper from NADSN, the event brought together research institutions, funders, and other key changemakers to discuss the barriers faced by disabled researchers in STEMM and explore best practices.

Then on 19th September, we held our first online town hall event with invited panel speakers Prof Kate Sang and Dr Katherine Deane to discuss how centring disability can drive innovative in health research and Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI).

July 2025

We had a very successful online symposium "Professional Services, Disability & Inclusive Research Cultures" on 3rd July 2025, featuring our own Programme Manager Rhea Halsey, Lucy Dunning, and Liz Dew.

Watch the recording and read the papers here.

June 2025

Disability Matters's Christina Lee was a guest on the Ethics in Practice podcast. In this episode, Nicole Redvers and Christina Lee share their experience of resisting hierarchies and creating space for alternative ways of thinking and being in academia. They take us through Buddhist philosophy, feminism, crip theory, and indigenous law in the sub-Arctic region to close with three provocations that you can hold onto for our whole series:

• What if health isn’t about curing our body of the changes it endures? But about living well with those changes instead?
   
• What if research isn’t an act of knowledge creation? But a service to those who hold knowledge that is true for their context?
   
• What if bioethics as governance is not rooted in prevention of harm but reciprocity? Where we recognise how our well-being is squarely dependent on that of others including Nature itself.
   

 Our Canadian colleagues in Toronto ran a writing retreat Questions of disability studies to address a key question of the Disability Matters programme: what is disability studies for?  Retreat discussions were also informed by two work in progress papers:

Titchkosky, T. (forthcoming). Submitted: Fascism taking Flight on a Disability Runway: Analyzing Trump’s Disability Degradation in Turbulent Times. Disability in Turbulent Times (Edward Elgar Publishing). Edited by Patty Douglas, Harriet Cameron and Katherine Rusnwick-Cole.

Cagulada, E. (2025). Breathing Speaks of God: Exploring a Moment's Unfolding Through Interpretive Disability Studies” (Canadian Theological Society ... https://cts-stc.ca/2025/05/21/cts-2025-final-schedule/ ). 

May 2025 

Our own Programme Manager Rhea writes a blog on her recent experiences at the Nordic Network on Disability Research (NNDR) conference in Helsinki. Read the blog here. 

Ankita Mishra, Rhea Halsey, Christina Lee and Dan Goodley presented at the 30th May Disability Matters ∞ Ways of Perceiving: International Conversations hosted by Tanya Tichkosky and Elaine Cagulada, University of Toronto. All colleagues are members of the Disability Matters team.

March and April 2025

Members of the Disability Matters are working hard on plans for different phases of the Disability Matters programme. We are capturing some of our conceptual thinking in contributions to iHuman's Disability Dialogues 

And Ankita Mishra provides us with an update on Building Bridges in Disability Matters 

Dan Goodley has published a paper with Kirsty Liddiard and Rebecca Lawthom which draws on bureaucratic reflections  from the Disability Matters and Humanising Healthcare projects and is published in the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research - The Depathologising University

January 2025

Happy 2025! You might have missed this news feature on the University of Toronto website; Tanya Tichkosky and Elaine Cagulada share their aspirations for the research programme. 

We also welcome a new member to our team - Jodi Lamanna - who will be working with Jackie Leach Scully at the Disability Innovation Institute, University of New South Wales.

We are delighted to announce that Jackie Leach Scully has been has been named as one of the Australian Academy of the Humanities Fellows for 2024 and Dan Goodley has been made a Fellow of the British Academy.