The Living Life to the Fullest Project, led by iHuman and the School of Education’s Dan Goodley, Katherine Runswick-Cole and Kirsty Liddiard, is proud to have collaborated with the publisher Emerald on its celebrations for International Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPD) 2019. You can access this collaboration here.
Since 1992, the International Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPD) has been annually observed on 3 December around the world. The theme for this 2019 IDPD is ‘Promoting the participation of persons with disabilities and their leadership: taking action on the 2030 Development Agenda’.
The centring of disability and leadership in this year’s theme means a lot as a Project Team made up of disabled young co-researchers and university researchers. We distribute leadership across our project, making space for disabled young people to become leaders of the research process in ways that are important to them.
As part of our IDPD celebrations, Living Life to the Fullest co-researcher, Sally Whitney, has co-produced a podcast with Emerald about her experiences of researching on the project. You can listen to the podcast here, or read the transcript here.
Sally said, “…having worked on the topic of disability and researching disability and hearing from other young disabled people has helped me get more of an insight into my own disabled identity. I now consider things in a different way that I wouldn’t have before. The young people that we’ve interviewed, the papers that we’ve written and the conclusions that we’ve come to have actually reflected back on to me and onto my thinking and how I feel about myself as a disabled young person. It’s just been incredibly empowering to be working on papers with academic professionals who’ve been in the field for so long. We’ve published papers in journals. I’ve written a paper which has also been published. I’m now co-leading an impact project on the topic of how assistance dogs help transform the lives of young disabled people. It’s a topic that I feel incredibly passionate about, having had the experience of having a wonderful assistance dog in my canine partner Ethan. I’m so excited to be leading on that and to be doing more research into it. We’re now writing a book which is amazing. I can’t believe that I’m in the situation where I’m helping write a book… It’s just incredible that I have been welcomed into the team and that I’m coproducing. I’m co-producing research in the field of disability and it’s fantastic.”
The below are also available as part of Emerald’s IDPD 2019 celebrations:
- Podcast: “The Co-researcher’s Perspective” with Sally Whitney, co-researcher on the University of Sheffield project ‘Living Life to the Fullest’
- Podcast: “Disability, Community and Inclusion” with Wendy Uttley, Down Syndrome Training and Support Service
- Blog: “Participatory Design with Autistic Adults” by Marc Fabri, Leeds Beckett University
- Blog: “Chronically Angry” by Alex Franklin, UWE
- Blog: “Independence, interdependence, and the community” by Mukta Kulkarni, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, and Eddy Ng, Bucknell University
- Blog: “Transforming Classroom Practices for Learners with Disabilities” by Jeffrey Bakken, Bradley University
- Lots of free papers from a range of subjects
- Details of our latest opportunities to publish
The Living Life to the Fullest Project Team is currently writing a book that will be published by Emerald in 2020. Follow our blog to keep up-to-date on its progress.
