Critical Disability Studies @ iHuman

• Our history
• A foundation in Education
• A commitment to Care and Collaboration
• Activities
• Projects
• iHuman Wellcome Hub

Our history

Critical Disability Studies @ iHuman enjoys an interdisciplinary and international reputation for critical disability studies. We span disciplines including education, psychology, sociology, history, geography, childhood and youth, health, social policy, arts, humanities and cultural studies. We find it helpful to understand our shared approach to research and scholarship as critical disability studies: realising disability’s potential to inform knowledge, learning and practice across a host of spaces including activism, arts, education, society, health and social care and beyond.

Our work builds upon a legacy left by Sheffield Academics working in the 1990s - such as Len Barton, Felicity Armstrong, Claire Tregaskis and Paul Ramcharan  - whose commitment to disability politics  informed some of the foundational work in disability studies in our university. Over the last decade our community has grown with doctoral students, early, mid and late career academics developing a distinct identity in relation to disability research, theory and analysis. It is worth noting that critical disability studies is a dynamic, self-critical field that is responsive to the challenges of contemporary times. 

Our approach to the study of disability starts but never ends with disability. In this sense, we seek to engage in scholarship that is always intersectional, recognising that disability intersects with race, gender, age, class, place and sexuality and other identities. This entails an eclectic use of theory, engaging with critical frameworks such as critical race theory, black feminism, postcolonial theory, queer studies, trans studies, new materialism, posthumanism to name but a few. We aim to theorise and challenge the conditions of disablism (the social, political, cultural and psycho-emotional exclusion of people with physical, sensory and/or cognitive impairments) and ableism (the contemporary ideals on which the able, autonomous, productive citizen is based).

Our research seeks to be inclusive and participatory: working alongside disabled people as experts, collaborators, artists, researchers and theorists in their own right. Our research and scholarship has a number of features including:

• A commitment to social, cultural, minority and intersectional models of disability;
• Desiring disability as an opportunity to rethink what it means to be human;
• Disorientating ourselves and others when orthodoxy and tradition reign;
• Centralising disability as the subject and object of study;
• Exploring disability’s disruptive potential to challenge what passes as the normative order;
• Holding in place a commitment to understanding and challenging the distinct though complementary practices of disablism (the exclusion of people with physical, sensory and cognitive impairments) and ableism (the ideological preference for able-bodied and mindedness).
• Positing disability as a key framing for new kinds of pedagogy, politics and practice;
• Challenging disability knowledge in education, technology, health and social care arenas;
• Creating challenging dialogues and risky conversations with professionals and researchers;
• Ensuring that any research we do is carried out in partnership with disabled people and/or their representative organisations.
• Connecting to critical psychology as a sister field, to challenge given psychological orthodoxies and discourses of deficit.
• Interrogating the disablist and abelist underpinnings of research methods and methodologies and finding inclusive and participatory alternatives.
• Colleagues in Critical Disability Studies at the University of Sheffield were Managing Editors of the international Journal of Disability Studies in Education and through this work we supported the scholarship of new and emerging scholars.
• Colleagues also lead the activities of the University of Sheffield Participatory Research Network
   

A Foundation in Education

Our foundational school is the School of Education and Critical Disability Studies forms one of the Research Clusters of this school led by Dr Lauren White. Research in education is underpinned by intersectional, justice-oriented frameworks to challenge disablism and ableism. Through co-produced and participatory research, we seek to reimagine disability as a transformative force, promoting equity and inclusion across all areas of education and society.

A Commitment to Care and Collaboration

We are also lucky to be supported by the work of colleagues in NIHR School for Social Care Research who are deeply committed to the principles of critical disability studies led by the Executive Director Professor Runswick-Cole.  Moreover, many members of our community are also actively involved with the Participatory Research Network which is led by Dr Kirsty Liddiard. 
 

Activities 

The Disability Dialogues Lounge is an online collaborative space run by the Critical Disability Studies Cluster in Education guided by a key prompt for the month.Letters to Critical Disability Studies - On the 17th July 2025, The Critical Disability Studies team met to think about who we are and the work we do within the field. This was supported and facilitated by the creative work and community spirit of Dal Kular. You can find out more about Dal’s work via this page: https://www.dalkular.com. We also support the curation of Disability Dialogues an online space that celebrates the work of emerging scholars in our field.

Current projects

Find out more about our current projects here

iHuman Wellcome hub

The Hub aims to establish a stream of funded disability research projects supported by Wellcome that promote equity, diversity and inclusive research approaches; that centre things like open research and sustainability; and work with different kinds of partners to ensure meaningful impact. Find out more here