Anti-ableist Resources

During the lifetime of WAARC we will be releasing details of collaboration, writing and outputs from our research in a variety of forms.

Collaborative work in progress

Members of the WAARC team are working in collaboration with National Association of Disabled Staff Networks to realise their aspirations in relation to two wider community projects that seek to enhance the work experiences of disabled academics and professional services colleagues: 

• RIDE Higher (Realising the Inclusion of Disabled Staff) is an initiative established by and for disabled staff in Higher Education - which feeds directly upon the activities of the Cross-cutting theme led by Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril.

• Access to Work Users Group - led by Armineh Soorenian - This NADSN subgroup is for Disabled staff who receive Access to Work (AtW) support, such as Support Workers, equipment, or assistive tech. It offers monthly peer support meetings and will contribute to NADSN’s response to the UK Government’s AtW consultation. This work has come directly out of Armineh and Kirsty Liddiard's work on WAARC's Priority Area 1: Environments.

WAARC is engaging with colleagues in the the Univerity of Sheffield Research Culture team on a number of key research culture priorities. One of these relates to promoting accessible events and builds on previous work that members of our team have been involved with including Accessibility guide for inclusive university events (led by Antonios Ktenidis in collaboration with the Univerity of Sheffield Research Culture team)  and some earlier work Antonios did with Sheffield Voices in producing an Easy read accessibility guide

We also want to connect with other researchers and institutes in the country. 

Daniel P. Jones is collaborating with researchers from Durham University’s Institute for Medical Humanities and Wellcome-funded Discovery Research Platform to apply some of the findings from his WAARC research into accessible events to an internationally scaled academic event. Working as an accessibility advisor, this conference has taken a commitment to COVID-19 and airborne virus risk mitigation strategies, quiet rooms, and a variety of other access commitments that haven’t been seen before at such a large-scaled conference: International Conference: Critical Neurodiversity Studies: Directions, Intersections, Contradictions

Daniel and Lauren White have recently published a blog on the National Centre for Research Methods entitled Revisiting access and inclusion in research methods which reflects upon work that they are leading on WAARC's Priority Area 2: Developments

Liz Dew and Armineh Soorenian have been invited by the University of Leeds to present a keynote address - Reimagining Research Culture, Together - at the Research Culture Community of Practice Event 2025 (Leeds, 14th July 2025)

Lauren White has worked in collaboration with members of  the Maker{Futures} programme team on a journal article that explores ways of  collaboratively with Disabled Young People as Researchers, Designers and Makers

The Inclusion Leadership Research Interest Group of BELMAS hosted an event on Thursday 19th June 2025, entitled ‘The Depathologising University’. The RIG’s Co-Convenors, Dr Beth Holmes, Dr Wendy Conrad and Dr Donnie Adams, were joined by guest speaker, Professor Dan Goodley, Professor of Disability Studies and Education in the University of Sheffield’s School of Education, who discussed his work in the field of Critical Disability Studies, and the ways in which academics, researchers and research professional colleagues are depathologising the disablist and ableist university. You can find a recording of Dan's talk here

Presentations from the WAARC team 

Related Anti-ableist publications from the WAARC team

WAARC team members have led on a number of Special issues and Edited Collections during the time of our project that bring together some of the cutting edge debates and contributions from critical disability studies:

Kirsty Liddiard and Rebecca Lawthom (editors), Special issue: Disability as a feminist issue, Feminism and Psychology, June 2025, Volume 35, Issue 2: contributions to the Special Issue, exploring voice, embodiment, power, sexuality, care, labour, hetero/sexism, disablism, and ableism.

Tsitsi Chataika and Dan Goodley (editors).The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Disability Studies. London: Routledge, published March 2024). Led, curated and driven by Dr Tsitsi Chataika - with editorial input from Disability Matters's Dan Goodley - this exciting new text challenges the Western, European and North American tendencies of critical disability studies through centring and exploring postcolonial theory. More details can be found here

We also support a number of Working Papers through which the WAARC team critically engage with emerging findings and deliberations with a specific focus on our aims and deliverables. 

Missive from the Accommodations Loop by Daniel P. Jones and Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril
A critical disability studies take on the question of accommodations in the university

Imagining the anti-ableist university -  published in the geoz.one -  Editors Daniel Jones and Lauren White and contributors Daniel P. Jones, Lauren White, Liz Dew, Elaina Gauthier-Mamaril, Armineh Soorenian, Ankita Mishra, Cassie Kill, Helen Evans, Christina Lee, & Sophie Phillips (2025). 

Joy in Social Research - created space for postgraduate and early career researchers to collaborate and critically engage in the concept of joy. It was funded by the Participatory Research Network and iHuman

Disability Dialogues a series of short provocative pieces about disability studies and research; a joint venture of iHuman, University of Sheffield; Centre for Disability Studies, University of Leeds; Disability Innovation Institute, UNSW and NIE/NTU Singapore.

And we are sharing Books and Journal articles - Open Access peer reviewed papers - written by the WAARC team that either emerge directly from our work or reflect team members' scholarship that are impacting on our discussions within the team. These papers consider the power of podcasting to promote dialogue and theorisation; theoretical ideas relating to understanding the anti-ableist university; the challenges of particular research methods when these methods are built upon ableist assumptions; the urgent need to engage disabled people and their representative organisations at all stages of research:

Massively Disabled 3: Back to the Future with Polio - In the third post of an ongoing monthly series exploring podcasting practice and the medical humanities, Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril reflects on how disabled communities of care share practices and knowledges from polio to COVID.

The Autistic Postgraduate Woman: Navigating the Neurotypical University - Bringing together current research with lived experience, this book by Sophie Phillips considers the challenges of being an autistic woman in postgraduate education with the aim to raise awareness, challenge misconceptions and ignite change within the system.

Anti-Frontiers in Zineing: Zines as Process & the Politics of Refusal - Reflecting on his own zine-practice as geographer, Daniel P. Jones calls for a shift to the focus on zineing as process and politics of refusal that explicitly challenges neoliberal, capitalist agendas. 

Depathologising the University - Dan Goodley's paper develops a conversation with decolonisation to pitch a novel mode of engagement; depathologising the university

The Depathologising University - This paper offers an original affirmative proposition: that the university is already depathologising - by Dan.Goodley, Kirsty Liddiard and Rebecca Lawthom

Failing ethnographies as post-qualitative possibilities: reflections from critical posthumanities and critical disability studies - Through reference to critical posthumanities and critical disability studies theory, attend to broken, patchwork, kintsugi and crip ethnographies that, we argue, allow us to sit in the liminal space between qualitative/post-qualitative research and human/posthuman theory by Bojana Daw Srdanovic, Nikita Hayden, Dan Goodley, Rebecca Lawthom and Katherine Runswick-Cole. 

Co-producing ethics guidelines together with people with learning disabilities - Bottomley et al reflect on developing the Participatory Ethics Good Practice Guidelines; as a research team of clinical, academic and advocacy-based researchers with and without learning disabilities.

The inclusion of adults with intellectual disabilities in health research - challenges, barriers & opportunities: a mixed-method study among stakeholders in England - Bishop et al's study aims to understand system barriers to research participation for people with intellectual disabilities.

Being human as praxis: for people with learning disabilities - Dan Goodley posits that being human as praxis—in relation to the lives of People with Learning Disabilities—offers a significant and original insight into critical and social theory across the social sciences and humanities.

Moreover, we are fortunate to draw upon scholarship symposia, films and their recordings which bring together the work of emerging and established disability studies and disabled researchers as well as the writing of the Disability Matters team:

Disability Matters Scholarship Collection is a growing resource of short papers, filmed presentations and Q&A sessions with emerging disability studies scholars from around the world. 

Disability Matters team publications - gives links to outputs emerging from this six year pan-national programme of research that centres disability as the driving subject of inquiry in the health, research and science sectors.

Webinar: Children and Disability -This webinar – hosted by the Childhood, Law & Policy Network (CLPN) on the 25th February 2025 – brought together three experts to discuss theoretical and practical questions concerning children and disability. Panellists: Anastasia Todd (the University of Kentucky), Antonios Ktenidis (the University of Sheffield), and Susan Flynn (Trinity College Dublin). Chair: Hedi Viterbo (Queen Mary University of London).

Jones, D. P. (2025). Using easy read formats in geography. Fennia - International Journal of Geography, 202(2), 326–333. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.148662 - Daniel P. Jones recently worked with Fennia to produce the first peer-reviewed easy-read only paper that introduces the value of using easy-read formats in Geography. It encourages us to reconsider easy-read formats as more-than afterthought, asking what might come from using the format as a starting point in research dissemination. 

Jones, D. P., & Phoenix-Kane, D. (2025). Tourettic research of Tourette syndrome: some reflections. Neurodiversity, 3, 27546330251328489 - Daniel P. Jones expands on his work in WAARC on inclusive research methodologies with this new collaborative commentary co-authored with Danni Phoenix-Kane. The paper reflects on the authors experiences of conducting research into Tourette Syndrome as two Tourettic researchers themselves, focusing on themes of representation, additional labour, and data collection, before calling for removing current barriers to research rather than making calls for future involvement of Tourettic researchers. 

Blog paper and response - As our Wellcome Anti-Ableism Research culture project works to identify anti-ableist practice in the university this is also promoting debate within our own team.  We are all committed to honouring and respecting different opinions and perspectives. One debate relates to masking - and papers from Sophie Phillips & Armineh Soorenian and Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril & Daniel P. Jones capture some of the nuanced debates emerging from our team. Please read more here:

Phillips, Sophie, and Armineh Soorenian. 2025. ‘To Wear or Not to Wear: Face Masks in Disability Focused Events’. The Polyphony (blog). 8 April 2025. https://lnkd.in/ezdejj_V.

Gauthier-Mamaril, Élaina and Daniel P Jones. 2025. Being a masking crip killjoy. The Polyphony (blog). 2 June 2025. https://lnkd.in/eeACg3sZ

Public engagement outputs from the WAARC team

Due to the wider work of our WAARC team we are fortunate to draw upon a plethora of resources that we might frame as public engagement:

Elaina Gauthier-Mamaril's Massively Disabled: A long COVID research podcast series. And you can find the transcripts of each episode here: https://www.massivelydisabled.com/

WAARC team and others' Zine coming soon to the Wellcome Collection (March 2025) - Imagining the anti-ableist university’ is a collection of frustrations, tensions, and hopes for the future of an anti-ableist university created by a collection of critical disability studies scholars and university professional services staff in the UK. Through sharing some of our dialogues surrounding the concept of the anti-ableist university over the past 6 months, we encourage this zine to be read critically and engaged, critiqued, and used as a starting point for others to share their frustrations with and hopes for the anti-ableist university, whatever that may mean to you. 

Outputs of Disabled People's Organisations 

WAARC partners - Disabled People's Organisations - have produced a number of outputs relating to research, innovation and evaluation. These include:

Inclusive Recruitment and MyEmployment Plan developed by Speakup Self-advocacy. Employment is for Everyone site. Employers will find information on video CVs examples of inclusive recruitment and the My Employment Plan, which employers could adopt for all colleagues who are in employment within the university who are autistic this would ensure reasonable adjustments were made in the workplace. 

Human activism with Speakup Self-advocacy - human activism as made by self-advocates with learning disabilities

ScHARR Mini Master Class in Health Research #8 Dr Liz Croot and guests - Doing Research with People with Learning Disabilities - thinking differently about doing research through co-production

Humanising Healthcare: An exhibition  - showcases the humanising healthcare practices created by researchers with learning disabilities including colleagues from WAARC partners Speakup Self-advocacy and Sheffield Voices

Human Rights - a film - by Sheffield Voices

Impact of advocacy - by Speakup Self-advocacy - many reflections on the power of self-advocacy

NADSN Conference held pre-covid in Manchester in 2019 - a link to presentations

NADSN’s post-lockdown position paper

NADSN members have also been involved in this fabulous film and project Marginalisation in Science: Disabilty and Inclusion