Collaborative Projects

Making Bills Easier to Understand

• Find out more about the 'Making Bills Easier to Understand' project
• Final project presentation slides (as powerpoints)

Led by:

• Bev Enion, School of Education, University of Sheffield
• Turana Abdullayeva,  School of Education, University of Sheffield
• Leyla Jabbarzade, School of Education, University of Sheffield

Partnered with Our Vision Our Future

An invitation to listen

Summary: The study had three research questions: (1) How do The Professors do inclusive participatory research through arts practice? (2) What do these approaches to participatory arts-based research do, and what do they not do? (3) How can The Professors’ ways of working inform anti-ableist participatory research in and beyond the university? To answer these questions, Cassie carried out ethnographic research with The Professors. This involved hanging out in their meetings for an extended period, participating in, observing, and documenting their artistic methodologies. Cassie and The Professors explored the group’s history and made new artistic work, including five films.

• Find out more about the 'Knowing together, differently' project
• Link to Blog on this project
• Films 

Led by:

• Dr Cassie Kill, School of Education, University of Sheffield

Partnered with The Professors (Sheffield)

Accessing Archives

Summary: This project was about making archives more accessible for disabled, deaf and neurodivergent historians. Archives are collections of records and documents, related to the past. They can be digital or physical. They can be big or small. They might be ‘official archives’ owned by the government, such as The National Archives or by local councils, or they might be owned by charities, institutions or private organisations. They may have very old materials, or they may be relatively recent. Most have textual records, but some might also have pictures, photographs, or more unusually examples of material culture. Archives are important because they hold information. If we want to know what the past was like we could use secondary sources, such as books about the past, but in order to research areas that have not already been written about we need to consult primary documents. This is particularly the case if we’re researching historical people, events or phenomena outside of living memory. There are lots of reasons why disabled people might find it hard to access archives. There may be physical barriers or sensory challenges, the unfamiliar environment might cause stress, and the material contained in the archives might lead to overwhelm. Through creating a network, disseminating a questionnaire, having online and in-person meetings and working with a Disabled People’s Organisation (BuDS), our project explored questions around archival access and created some resources both for prospective researchers and archives themselves.

• Find out more about the 'Accessing Archives' project
• Final Project presentation (as powerpoint slides)
• Script from the presentation
• Accessing Archives recommendations

Led by

• Dr Esme Cleall , School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities, University of Sheffield
• Dr Rachel Bright, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Keele University

 Partnered with Buckinghamshire Disability Service ( BuDS) 

Open Scholar

• Find out more about the 'Open Scholar' project
• Final Project Presentation film on Vimeo

Led by

• Dr Grace Joseph, School of Education, University of Sheffield

Partnered with Extant, London