Med Soc Conference 2025: Welcoming Disability In

• This short blog post reports on a recent trip to the British Sociological Association’s annual Medical Sociology Conference (Med Soc).
• It describes how Cripping Breath team members Julie and Kate gave a talk about the project at the conference and some of the questions they received in response.

It was an overcast morning on the 10th of October when Julie and Kate arrived in Newcastle for the BSA’s annual Med Soc conference hosted this year by Northumbria University. We were delighted to have a paper accepted to talk about Cripping Breath and the crip approaches (such as crip time) we are carefully embedding throughout the project - which in practice means always recognising disability and chronic illness as valuable human experiences. 

As medical sociologists, we (Kate and Julie) bring medical sociology as a key lens to our Cripping Breath work and this makes us curious about points of convergence and divergence between medical sociology and the field of (particularly critical) disability studies. As some have recently argued, there is something of a legacy of silence around the intersections between the two disciplines which isn’t especially helpful when it comes to understanding the lives of disabled and chronically ill people better. 

And so, our talk drew on a paper published recently by the Cripping Breath team and began by contextualising what we wanted to say against this background of a ‘divide’ between the two fields of study. Thereafter we discussed some common key challenges in disability and chronic illness research such as negotiating accessibility; challenging ableist and institutional notions of productivity; co-creating inclusive methodological design and the uncertainty of living with fragility and loss within the research process. We explained how we were drawing on crip ideas and approaches to navigate these challenges (slow scholarship, rest and recuperation, intersectionality, interdependence) and suggested medical sociology might benefit from ‘welcoming in’ some of these ideas too.  

We had lots of interest from other researchers and some great questions as part of the Q and A after the talk.  These inquired about our approach to intersectionality and the links between critical disability studies and critical race studies in particular (something we are starting to explore in the narrative stream by making connections with the Equal Breath project), our experiences of institutional support for researchers involved in coproduction research, and also the response of our funder (Wellcome) to our deliberate engagement with slow scholarship and the implications of this for timescales and project outcomes.  

It was great to connect with others who are also working across medical sociology and disability studies, and we are looking forward to returning in a couple of years to report on our project findings!