Disability Matters Online Symposia 2026: China and Disability

This a free online event taking place via Zoom on Thursday 13th August, 2026, from 10-11.15am UK/ 5-6.15pm China time.
 

Disability Matters is a major  six year pan-national programme of disability, health and science research, funded by a Wellcome Trust Discretionary Award. 

A key ambition of Disability Matters is to make disability the driving subject of research. We will be promoting scholarship that demonstrates the contribution of disability studies to a host of fields including medicine, medical humanities, medical sociology, science and technology studies, health sciences, population health as well as other key areas including education, law, business, legal studies, health psychology, social work, etc.
 

The theme of this online symposium will be on China and disability, with three brilliant speaker presenting their work on disability inclusion in employment and education in China. 

Agenda

• Introduction (5 minutes)
• Three x spoken provocations (10 minutes x 3)
• Comfort break (5 minutes)
• Q&A (15 minutes) 
• Open discussion (15 minutes) 
• Closing (5 minutes)

Total duration: 1 hour 15 minutes 
 

Speakers 

Title: A Life Course Perspective on Disability: Education-to-Work Transitions of People with Visual Impairments in China

Dr Minjie Chen is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Government, Shenzhen University, China. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Nottingham. Her interdisciplinary training spans social work and social science research methods, and her research focuses on disability, accessibility, inclusive public services, and urban governance.

Her early work examines the life course experiences of people with visual impairments in China, focusing on education-to-work transitions, institutional barriers, and the production of inequality across the life course. Building on this foundation, her current research expands into accessible city development and urban governance, with particular attention to the gap between accessibility policy design and lived experiences of diverse user groups. She is actively involved in research projects and fieldwork on accessible city initiatives in China.

Dr Chen has published several peer-reviewed articles in the international journals, covering disability, education, gender, and social vulnerability. She serves as an Editorial Board Member of Disability & Society (SSCI), and is a regular reviewer for multiple SSCI journals in the field of disability and social policy.

Her forthcoming work includes several journal articles, two co-authored book chapters with Springer and Palgrave Macmillan, as well as a sole-authored monograph under contract with Peter Lang. She is the winner of the Peter Lang 2026 Emerging Scholars Competition in Disability Studies within Education Contexts.

Link to paper

Title: Interfaces That Buffer: Disability-Led Data Labelling and the Making of Actionable Participation in China

Jinna He is a postdoctoral researcher at Guangzhou University. Her research sits at the intersection of communication, disability studies, and science and technology studies. Her current work examines data labelling as an emerging form of diverse employment for disabled people in China, with a particular focus on visually impaired workers, accessibility practices, and the everyday negotiation of digital work. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, life-history interviews, and collaborative research with organisations of persons with disabilities, her work explores how disabled workers and disability-led organisations navigate, adapt, and reshape digital infrastructures in order to make work participation more accessible and sustainable.

Link to paper

Title: Engaging with Tensions and Dilemmas in Inclusive Pedagogical Practice with the Lens of Critical Realism

Zitian Zeng: For the past decade, Zitian’s work has focused on how research and practice can come together to ensure quality educational experiences for all students, through the development of inclusive classroom practices and teachers’ responses to learners’ individual differences. Her current research interests centre on inclusive pedagogy, inclusive practices, teacher-student relationships and trauma-informed schooling practices. Zitian started her professional career as a classroom teacher in Hong Kong, in a specialist school for both primary- and secondary-aged students with physical disabilities. Thereafter, she completed a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Alongside her research, she enjoys contributing to school and university teaching in both the UK and Hong Kong, communicating meaningful research findings to teachers and other educators, and facilitating collaboration between different professionals to enable children and young people to participate fully in education.

Link to paper

A Life Course Perspective on Disability: Education-to-Work Transitions of People with Visual Impairments in China

Dr Minjie Chen

Script: A Life Course Perspective on Disability: Education-to-Work Transitions of People with Visual Impairments in China

Good morning and good afternoon everyone.

Thank you very much for inviting me to this seminar. It is a great pleasure to be here today.

I’m Minjie, and I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Shenzhen University in China. My research focuses on disability studies, particularly the education, employment, and life experiences of people with visual impairments. More recently, my work has expanded to accessibility and inclusive urban environments in China.

Today, I would like to share findings from one of my recent studies, which explores the education-to-work transitions of people with visual impairments in China through a life course perspective.

I would like to begin with a simple question.

Why do so many people with visual impairments in China eventually become massage therapists?

Massage has long been regarded as the most common occupation for blind people in China. However, rather than asking why massage is popular, I became interested in another question:

How do people arrive there?

To answer this question, I interviewed 26 adults with visual impairments from both urban and rural China. Instead of examining only one stage of their lives, I adopted a life course perspective, which allows us to understand how early experiences shape later educational and employment opportunities.

One of the key messages from this study is that education-to-work transitions are already shaped before children even enter primary school.

The first finding concerns early educational exclusion.

Among the 26 participants, only four had attended preschool.

This was not only because families did not value education. Instead, participants repeatedly described how mainstream preschools refused to admit children with visual impairments, while most special schools in China only begin at primary school level. As a result, many children simply stayed at home during the preschool years.

Educational inequality therefore began much earlier than primary school.

Another striking finding was delayed school entry.

At least five participants did not start primary school until after the age of eleven, and all of them entered special primary schools rather than mainstream schools.

Compared with their peers without disabilities, many participants started formal education much later. This was not because they were unwilling to study, but because they often faced rejection from local mainstream schools. At the same time, schools for the blind were not available in every city. As a result, many families spent months or even years searching for an appropriate school, waiting for a place in another city or province, or simply postponing their children’s entry into education. 

This delay affected not only their learning but also the timing of later life transitions. Several participants felt pressure to leave school early and learn practical skills, such as massage, one of the few vocational options available to them, because they believed they were already “too old” to continue studying.

From a life course perspective, these early delays accumulated over time and shaped later educational and employment opportunities.

The second finding concerns different educational pathways.

Participants entered education through three different starting points.

Sixteen participants began their education in special schools.

Nine participants began in mainstream schools, and most of them had low vision rather than complete blindness when they first enrolled.

Finally, one participant never received any formal education at all.

At first glance, these pathways appear very different.

However, one finding surprised me.

None of the nine participants who started in mainstream schools completed their education entirely within mainstream education.

Some transferred to special schools after their vision deteriorated.

Others dropped out of school completely and entered massage training.

Participants consistently described mainstream schools as inaccessible learning environments. They often had to rely entirely on themselves because accessible learning materials, classroom support, and appropriate accommodations were extremely limited.

Several participants there also experienced isolation or bullying. However, more fundamentally, they felt that the education system had only been designed for students without disabilities.

In other words, entering mainstream education did not necessarily lead to more diverse educational or employment opportunities.

This brings me to the third finding.

Although participants followed different educational pathways, their employment outcomes were remarkably similar.

Almost every participant received massage training at some stage of life.

Some learned massage through massage vocational schools.

Others attended short-term training programmes.

Some became apprentices in massage parlours.

Regardless of how they entered the profession, massage training became a common experience across almost all life trajectories.

At the time of the interviews, 19 participants were working in the massage industry, while only seven participants had entered occupations outside massage, including music, IT, customer service, libraries, and DPOs.

This does not mean that everyone wanted to become a massage therapist.

One participant, Ouwen, completed a university degree in massage but later taught himself computer programming. He told me that he wanted to challenge the stereotype that people with visual impairments could only work in massage.

His story reminds us that career aspirations are often much broader than the opportunities that are actually available.

The final finding concerns family and place.

Participants from urban families were often able to access additional educational resources, such as piano lessons, English tutoring, or computer training. These opportunities allowed some participants to develop careers beyond massage.

In contrast, participants from rural families frequently faced financial pressure. For many of them, learning massage represented the fastest way to earn an income and support their families.

Therefore, disability alone cannot explain different life trajectories.

Educational opportunities are also shaped by family resources, geographical location, and unequal access to support.

I would like to conclude with two reflections.

First, this study suggests that employment inequality does not begin when people start looking for work.

Instead, it begins much earlier, through unequal access to preschool, delayed school entry, inaccessible learning environments, and restricted educational opportunities.

By the time many participants entered adulthood, their future career choices had already been shaped by experiences accumulated throughout childhood.

Second, this research has also influenced the direction of my current work.

As a postdoctoral researcher, I now study accessibility and accessible cities in China. Looking back, I have come to realise that accessibility is not only about physical environments, such as ramps or public transport.

Accessibility also shapes people’s life opportunities.

Whether a child can enter preschool, whether a student can learn independently in school, and whether an adult has genuine choices in employment are all questions of accessibility.

From a life course perspective, accessibility should therefore be understood as something that supports participation across the whole of life, rather than only removing barriers at a single point in time.

I hope this perspective can contribute to future discussions on disability, education, and accessibility, both in China and internationally.

Thank you very much for listening, and I look forward to your questions.

Interfaces That Buffer: Disability-Led Data Labelling and the Making of Actionable Participation in China

Jinna He

Today, I will discuss data labelling as an emerging form of employment for disabled people in China, focusing on visually impaired workers.

This research was conducted with a disabled activist and within a DPO founded by another disabled activist. It is an action-oriented and collaborative project that would not have been possible without their knowledge, trust, and organisational work.

My argument is that digital participation cannot be understood simply by asking whether access exists. We need to examine the interfaces through which access is organised, negotiated, and remade.

Beyond Access: Interface as Process

Digital technologies are often presented as creating new employment opportunities for disabled people. Data labelling appears to be one such opportunity because it is computer-based and can involve checking text, classifying information, and reviewing data.

However, describing a job as digital tells us little about whether disabled people can actually perform it.

A platform may work partly with a screen reader, while key steps remain unreadable. A worker may enter the system but still be unable to complete the task. A project may recruit disabled workers, while its training materials, time limits, and quality standards remain organised around sighted users.

These situations cannot be described simply as accessible or inaccessible, successful or unsuccessful. As Ingunn Moser argues, technologies enable or disable people within specific material and social arrangements (Moser, 2006). Access is therefore partial, situated, and continuously enacted.

Following Alexander Galloway and Branden Hookway, I approach the interface not simply as a screen or doorway, but as a mode of mediation and a form of relationship (Galloway, 2012; Hookway, 2014). It is the process through which bodies, technologies, organisations, and rules are brought into relation.

Interfaces Prescribe

Interfaces do not simply display information. They prescribe how users should perceive, move, and act.

A data-labelling platform may assume that a worker can scan a page visually, locate a button, use a mouse, compare several areas of the screen, and respond within a set time. The interface therefore imagines a particular user and establishes a standard way of acting.

For a visually impaired worker, the same task may become a sequence of audio cues, keyboard commands, memory, and repeated checking. The difficulty is not located only in the worker’s body or in one inaccessible button. It is produced by wider expectations about vision, speed, accuracy, and normal use.

A screen reader may provide entry, but it does not automatically change the rules embedded in the task.

Interfaces Extend Beyond the Screen

My fieldwork shows that the interface does not end at the screen.

When a platform does not work smoothly with a screen reader, the problem moves into training, management, peer relations, and communication with clients.

The DPO plays a central role. Activists and staff test whether tasks are workable, identify inaccessible steps, explain workers’ needs to project managers, adjust training materials, and sometimes reorganise the workflow.

They translate between two forms of knowledge.

On one side are commercial requirements: accuracy, efficiency, deadlines, and standardised procedures. On the other are disabled workers’ embodied and technical experiences: how information is heard through a screen reader, how long navigation takes, where the workflow breaks down, and what support makes completion possible. We call it disabilitiy expertise.

The organisation becomes an interface where these different expectations meet and are negotiated.

Interfaces That Buffer

I use the phrase “interfaces that buffer” to describe this work of translation and coordination.

Buffering absorbs friction between a standardised digital system and diverse embodied practices. It creates room for participation where the original system provides little.

Workers develop keyboard-based procedures for mouse-based tasks and share accessibility tips. Staff convert visual instructions into verbal or text-based explanations. Activists negotiate changes with clients and prevent technical failures from being interpreted as evidence that a worker lacks ability.

These practices make participation actionable.

By actionable participation, I mean more than formal inclusion or entry into a workplace. I mean having the practical conditions to understand a task, act within the system, complete the work, and contribute knowledge about how work should be organised. As Aimi Hamraie shows, access is not a neutral design outcome. It is shaped by decisions about whose bodies and knowledge matter (Hamraie, 2017).

However, buffering is also ambivalent.

It makes employment possible, but it can conceal the inaccessibility that makes such work necessary. When disabled workers and organisations repeatedly repair platforms, redesign procedures, and absorb technical problems, employers may see a functioning project without seeing the additional labour behind it.

The interface appears inclusive because disabled people have worked hard to make it so.

Rewriting the Rules of Interaction

Disabled workers are not simply adapting themselves to an existing interface.

Through scripts, shortcuts, revised procedures, peer support, and organisational negotiation, they generate new rules of interaction between bodies, technologies, and work.

A visual task becomes an auditory and keyboard-based task. A standard workflow becomes a collaboratively adjusted workflow. A technical problem becomes a matter for organisational negotiation rather than an individual failure.

This is more than accommodation. It is the creation of another way of working.

Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch use the term “crip technoscience” to describe disabled people’s practices of critiquing, altering, and reinventing material worlds. They emphasise that disabled people are experts and designers of everyday life (Hamraie and Fritsch, 2019). Disability-led data labelling offers one example of such expertise in practice.

It shows that interfaces are not fixed. They can be contested, extended, and remade.

This changes how we understand disability employment. Inclusion should not mean placing disabled people inside workplaces that remain unchanged. It should involve recognising their knowledge and allowing them to reshape the conditions of participation.

Disabled people’s organisations are crucial here. They are not only service providers. They are sites where knowledge about technology, access, bodies, and work is produced collectively.

I want to end with one point.

Disabled workers are often described as people waiting to be included in digital futures. But the workers and activists in this research are already building those futures. By exposing the assumptions built into digital interfaces, coordinating conflicting practices, and creating new rules of interaction, they make participation actionable.

References

Galloway, A. R. (2012) The Interface Effect. Cambridge: Polity.

Hamraie, A. (2017) Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hamraie, A. and Fritsch, K. (2019) “Crip Technoscience Manifesto.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 5(1): 1–33.

Hookway, B. (2014) Interface. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Moser, I. (2006) “Disability and the Promises of Technology: Technology, Subjectivity and Embodiment within an Order of the Normal.” Information, Communication & Society, 9(3): 373–395.

Teachers’ Systemic Predicaments and Agency for Inclusive Pedagogical Practice with the Lens of Critical Realism 

Dr. Zitian Zeng

Section 1: Introduction & Research Methods

Slide 1: Title

Slide 2: Background
Slide 3: Research Purposes
The title for today’s presentation is Teachers’ Systemic Predicaments and Agency for Inclusive Pedagogical Practice with the Lens of Critical Realism. I am Dr. Zitian Zeng.

Across many educational systems globally, including Hong Kong, teachers frequently express feelings of helplessness and confusion when tasked with enacting inclusive education. While teachers are urged to develop inclusive pedagogical practices, they are often not sufficiently articulated, and literature still lacks meaningful engagement with the messy, contradictory realities of everyday classrooms. I would like to focus on shedding light on these gaps in today’s presentation.

In my study, I explored how teachers navigate their relationships with students whom they identified as vulnerable to exclusion, how they developed inclusive pedagogical practices to respond to their diverse needs, and how these two aspects interplayed, so as to support all their students’ learning and participation in their classrooms.
Slide 4 & 5: Methods
To achieve these research purposes, my research adopted a qualitative multiple case study approach, with principles and elements of participatory research. As a starting point, I aligned to a strength-based approach to look for what worked in the teachers’ classrooms.

The main participants were teachers, and the key cases were the teachers, in relationships with their focus students. Eventually, the research included four teachers, two from a mainstream primary school and two from a specialist school, in relationships with eight students, whom they identified as more vulnerable to educational exclusion from one of their classes.

The main sources of evidence were semi-structured interviews with teachers and lesson observations. To account for and make sense of the complexity of teachers’ practices in their often contradictory and dilemmatic working environments, I used thematic analysis, with critical realism as an analytic lens. 
Slide 6: Briefing on Critical Realism
Due to time constraints today, I am not going to elaborate on the theoretical perspective of Critical Realism. Here is a briefing slide for you to get an overview of it.

Section 2: Case Study: Arya’s Agentic Inclusive Pedagogical Practices

Slides 7 – 9:  Case Study - Arya, in Relationships with Dara and Cary

Slides 10: Analysis and Findings
Today, I am going to focus on one compelling case study: Arya, a mainstream English language teacher. At the time of the study, Arya was teaching a Primary 4 class in a mainstream co-educational Christian primary school. Two of her students were identified by her as particularly vulnerable to educational exclusion: Dara, a girl with severe hearing impairments who required a specialised receiver device attached to her hearing aids, and Cary, a boy identified with ADHD and limited intelligence.

When observing Arya’s classroom, what immediately stood out was her rich, relational understanding of her students. Because of pandemic disruptions, she had stayed with this class for a second consecutive year, allowing her to know them deeply, not just by their SEN labels, but as whole individuals.

In response to Dara’s severe hearing impairments, Arya developed what she colourfully described as “theatrical” or “dance-like” teaching methods. During whole-class reading exercises, she would intentionally match wrong quantifiers to nouns, like saying “less pencils”, and then dramatically shout “Ms. Arya is on FIRE!” with exaggerated gestures. This visual, high-energy style gave Dara the visual cues she needed to follow along.

Crucially, however, Arya did not do this just for Dara. Instead, she extended this vibrant pedagogical technique to the entire class. She recognised that many other students also benefited from exaggerated body language and visual clarity. This directly embodies the core principle of inclusive pedagogy: extending what is ordinarily available to everybody, rather than treating ordinary provision as for “most” and providing something “different or additional” only for a labelled few.

Section 3: Case Study: Arya’s Structural Predicaments

Slides 11 & 12:  Case Study - Arya, in Relationships with Dara and Cary

Slides 13: Analysis and Findings
However, the underlying structural forces seemed to shadow Arya’s work with significant but complicated tensions and dilemmas. While Arya demonstrated innovative inclusive pedagogical practices, she voiced intense frustration regarding the broader Hong Kong educational system.

For instance, Arya shared how her students could create highly sophisticated, creative English brochures using digital software, far exceeding grade-level expectations, yet they consistently struggled and suffered under rigid, paper-and-pencil standardised testing.

In her interview, Arya powerfully articulated this dilemma, saying:
“In fact, I would say it’s the problem of the whole Hong Kong education system. Its assessment model is quite nerve-wracking... It’s very exam-oriented. It’s why teachers have to focus on exams, exams, exams... You do all the things just for TSA, for BCA, for internal assessments for SSPA, but we don’t have a choice... For Dara, you make her do speaking and listening tests. It’s hard and unfair for her, but there’s no other way... For these students with SEN, their so-called inclusive education doesn’t think of this.”

Analysing this through our critical lens uncovers two distinct structural layers that create this predicament for frontline teachers, as well as furthering our understanding on their agency for inclusive pedagogical practice:
Institutional Facilitators and Constraints: Even though Arya’s school was progressive and reduced written exams to 70–80%, the school was still bound to territory-wide academic benchmarks. The institutional pressure to raise overall academic attainment constantly forced Arya to prioritise examination-oriented practices.
Systemic Incompatibilities: High-stakes selection mechanisms, such as the Secondary School Places Allocation (SSPA) system, rely heavily on standardised tests that rank students along a normal distribution curve. This system assumes all students can be reduced to a single numerical score. At the same time, the special examination arrangement policy fails to provide truly accessible adaptations for deaf and hard-of-hearing students like Dara. Meanwhile, Hong Kong operates on a dual-track mode of integrated and special education. This framework conceptualises inclusion as providing “ordinary” teaching for the mainstream and tagging on “additional, specialist provisions” for students with identified SEN. When combined with high-stakes testing, this places an overwhelming burden on mainstream teachers. 
Loss of Agency: When Arya repeatedly stated, “We don’t have a choice” or “There’s no other way”, we observe a profound loss of a sense of agency. Her experience demonstrates that teacher disempowerment is not subjective, nor is it caused merely by “negative teacher attitudes” or “lack of training”. It is the direct result of competing, contradictory systemic forces, where teachers are mandated to provide additional, specialist provisions for students with identified SEN and/or disabilities on one hand, but judged strictly by standardised, competitive selection exams on the other. Yet, Arya’s case also shows us where agency survives. Her agentic response was rooted in her relational knowledge of her students. By withholding quick judgements about Cary’s ADHD behaviours or Dara’s hearing limitations, and by understanding them as complex individual learners, she was able to craft everyday pedagogical moments that transcends the systemic barriers, even if only within the boundaries of her classroom.

Such research findings can have significant implications for both theory and practice.

Section 4: Conclusion

Slide 14: Conclusion
Repeatedly, professional development for inclusive education focuses on what teachers lack, demanding more specialised knowledge, more clinical diagnosis training, or extra specialist resources.

The findings of this study point toward a far more strategic, realist, and strength-based alternative:
We must candidly acknowledge that teachers work within complex environments that often actively generate pressures of educational exclusion.
By helping teachers understand how structural constraints operate, we can re-empower them to strategically navigate these dilemmas, advocate for their students, and expand inclusive learning communities. 
Instead of lamenting what teachers lack, professional development might be more beneficial if we identify, respect, and build upon the craft knowledge of inclusive pedagogical practice that teachers are already exercising within their classrooms. Recognising and relating to students holistically is where meaningful inclusion begins.

Slide 15: References
Here are my references for today. Thank you very much.