Our aims

Health research still tends to adopt disability as a passive object of intellectual curiosity, empirically investigate disability as a chronic illness or understand disability in terms of impairment or pathology. Disability exists as an ‘absent presence’ - a present problem to be solved by research but absent as a research colleague or scholarly authority - and disabled health researchers are conspicuously absent. Health research often ignores the specificities of disabled people’s lives and the health inequalities that they endure as a consequence of disabling systemic factors. Poor, working class, female, LBGTQ+ and black disabled people are particularly at risk of being forgotten. We will address these omissions and cultivate a new cadre of early career researchers across Australia, Canada, India, Singapore and the UK. These country sites capture diverse national/cultural perspectives of disabled people across high/middle income nations across four continents. Seven research phases will each address a research question:

1. How is health research, theory and scholarship transformed by an engagement with critical disability studies? 
2. What are the health priorities of disabled people in Australia, Canada, India, Singapore and the United Kingdom?
3. What kinds of research methodologies represent disabled people and their health priorities?
4. How does the presence of disability enable more inclusive health research environments?
5. In what ways can we reimagine representations of disability in health research?
6. How do we build a new generation of disabled and disability-positive health researchers? 
7. What transformative knowledge pertaining to equity, diversity and inclusion can be generated through a focus on anti-ableist and anti-disablist practice?

Empirical work will be undertaken concurrently in all five countries in key research sites of universities, disabled people’s communities, health research organisations, research funders and spaces of public engagement. Our bold ambitions are to interrogate the assumptions, priorities, methods and applications of different types (conceptual, empirical, exploratory, applied and translational) and fields of health research (medicine, health sciences, medical humanities, medical sociology and science and technology studies). 

Expected Outcomes
We will deliver a number of ambitious expected outcomes:

1. Intellectual transformation in health research scholarship through a critical engagement with critical disability studies and the expertise of disabled people.
2. Pan-national understanding of the common and differential health priorities of disabled people across four continents.
3. Transformation of health research methods to ensure the meaningfully inclusion of disabled people as researchers and participants.
4. Promotion of more inclusive health research environments, cultures and systems through a focus on disability and other protected characteristics.  
5. Reframing the representation of disability in healthcare research, dissemination and public engagement.
6. Raising the capacities of disabled and disability-positive early career health researchers.

Generating transformative equity, diversity and inclusion knowledge that supports Wellcome’s strategy to lead the sector in challenging ableism and disablism in the practices and cultures of health research.