Cripping Knowledge Exchange: Disability, Creativity, and the Politics of Knowing

Turana Abdullayeva is a fourth-year PhD student in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield, specialising in inclusive education in Azerbaijan. With eight years of experience, she focuses on enhancing educational accessibility by integrating inclusive practices into teacher education programs. Her research interests include inclusive education, disability studies, and the development of inclusive policies within Azerbaijan's educational framework.

Many thanks to Turana who was our notetaker for the workshop.

The Cripping Knowledge Exchange Workshop (March 2026), part of the Disability Matters Programme, examined how centring disability as a method, rather than a topic, can reshape the production, sharing, and valuing of knowledge. Instead of focusing on how to make research more inclusive, the workshop addressed a deeper question: what changes are needed within knowledge systems themselves?

From Inclusion to Epistemic Change

A central theme of the workshop was the concept of “cripping” knowledge exchange. Within critical disability studies, “crip” denotes a rejection of ableist norms and an affirmation of disabled epistemologies as generative. Cripping knowledge exchange involves moving beyond inclusion toward epistemic transformation:

• Centring disabled people as knowledge producers and leaders

• Valuing lived and embodied experience alongside academic expertise

• Challenging standardised, exclusionary formats

• Embracing creative, relational, and access-led practices

This shift highlights the limitations of EDI approaches that merely diversify participation without addressing the deeper inequalities in how knowledge is recognised and legitimised.

Creative Practice as Knowledge-Making

Throughout the workshop, creative methods were conceptualised primarily as forms of knowledge production rather than solely as dissemination tools.

Podcasting: Care, Access, and Invisible Labour

Podcasting was identified as a form of “caring scholarship,” facilitating flexible, dialogic, and accessible engagement. It supports, community-building and reduced isolation, more authentic and dialogic forms of research communication, and also creative autonomy for disabled scholars. At the same time, it highlights structural inequalities. The technical and emotional labour involved remains largely unrecognised, raising questions about how institutions value creative work.

Performance: Embodiment and Opacity

Performance was introduced as an embodied methodology that challenges exclusively text-based knowledge systems. This approach enables the development of sensory and affective forms of understanding, disabled-led narratives that challenge historical misrepresentation. Performance also highlights the inherent limits of accessibility. Attempts to render work fully “legible” may reduce its complexity. In this context, opacity, understood as partial or non-explanatory knowledge, can serve as a critical practice.

Crip Filmmaking: Collaboration and Access

Filmmaking was explored as a collaborative, access-led practice grounded in interdependence. Key principles included, defining and communicating access needs from the outset, building trusted, collaborative teams, redistributing labour to support sustainability. This approach challenges individualised models of research, foregrounding collective working and care as central to knowledge production.

Rethinking What Counts as Knowledge

The workshop highlighted how dominant research systems continue to marginalise, lived and embodied knowledge, informal and relational learning, creative and sensory practices. These forms often resist measurement and are undervalued within funding and evaluation frameworks. Participants called for:

• Funding models that support process, not just outputs

• Recognition of the labour involved in inclusive work

• Protected space for experimentation and creative practice

Care, Crip Time, and Institutional Limits

Care was positioned as foundational, not supplementary. This includes recognising, the emotional and practical labour of inclusion, the importance of working across different temporalities (“crip time”)

the need to prioritise sustainability over productivity. However, the language of care can be co-opted within institutions, often without meaningful structural support. How care is defined and enacted remains a critical question.

Reframing Audience and Accountability

A key closing reflection challenged assumptions about audience. Rather than prioritising institutional or non-disabled publics, participants emphasised, creating knowledge with and for disabled communities, recognising disabled communities as already producing knowledge, engaging institutions strategically, not as default endpoints. This reframing shifts the focus from “impact” to accountability and epistemic justice.

Beyond Inclusion

Cripping knowledge exchange is not about adapting existing systems. It is about transforming them.

Creative practices such as podcasting, performance, and filmmaking reveal both the limitations of dominant knowledge structures and the possibilities for doing things differently, through access, care, and collective practice. Disabled-led knowledge is not emerging, it is already here. The challenge is whether institutions are willing to recognise, resource, and learn from it.