Interdependency in Fieldwork

To cite this work: Soorenian, A. and Dew, E. (2025). Interdependency in fieldwork. Disability Dialogues. Sheffield: iHuman, University of Sheffield. 

Armineh is a Disabled researcher with experience of working in DPO, public and HE sector. In her work, Armineh has researched, and commissioned and managed disability research projects on a range of topics, including disability arts, inclusive education, attitudes towards Disabled people, employment, housing, family relationships, and social care and support. She is currently one of the Research Associates on the Wellcome Anti-Ableist Research Cultures project. 

Liz is proudly autistic and is the Project Manager for the Wellcome Trust Anti-ableist Research Culture project. Liz loves doing work that is disruptive and has social justice at its heart. Before joining iHuman she managed a project that reunited Refugees with their family members, which led on from and intersected with work she did around equity and improvements in maternity services. Liz enjoys talking to people about social justice and understanding the world in unconventional ways.

Wellcome Anti-Ableist Research Culture (WAARC) project aims to bring together researchers at all career stages and professional services colleagues from across the University of Sheffield (TUOS) and our partner organisations to develop a suite of activities that centre disability and contest systemic ableism. Priority Area 1 Environment focuses on Recruitment and Employment experiences of Disabled staff. The Recruitment part addresses the under-recruitment of Disabled researchers and research support staff due to systemic barriers. The Employment part addresses barriers to attracting and retaining Disabled researchers. Armineh Soorenian leads the Environment strand of the project, and Liz Dew is the WAARC Project Manager. 

Armineh’s access needs are as such that she needs to have a Support Worker to assist her with the work. However, despite numerous attempts for the last 10 months, the search for an appropriate Support Worker continues as we write this blog. 

As our ethics application was approved late last year and as we developed discussion topics and research questions for the interviews, it became more evident that not having a Support Worker to support Armineh during the fieldwork could pose a significant barrier to progressing the research. As a team, we considered to pause the fieldwork for this Priority Area. However, reflecting on the other moving parts of the project and the impact halting the fieldwork would have, not only on the project, but also on Armineh’s confidence and professionalism as an experienced researcher, this option seemed not workable and in fact quite damaging. 

As a team, we reflected how to negotiate the access barriers together during fieldwork and gave space to ideas about creating a community of care and support. This was when Liz stepped in to offer practical support. Armineh and Liz worked together to share the recruitment publicity on different platforms, some of which were inaccessible. Due to the incompatibility of shared drives with Armineh’s screen-reader, Liz and Armineh worked collaboratively. Armineh responded by email to staff interested in the research, sending them the Participants Information Sheets and Consent forms, copying in Liz, who then created a shared folder on the X drive and saved the Consent forms. Liz also checked across Armineh and participants’ availability, sent out the interview invites and communicated with participants for any missing information. Additionally, as the X drive is inaccessible to Armineh, to ensure the recordings were saved in the appropriate place, it was decided that Liz would start the interviews, press the record function on google meet, and then would leave the meeting in order for the participants to feel comfortable sharing their experiences with Armineh. Although this restricted the fieldwork to the days when Liz was working, we thought spreading out the interviews, would provide a reflective space for Armineh to process participants’ experiences and to decompress. Together, Liz and Armineh shared a kind of ground-level access intimacy, with no need for Armineh to justify or explain her access needs, yet with an instant ease to be able to ask for support.

‘Access intimacy is not charity, resentfulness enacted, intimidation, a humiliating trade for survival or an ego boost. In fact, all of this threatens and kills access intimacy. There is a good feeling after and while you are experiencing access intimacy. It is a freeing, light, loving feeling.’ (Mingus, 2011). 

Planning how to work together was a generative process and provided an opportunity for Armineh and Liz to learn about each others’ access needs. This has been a sensitively managed process without expectations or assumptions. Liz has always been respectful of Armineh’s research experience and Armineh appreciative of Liz’s time and support. Feeling fully understood, validated and believed, Armineh has been able to say what her access needs were and sometimes be unsure, without shame or embarrassment. Liz never expected payment in the form of emotional currency or ownership for access. Instead, she invested in remembering Armineh’s access needs and checking in with Armineh to see if there are going to be situations that might be inaccessible during the interviews. This was reciprocated by Armineh as Liz can struggle with memory, and so despite writing things down there were a couple of instances of forgetting or doing something in a slightly different way than we had talked about. We met regularly, which helped Liz stay on track. This kind of mutual generosity is built on the foundations of a willingness to assume the best about each other and creates a psychological safety which is often lacking in ableist working environments. Additionally, Liz’s familiarity with the project and not having to start at square one with a colleague who has no experience of access needs that takes away a chunk of emotional labour has meant that Armineh has more time, physical and emotional capacity and space for the actual research and an intense period of fieldwork.

We both brought an understanding that not only are access needs valid and necessary but that they can be creative and expansive when considered in partnership with one another. We understood one another’s access needs based on our own shared similar lived experience of the many different ways ableism manifests in our lives. Together, we held the logistics and emotions while staring back at an inaccessible fieldwork culture. This interdependent relationship of crip solidarity has been a critical demonstration of an anti-ableist practice in action in an ableist fieldwork environment. 

Crip solidarity and crip community is everything! 

Reference 

Mingus, M. (2011). Access Intimacy: The Missing Link. Leaving Evidence. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/