Anti-ableist Resources
A series of resources from the WAARC team which will be of interest to anyone in the university who is seeking to develop and promote anti-ableist practice
Welcome to the WAARC Anti-Ableist Resources page. Here you will find a set of resources that emerge from the work of the WAARC team and, crucially, the innovative practice of our Disabled People's Organisation partners.
Inclusive recruitment
Inclusive Recruitment and MyEmployment Plan developed by Speakup Self-advocacy. Employment is for Everyone site. Employers will find information on video CVs examples of inclusive recruitment and the My Employment Plan, which employers could adopt for all colleagues who are in employment within the university who are autistic this would ensure reasonable adjustments were made in the workplace.
Inclusive recruitment as a key element of supporting disabled researchers paper presented by Dan Goodley and Rebecca Lawthom presented at Disabled Researchers Network Celebration Event, 24th September 2025, Liverpool John Moores University: which picks up on inclusive recruitment a key process in building more positive research cultures.
Support for and by disabled staff in the university
NADSN published there Towards a fully inclusive environment for disabled people in STEMM: A NADSN White Paper in March 2025. This ground-breaking paper was launched on 17th September at the Wellcome Trust offices in London. The paper outlines a number of urgent recommendations for universities to ensure that the full potential of disabled people are realised in the STEMM subject. NADSN has many resources on their website. This includes materials from a number of conferences - bringing together disabled academics and professional series colleagues - and can find details here - and given many presentations and produced various materials: NADSN conference 2024, presentations, literature, NADSN Conference held pre-covid in Manchester in 2019, NADSN’s post-lockdown position paper while NADSN members have also been involved in this fabulous film and project Marginalisation in Science: Disabilty and Inclusion
Members of the WAARC team are working in collaboration with National Association of Disabled Staff Networks to realise their aspirations in relation to two wider community projects that seek to enhance the work experiences of disabled academics and professional services colleagues:
RIDE Higher (Realising the Inclusion of Disabled Staff) is an initiative established by and for disabled staff in Higher Education - which feeds directly upon the activities of the Cross-cutting theme led by Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril.
Access to Work Users Sub-Group - led by Armineh Soorenian - This NADSN subgroup is for Disabled staff who receive Access to Work (AtW) support, such as Support Workers, equipment, or assistive tech. It offers monthly peer support meetings and will contribute to NADSN’s response to the UK Government’s AtW consultation. This work has come directly out of Armineh and Kirsty Liddiard's work on WAARC's Priority Area 1: Environments.
Inclusive university events
Advice related to hosting inclusive events - members of our team have been involved with including Accessibility guide for inclusive university events (led by Antonios Ktenidis in collaboration with the University of Sheffield Research Culture team) and some earlier work Antonios did with Sheffield Voices in producing an Easy read accessibility guide. Identifying inclusive practices in relation to events such as conferences is also being picked up by colleagues in the University of Sheffield including Removing Barriers: An inclusive conference for disabled postgraduate researchers (PGRs) and academic staff led by Hayley Rennie (Project Delivery Lead for Disabled PGRs Project (RPI) and Specialist Mental Health and Neurodiversity Mentor, DDSS).
A conversation about access between Dan Goodley, Lauren White, Antonios Ktenidis and Daniel P.Jones where they reflect on the meaning of inclusion in the context of the university.
Daniel P. Jones collaborated with researchers from Durham University’s Institute for Medical Humanities and Wellcome-funded Discovery Research Platform to apply some of the findings from his WAARC research into accessible events to an internationally scaled academic event. Working as an accessibility advisor, this conference has taken a commitment to COVID-19 and airborne virus risk mitigation strategies, quiet rooms, and a variety of other access commitments that haven’t been seen before at such a large-scaled conference: International Conference: Critical Neurodiversity Studies: Directions, Intersections, Contradictions. Daniel's report is available - Inclusion and Sharing Best Practice for Academic Events Facilitation.pdf
Daniel and Lauren White have recently published a blog on the National Centre for Research Methods entitled Revisiting access and inclusion in research methods which reflects upon work that they are leading on WAARC's Priority Area 2: Developments
Ryan Bramley (Education) and WAARC's Kirsty Liddiard, in collaboration with Sheffield-based company Paper, Beth Evans (SUBTXT Creative) and Josh Slack (Inertia Creative), won the University of Sheffield Knowledge Exchange and Impact Awards 2025 in the Outstanding Partnership or Impact in Creativity/Culture/Society category for their projects, Animating Inclusion and Rethinking Subtitles for Deaf Audiences. Poor quality, missing, and/or lagging captions lead to Deaf audiences feeling excluded from cinematic experiences. In response, these projects explored caption quality and accessibility, which resulted in the two short films above, as well as evidence submission to the British Film and High-End Television Inquiry and collaboration with Paramount Pictures to explore implementation of the project’s Six Recommendations for Change into future UK releases. You can view Rethinking Subtitles for Deaf Audiences here; You can view Animating Inclusion here.
A recent blog post by Antonios Ktenidis sets out some ideas and principles relating to anti-ableist pedagogy which are relevant to curating accessible events - available to read here
Co-production and participatory research
Promoting equality, diversity and inclusive in research ethics policy and practice - Kirsty Liddiard and Sophie Phillips worked with Jennifer Burr (Medicine and Population Health) to explore the most appropriate ways of addressing ED&I in research ethics policy and processes. This work linked with Ethical Research and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion films produced by the PRN which included WAARC's Lauren White. These Four short videos outline the opportunities and challenges of doing inclusive and ethical research, based on reflections from participatory and collaborative research projects across the university.
Kirsty Liddiard led the Why Can't we Dream Coproduction project with young disabled people with life-limiting and life-threatening impairments which includes the Living Life to the Fullest Co-Production Toolkit: an approach that centres co-researchers in the research process.
Lauren White has worked in collaboration with members of the Maker{Futures} programme team on a journal article that explores ways of collaboratively with Disabled Young People as Researchers, Designers and Makers and has led models of research project on the Reimagining Trustworthy Autonomous Systems with Young People
Medications and my mental health offers co-produced resources to support conversations about mental health with people with learning disabilities
Tired of spinning plates: a rapid scoping review of the mental health needs and mental health support of carers of adults with learning disabilities in the United Kingdom. International Journal of Disability and Social Justice. This paper is a co produced rapid scoping review of the literature about mental health and carers of adults with learning disabilities. Evidence synthesis is rarely carried out in co-production with disabled people and family carers and this article aimed to open up the process
Human activism with Speakup Self-advocacy presents a number of co-produced films with self-advocates with learning disabilities who reflect on the support, community, employment and comradeship that helps them to live the kinds of lives that they desire.
ScHARR Mini Master Class in Health Research #8 Dr Liz Croot and guests - Doing Research with People with Learning Disabilities - thinking differently about doing research through co-production.
Humanising Healthcare showcases the humanising healthcare practices created by researchers with learning disabilities including colleagues from WAARC partners Speakup Self-advocacy and Sheffield Voices and reflects on participatory approaches to research from ethics through methods, analysis to dissemination and Open Research. Humanising Healtcare is also developing Humanising approaches to Open Data and Open Research - Nikita Hayden, Bojana Daw Srdanovic and Dan Goodley have written a document entitled 'Thinking of using this dataset? Read the team’s approach to Open Data that involves people with learning disabilities'. This explains how we have approached Open Data with a firm commitment to the lives and aspirations of people with learning disabilities - and a continued engagement with co-production. This document is a compulsory read for anyone who wants to use our data which. This document and the data can be found here deposited here
Impact of advocacy - by Speakup Self-advocacy - many reflections on the power of self-advocacy
WAARC is also connecting with other Wellcome funded projects at the University of Sheffield that promote participatory methods:
Connections with the Wellcome Trust Discovery Award Cripping Breath - Kirsty Liddiard and her team are exploring a number of matters pertaining to the promotion of positive research culture and are documenting some of their thoughts and consideration in their excellent blog here
Sharing knowledge with colleagues on the Wellcome Trust Discretionary Award Disability Matters especially the work on promoting the work being undertaken on positive research environments, knowledge exchange and growing a new cadre of disabled and disability-positive researchers.
Promoting positive research cultures
Liz Dew and Armineh Soorenian were invited by the University of Leeds to present a keynote address - Reimagining Research Culture, Together - at the Research Culture Community of Practice Event 2025 (Leeds, 14th July 2025). In this paper the significant contributions of professional services colleagues to the promotion of positive research culture is highlighted and these contributions are taken further in this paper by Liz in collaboration with colleagues Rhea and Lucy Dunning in their popular recent paper presented as part of of the Disability Matters Online Symposia Series
The Inclusion Leadership Research Interest Group of BELMAS hosted an event on Thursday 19th June 2025, entitled ‘The Depathologising University’. The RIG’s Co-Convenors, Dr Beth Holmes, Dr Wendy Conrad and Dr Donnie Adams, were joined by guest speaker, Professor Dan Goodley, Professor of Disability Studies and Education in the University of Sheffield’s School of Education, who discussed his work in the field of Critical Disability Studies, and the ways in which academics, researchers and research professional colleagues are depathologising the disablist and ableist university. You can find a recording of Dan's talk here
Lauren White has shared some of her own reflections on promoting more inclusive research practices in Forged in Sheffield podcast series.
Dan Goodley and Rebecca Lawthom have reflected on the challenges of curating more inclusive university cultures in their recent blogpost for the White Rose Consortium Disrupting the Default: Anti-Ableist Research Culture
Presentations from the WAARC team
The WAARC team is committed to sharing our emerging findings, headlines and reflections on anti-ableism. Recent presentations are added below - if you would like a copy of any of the presentations please email waarc@sheffield.ac.uk.
Antonios Ktenidis BSA PGR regional event ‘Intersections of Sociology with Crip Theory, Critical Disability Studies, and Mad Studies’, 11th June 2025. Check out here for Antonios's blog from the conference
Dan Goodley, Disability Matters and Wellcome Anti-Ableist Research Culture projects, NADSN, NADSN 10th Anniversary Conference & Celebration, Friday 6th December 2024 | University of Greenwich.
Liz Dew, Introduction to WAARC, Research Contracts Team, University of Sheffield, 29th April 2025.
Dan Goodley The depathologising university, Invited Keynote, BELMAS Inclusion Leadership RIG Event June, 19th June 2025.
Liz Dew, Lucy Dunning and Rhea Halsey, Beyond the Desk: How Professional Services Staff Shape Inclusive Research Culture, 3rd July 2024, Online Symposium For this talk, we will draw upon our experiences as professional services colleagues to provide examples of inclusive practices related to the recruitment, employment, support, and retention of disabled researchers. By sharing our personal stories, we wish to illustrate the positive impact of incorporating disability-focused strategies into research culture, ultimately fostering an environment that supports disabled researchers and challenges ableism. The recognition that university research cultures are exclusionary has become a prevalent topic in university discourse, leading to increased interventions aimed at promoting positive research culture, policy and practice. However, disability and the perspectives of disabled researchers and professional services staff are often sidelined in discussions surrounding equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). Here we wish to highlight the efforts of multiple research projects based within iHuman, a research centre at the University of Sheffield, which seek to address this omission. Disability Matters and The Wellcome Trust Anti-Ableist Research Culture (WAARC) brings together professional services and academic staff to create and deliver a suite of activities centring disability. These projects imagine a culture in which disability is viewed as an asset and a driver for positive change.
Sophie Phillips, Navigating Writing as a Neurodivergent Woman, University of Glasgow, Spring Writing Festival, Friday 23rd May 2025.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril, Brokering Crip Knowledge Under Epistemic Domination, Digital Workplaces and the Lived Experience of Work, Thursday 26th-Friday 27th June 2025, Swansea University
Members of the WAARC team presenting at the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society Conference, Dublin, June 10-12th 2025
Liz Dew, Cassie Kill, Rebecca Lawthom: Parasitic leadership and professional services work as everyday creative activism in the neoliberal-ableist academy
Armineh Soorenian: Reclaiming Disability as a tool for Creativity in University
Dr Cassie Kill and Daniel Jones: Mobilising creative methodologies to reimagine the anti-ableist university otherwise.
Lauren White, Towards a Pedagogy of Joy' based on the Joyful Learning project available here: https://sites.google.com/sheffield.ac.uk/joyfuleds/home
Daniel Jones (2025). Pockets of Opportunity: Tourette Syndrome and the Creative Management of Impulse in Public Space(s), Geographies of Attention: Between Crisis and Creativity, Royal Geographical Society - Institute of British Geographers Annual Conference 2025.
International conference presentation: Clarifying the ‘life-saving’ online community building in Tourette Syndrome
Daniel P. Jones recently shared findings from his research into Tourette Syndrome, experiences of public space, and the production of solidarity within the Tourettic community at the European Society for the Study of Tics & Tourette Syndrome Annual Meeting 2025 in Greece. These findings highlight the value of digital and online spaces for Tourettic adults, and highlights the need for further intersectional consideration in support service provision, particularly surrounding queer, trans and global majority ethnic experiences.
Dan Goodley and Rebecca Lawthom, The depathologising university, paper presented at Disability Matters ∞ Ways of Perceiving: International Conversations, 30th May, University of Toronto.
Related Anti-ableist publications from the WAARC team
WAARC team members have led on a number of Special issues and Edited Collections during the time of our project that bring together some of the cutting edge debates and contributions from critical disability studies:
Kirsty Liddiard and Rebecca Lawthom (editors), Special issue: Disability as a feminist issue, Feminism and Psychology, June 2025, Volume 35, Issue 2: contributions to the Special Issue, exploring voice, embodiment, power, sexuality, care, labour, hetero/sexism, disablism, and ableism.
Tsitsi Chataika and Dan Goodley (editors).The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Disability Studies. London: Routledge, published March 2024). Led, curated and driven by Dr Tsitsi Chataika - with editorial input from Disability Matters's Dan Goodley - this exciting new text challenges the Western, European and North American tendencies of critical disability studies through centring and exploring postcolonial theory. More details can be found here
We also support a number of Working Papers through which the WAARC team critically engage with emerging findings and deliberations with a specific focus on our aims and deliverables.
Missive from the Accommodations Loop by Daniel P. Jones and Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril
A critical disability studies take on the question of accommodations in the university
Imagining the anti-ableist university - published in the geoz.one - Editors Daniel Jones and Lauren White and contributors Daniel P. Jones, Lauren White, Liz Dew, Elaina Gauthier-Mamaril, Armineh Soorenian, Ankita Mishra, Cassie Kill, Helen Evans, Christina Lee, & Sophie Phillips (2025).
Joy in Social Research - created space for postgraduate and early career researchers to collaborate and critically engage in the concept of joy. It was funded by the Participatory Research Network and iHuman
Disability Dialogues a series of short provocative pieces about disability studies and research; a joint venture of iHuman, University of Sheffield; Centre for Disability Studies, University of Leeds; Disability Innovation Institute, UNSW and NIE/NTU Singapore.
And we are sharing Books and Journal articles - Open Access peer reviewed papers - written by the WAARC team that either emerge directly from our work or reflect team members' scholarship that are impacting on our discussions within the team. These papers consider the power of podcasting to promote dialogue and theorisation; theoretical ideas relating to understanding the anti-ableist university; the challenges of particular research methods when these methods are built upon ableist assumptions; the urgent need to engage disabled people and their representative organisations at all stages of research:
Massively Disabled 3: Back to the Future with Polio - In the third post of an ongoing monthly series exploring podcasting practice and the medical humanities, Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril reflects on how disabled communities of care share practices and knowledges from polio to COVID.
The Autistic Postgraduate Woman: Navigating the Neurotypical University - Bringing together current research with lived experience, this book by Sophie Phillips considers the challenges of being an autistic woman in postgraduate education with the aim to raise awareness, challenge misconceptions and ignite change within the system.
Anti-Frontiers in Zineing: Zines as Process & the Politics of Refusal - Reflecting on his own zine-practice as geographer, Daniel P. Jones calls for a shift to the focus on zineing as process and politics of refusal that explicitly challenges neoliberal, capitalist agendas.
Depathologising the University - Dan Goodley's paper develops a conversation with decolonisation to pitch a novel mode of engagement; depathologising the university
The Depathologising University - This paper offers an original affirmative proposition: that the university is already depathologising - by Dan.Goodley, Kirsty Liddiard and Rebecca Lawthom
Failing ethnographies as post-qualitative possibilities: reflections from critical posthumanities and critical disability studies - Through reference to critical posthumanities and critical disability studies theory, attend to broken, patchwork, kintsugi and crip ethnographies that, we argue, allow us to sit in the liminal space between qualitative/post-qualitative research and human/posthuman theory by Bojana Daw Srdanovic, Nikita Hayden, Dan Goodley, Rebecca Lawthom and Katherine Runswick-Cole.
Co-producing ethics guidelines together with people with learning disabilities - Bottomley et al reflect on developing the Participatory Ethics Good Practice Guidelines; as a research team of clinical, academic and advocacy-based researchers with and without learning disabilities.
The inclusion of adults with intellectual disabilities in health research - challenges, barriers & opportunities: a mixed-method study among stakeholders in England - Bishop et al's study aims to understand system barriers to research participation for people with intellectual disabilities.
Being human as praxis: for people with learning disabilities - Dan Goodley posits that being human as praxis—in relation to the lives of People with Learning Disabilities—offers a significant and original insight into critical and social theory across the social sciences and humanities.
Moreover, we are fortunate to draw upon scholarship symposia, films and their recordings which bring together the work of emerging and established disability studies and disabled researchers as well as the writing of the Disability Matters team:
Disability Matters Scholarship Collection is a growing resource of short papers, filmed presentations and Q&A sessions with emerging disability studies scholars from around the world.
Disability Matters team publications - gives links to outputs emerging from this six year pan-national programme of research that centres disability as the driving subject of inquiry in the health, research and science sectors.
Webinar: Children and Disability -This webinar – hosted by the Childhood, Law & Policy Network (CLPN) on the 25th February 2025 – brought together three experts to discuss theoretical and practical questions concerning children and disability. Panellists: Anastasia Todd (the University of Kentucky), Antonios Ktenidis (the University of Sheffield), and Susan Flynn (Trinity College Dublin). Chair: Hedi Viterbo (Queen Mary University of London).
Jones, D. P. (2025). Using easy read formats in geography. Fennia - International Journal of Geography, 202(2), 326–333. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.148662 - Daniel P. Jones recently worked with Fennia to produce the first peer-reviewed easy-read only paper that introduces the value of using easy-read formats in Geography. It encourages us to reconsider easy-read formats as more-than afterthought, asking what might come from using the format as a starting point in research dissemination.
Jones, D. P., & Phoenix-Kane, D. (2025). Tourettic research of Tourette syndrome: some reflections. Neurodiversity, 3, 27546330251328489 - Daniel P. Jones expands on his work in WAARC on inclusive research methodologies with this new collaborative commentary co-authored with Danni Phoenix-Kane. The paper reflects on the authors experiences of conducting research into Tourette Syndrome as two Tourettic researchers themselves, focusing on themes of representation, additional labour, and data collection, before calling for removing current barriers to research rather than making calls for future involvement of Tourettic researchers.
Phillips, Sophie, and Armineh Soorenian. 2025. ‘To Wear or Not to Wear: Face Masks in Disability Focused Events’. The Polyphony (blog). 8 April 2025. https://lnkd.in/ezdejj_V.
Gauthier-Mamaril, Élaina and Daniel P Jones. 2025. Being a masking crip killjoy. The Polyphony (blog). 2 June 2025. https://lnkd.in/eeACg3sZ
Public engagement outputs from the WAARC team
Due to the wider work of our WAARC team we are fortunate to draw upon a plethora of resources that we might frame as public engagement:
Elaina Gauthier-Mamaril's Massively Disabled: A long COVID research podcast series. And you can find the transcripts of each episode here: https://www.massivelydisabled.com/
WAARC team and others' Zine coming soon to the Wellcome Collection (March 2025) - Imagining the anti-ableist university’ is a collection of frustrations, tensions, and hopes for the future of an anti-ableist university created by a collection of critical disability studies scholars and university professional services staff in the UK. Through sharing some of our dialogues surrounding the concept of the anti-ableist university over the past 6 months, we encourage this zine to be read critically and engaged, critiqued, and used as a starting point for others to share their frustrations with and hopes for the anti-ableist university, whatever that may mean to you. The zine has been received particularly well, and has garnered international readership. The Zine is now featured in the Wellcome Collection's show "Zines Forever! DIY Publishing and Disability Justice". Additionally, it has made appearances at the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference 2025 in Birmingham, UK and at the American Association of Geographers' Annual Conference 2025 in Detroit, USA. Additionally, the zine can be found in Hull Zine Library in Kingston Upon Hull, UK and continues to be traded amongst zinesters in the North East of England and more broadly across the UK. If you have a zine collection that you would like to add copies of 'Imagining the Anti-Ableist University' to, a PDF is available to download and print as a PDF at https://geoz.one/zines/anti-ableist-university/. This site also includes a text version with visual descriptions of each page, suitable for screen readers. Alternatively, get in touch with one of our editors, Daniel P. Jones at dpjones.photo@outlook.com
Tourette syndrome research - with Dr. Daniel P. Jones on the Beyond 6 Seconds: Neurodiversity Stories: Dr. Daniel P. Jones is a Creative Practitioner, Disability Scholar, and Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Sheffield in the UK. Daniel specializes in inclusive research methodologies, focusing on the embodied experiences of public spaces, kinship, and solidarity within Tourette syndrome communities. As someone who has lived experience of Tourette syndrome himself, he has been actively engaged in community facilitation and Tourette syndrome activism in the UK for over a decade.
iHuman and School of Education helps lead first Critical Disability Studies Doctoral Course in Denmark
iHuman
How we understand being ‘human’ differs between disciplines and has changed radically over time. We are living in an age marked by rapid growth in knowledge about the human body and brain, and new technologies with the potential to change them.