Inclusive university events
Resources and guidance on making online and face-to-face events accessible and welcoming
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

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