Working paper:

Dan Goodley, Emily Badger, Lucy Dunning, John Flint, Richard Franey, Rhea Halsey, Hamied Haroon, Helen Irvine, Melanie Knight, Antonios Ktenidis, Rebecca Lawthom, Kirsty Liddiard, Jacquie Nicholson, Katherine Runswick-Cole, Kelly Scargill, Sarah Taylor, Meera Warrier, Lauren White

iHuman, Sheffield

Over the last decade we have witnessed a sharp rise in the numbers of people identifying with labels of disability, neurodiversity, learning disabilities, mental health, hidden disabilities, chronic illness and impairment. Social theorists have grappled with this phenomenon offering various interpretations including an epidemic of signification, a diagnostic trend and the biopolitics of disability. In this paper, we make a novel case for the reading of our contemporary moment with reference to a key societal institution: the university. We argue that we are caught up in ‘knowing times of disability’ impacted by a ‘new wave of disability’ that requires an urgent response; the generation of community. We consider the promise and actuality of work that seeks to promote positive action in relation to disability in the early stages of recruitment to research and professional services positions within a university in England. With reference to a new research project we explore how we might create positive, inclusive and welcoming university cultures and generate philosophical ideas that can be used in public institutions such as the university. 

Introduction

This paper is written by a team of academics and professional services colleagues and disabled people’s organisations. Urgent social concerns require deeply practical and philosophical responses. Over the last decade we have witnessed a sharp rise in the numbers of people identifying with labels of disability, neurodiversity, specific learning disabilities, hidden disabilities, mental health, chronic illness and impairment. Many people today are more likely to identify with diagnoses of disability and impairment as expressions of their human specificities, their peccadillos, their uniqueness, their identities and their differences than they were decades before. Identifying with a disability, chronic illness or impairment is a very personal experience (Ra, 2023) and we do not know enough about the experiences and aspirations of disabled staff; including academics and professional services colleagues (Åkerblom, 2020; Cox, 2024; Goodley, 2024). Critical disability studies treat the identification of disability, impairment and illness with care, criticality and consideration (Meekosha and Shuttleworth, 2009; Titchkosky, 2011; Shildrick, 2012; Goodley et al, 2019; Price, 2024). Disability matters and how it matters is a question of perspective (Thomas, 1999, 2007). Whenever an impairment label, chronic illness or disability diagnostic category burgeons in a specific social context like the university then we must ask why now and for what purposes? There are many complex social, historical, economic and cultural reasons why disability appears in the world at particular times (Titchkosky et al, 2022). Moreover, when folk self-identify or are labelled with disability, chronic illness, mental health or neurodiversity we often wonder how we can connect and welcome these ‘new recruits’ with all the exciting work in the critical disability studies that has been sitting critically with disability for over three decades. 

We are not suggesting that just because someone identifies or is labelled as disabled or neurodiverse, they should be automatically enrolled into a learning community requiring a lifetime of philosophical study about disability! We do desire that we ponder the meaning of the growing presence and recognition of disability. We also want people to know that there is a community that supports disabled people; especially when some folk might have had years of feeling isolated and alone.

In this paper, we explore how philosophers and social theorists have grappled with this phenomenon offering various interpretations including an epidemic of signification, a diagnostic trend and the biopolitics of disability. Whilst recognising these readings are helpful, our paper makes a novel case for a reading of our contemporary moment with reference to a key societal institution: the university. We argue that we are caught up in knowing times of disability impacted by a new wave of disability that requires an urgent response; the generation of community. We have written this paper with critical disability studies scholars, philosophers and researchers in mind. And yet, our main audience are other university academics and professional services and disabled people (in and outside of the university) who play a central role in the generation of university cultures that include or exclude disabled researchers and professional services colleagues. 

Historically, disabled academics have been chronically under-represented in universities across the globe, arising from an ideology of ableism: which assumes the presence of able-bodied-and-minded researchers in our places of knowledge, research and learning. Ableism aligns with white, male and middle class privilege; creating a version of the university that feels out of reach to some people from particular socio-economic backgrounds (Goodley, 2024; Price, 2024). In contrast, outside of the university, a thriving disabled people’s movement represents the aspirations of disabled people to live and create a more inclusive society (e.g. Campbell and Oliver, 1996). Our paper turns to the promise and actuality of work that seeks to promote the positive recruitment of disabled people to research and professional services positions within a British university. We explore how we might create inclusive and welcoming universities that are anti-ableist by design. 

An epidemic of signification 

When a phenomenon gathers momentum it builds cultural cache. Disability’s ubiquity in the 21st Century hangs together on a complex, ever-moving web of meanings through which disability is known. An epidemic of signification is a term taken from literary and cultural studies to refer to the creation of complex signs and symbols that give meaning to a given phenomenon. Disability’s signification is driven through the generation and application of various medical, social, educational, scientific and cultural discourses. Triechler (1987) deployed the concept of an epidemic of signification to an analysis of AIDS, homophobia and biomedical discourse. McRuer (2006) borrowed this term to make sense of the expansion, complexity and ubiquity of disability signs and symbols. The global rise and reach of disability signification has been ramped up by the online world. Short, snappy and intelligible narratives of disability diagnoses digitally trend. Online communities give important touchpoints for connection. One was as likely to encounter a disability story, for example, as one was to behold a cute kittens film or an influencers latest update on their banal lives. Critical disability studies scholarship has always been in tune with this kind of signification (Mitchell and Snyder, 2001). Disability categories, impairment labels and narratives of mental health and chronic illness are undergirded by powerful discourses, global industries and expert narratives from medicine, psychology and education. These powerhouses of knowledge production do something quite profound to our online/offline lives; the individualisation of human difference and the diagnosis of human diversity. We are now more likely to understand our very identities, bodies and minds through the signs and symbols of disability’s signification. 

A diagnostic trend

Philosophers and social theorists have sought to make sense of the growing diagnostic trend. Take, for example, the case of ADHD. McKechnie et al (2023) argue that between 2000 - 2018, the prevalence of ADHD diagnoses and prescriptions increased from 2000 to 2018 in all age groups. Various press reports of McKechnie’s publication frame ADHD as a ‘ticking time bomb’ that is set to hit the resources of the health and education systems.  Ferrara et al (2023) report on the skyrocketing numbers of people with ADHD between 2019-2022 evidenced through the increased use of stimulant medications which doubled during this time. There are multiple explanations for the increased recognition of ADHD. We choose three. McKechnie et al (2023) write that the rise in ADHD could reflect a genuine increase in the underlying condition as well as other explanations including ‘increasing awareness of the condition among patients, caregivers and medical professionals, thereby ameliorating underdiagnosis; changing attitudes toward ADHD; broadened diagnostic criteria; overdiagnosis; misdiagnosis and use of medication for ‘cognitive enhancement’ in otherwise healthy individuals’ (McKechnie et al, 2023: 3-4). Ferrara et al (2023: 62) conclude that ‘ADHD disorder is a booming disease and it represents a real social and dangerous problem ... ADHD was already on the rise with the expansion of the use of social networks with youth ’distractions’ which created an addiction with consequences on attention deficit’. Erlandsson and Punzi (2017: 3) write that ADHD diagnoses come at a time when many of us - especially children and parents - face physical and emotional strain as a consequence of rapid changes in our society, not least in communities where high rates of unemployment lead to economic vulnerability. Children and adults ‘run the risk of being capitalized by a diagnostic culture and the pharmacological industry producing new compounds resulting in increasing profits (Erlandsson and Punzi, 2017: 3). Trends risk becoming epidemics and epidemics, as we all know too well, are understood as threatening human life. It is now common to find disability at the heart of media narratives of moral and bureaucratic panic. A common story being told today is that the university - as one example of a social institution - cannot cope with the disability diagnostic trend: as this institution is under siege to the prevalence and presence of disability. As Titchkosky et al (2022) lucidly demonstrate: disability appears in the university and other institutions of social and cultural life in particular ways; framed as problem, threat and antagonism. And, paradoxically, framed as a diagnosis, then disability is often left to be and become an individual problem; and a diagnosis is to be desired. 

The biopolitics of disability 

Another common philosophical reading of disability’s ubiquity is one tied to the concept of biopower. Critical disability studies has been influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault (e.g. Tremain, 2005). Foucauldian ideas of discourse and biopower have been conceptually powerful in alerting us to the many ways in which human behaviour, conduct and identity are shaped through the deployment of powerful discourses of the self (e.g. Yates, 2005).  Today, knowledge of oneself has become the fundamental principle of modern living.  Biopower as a regulatory force (Berlant, 2007). As we have written about elsewhere (Goodley, 2016; Runswick-Cole and Goodley, 2024), we understand Rabinow and Rose’s (2006) conception of biopower and its relationship to disability as threefold:

(1)  one or more truth discourses about the ‘vital’ character of living human beings with an array of authorities considered competent to speak that truth. So, for example, disability as a physical, sensory or cognitive impairment described through the language of medicine, education and psychology. 

(2)  strategies for intervention upon collective existence in the name of life and health. Here diagnosis and various interventions are evoked in the lives of disabled people.

(3)  and modes of subjectification, in which individuals work on themselves in the name of individual or collective life or health. That is to say, disabled people, their families and a panoply of professionals engage in work on themselves in the name of life and health.
 

We come to know life and death through the regulatory workings of biopolitics. For Druedahl and Kälvemark Sporrong (2020), ADHD provides a perfect example of biopower in action. They argue that ADHD is a biopolitical identity through which people frame and subjectify their ‘undesirable behaviours’. Identifying with ADHD operates ‘internally in the form of self-monitoring in an attempt at normalisation, as well as externally through society's subjectification of’ those with ADHD (Druedahl and  Kälvemark Sporrong (2020: 1201). 

Read like this it is tempting to consider an ADHD diagnosis as nothing more than a reductive practice that, to quote the title of Erlandson and Punzi’s (2017) paper, ‘ignores human uniqueness’. We feel the tensions of disability diagnoses not least because, as disability studies researchers, we have been trained to be sceptical about categorisations that emerge from  processes of psychologisation, individualisation and medicalisation. Nonetheless, as more and more of us identify with a host of labels that span health conditions and disability categories, we would want to ask what does biopolitics give and take away from us? One might feel that human beings are being reduced to a set of symptoms, or truth discourses, in which anything that person does is only ever interpreted through the biopolitical reading of a specific category. Simultaneously, we know that biopower gives meaning, intention and practice to people. Biopolitics reproduce infinite ways of reading oneself in terms of a given biopolitical category. Following Toscano (2007: 112), the biopolitical category is, therefore, ‘both a mark of the most endemic control’ (framing people solely in terms of a category) and ‘a sign of a new insurgency’ (offering framings that can be used for various disruptive and empowering means). It is precisely in this biopolitical context that we can find both ‘the impasse and possibility’ (Karakilic, 2019: 499). We recognise that the biopolitical constitution of disability and impairment can be disempowering, dehumanising and pathologising (as individuals risk being read solely in terms of their impairment, disability or illness category) and empowering, humanising and depathologising (as people come to understand themselves, their behaviours and their desires through the impairment, disability and illness category that they have been assigned or signed up to).

Knowing times: A new wave of disability in the ableist university

Thus far we have covered some common theories of the rise in disability identities. While people feel recognised by a diagnosis and are afforded ways of understanding themselves and others through the biopolitics of disability, one wonders if this creates a kind of conceptual cul-de-sac in which one is interpellated into a particular kind of knowing of oneself. There is a danger that human difference, diversity, uniqueness and quirk are only ever read in the language of diagnosis, signification and biopolitics. We often feel disappointed by what has been left about the feel, theory and philosophy of disability. 

As Jain (2023) argues, all we can ever say with conviction is that disability is relational, contextual and equivocal. Disability is also deeply personal. No disabled person lives with their disability unequivocally, nor comes to a disability category, impairment identity or chronic illness diagnosis without a sense of its impact on one’s life. As more and more people identify with disability, we would hope that our own field of scholarship of critical disability studies supports these folk rather than treating them with suspicion (Price, 2024). To support is to demonstrate humility in the presence of disability: to acknowledge its existence and our own historical inability to affirm and positively recognise disability. To support disability is to sit with its equivocal nature. To support disability is to come to know it together.

We are buoyed by our current times where disability appears to be everywhere. We coin this new found ubiquity; a new wave of disability. This term has a disruptive feel to it;  reminding us of post-punk alternative art and music movements that resonate today (Bridget et al, 2021). A new wave announces a new constituency being driven by the sheer force of disability identification. And in this growing disability tide we find another philosophical framing; knowing times of disability. As Torgersen (2013) writes ‘contemporary developments are difficult to assess, even for disciplinary experts. Hype, hope and fear are closely related’.  While culture knows disability this is not to argue that disability is already known, sewed up, reduced, packaged, done and dusted. Instead, knowing times are dynamic times, as more and more people turn up with their own unique, sometimes new, other times long-founded, ever-changing knowings of disability. Knowing times are equivocal times. 

Our knowing times of disability draw on a veritable smorgasbord of diverse, frictional, frustrating and discombobulating meanings. These times invite us to celebrate our habitation of a shared culture in which debate is rife, questions are endless, mistakes are made, uncertainties trump easy answers and where conversations, actions and responses are endlessly being played out. Too often, there is an impulse to fix disability as an urgent question of access but: ‘as an uncanny problem, disability resists being written into policy and resists being fixed—in both senses’ (Price, 2024: 6).  Embracing our knowing times of disability permits us to sit together with the unpredictable nature of supporting one another (see also Titchkosky, 2011), to work with disability’s equivocation to find ways of being and knowing together; in respectful, inclusive and humane ways. We are encouraged to find positive human connections, interrogate our cultural practices and conventions and to rethink how we have known and how we might come to know now and in the future. Knowing disability becomes the cultural praxis and debate through which we come to know one another, the institutions we inhabit and the desires and aspirations that we hold. And crucial to this cultural praxis of knowing times in a new wave of disability is the input of critical disability studies: theory, scholarship, argument and debate that emanates from the politics of disabled people. We must ask how disabled people have known disability and be responsive to how the politics of disability and disability culture have known and continue to know disability. In these knowing times of disability - where more and more people feel safer to come out as disabled, neurodiverse, chronically ill, impaired or having mental health challenges - we would hope that critical disability studies scholarship has much to contribute, to provoke and to incite.  

We should be prepared to find our own failings and not seek easy answers. We should ask how we can and should we know? Critical disability studies is a wide open space offering variegated ways of knowing disability  that can contribute critically and affirmatively to a broader cultural politics of knowing. Many of these scholars, activists and artists have known disability in ways that have contested the often negative and pathological readings of disability that dominate our society and culture (Goodley, 2024). Disability can be the driving force of knowing, unknowing and re-knowing in the world. We might ask: what can be learnt from what we do and do not know? What opportunities do these knowing times of disability offer for us to find connection and community? How might the new wave of disability be harnessed to create more inclusive, supportive and welcoming communities and cultures? How can we engage with disabled people’s organisations; in which disability has been known in particular ways for many years even prior to the contemporary upsurge in disability diagnosis and biopolitics? To narrow our argument let us focus on one distinct community: the university.

Universities have singularly failed to position disability as a valued member and curator of these public institutions (Price, 2024).  Researchers and scholars often ignore disability, treat 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’, as a present problem to be solved by research but absent as scholarly authority (Titchkosky, 2011; Goodley, 2024; Price, 2024). It is important to interrogate the university in which disability appears (Titchkosky et al, 2022) because the university is founded upon an ideology of ableism: cherishing individual autonomy, excellence, agility and mobility (Brown and Leigh, 2018, 2020). Here is the paradox; a new wave of disability emerges in a place where ability is so valued (Goodley, 2014).  Ableism is neoliberalism’s peer which emphasises individual self-sufficiency, independence, responsibility and productivity.  Human success is collapsed into the image, the offer, the fantasy of the able-bodied-and-minded citizen. And, yet, as we have already discussed in this paper, as the ideology of ableism builds upon its foundations through various practices associated with self-sufficient citizenry, disability cannot help itself from turning up in this ableist culture. Our paper attends to knowing times of disability - driven by a new wave of disability -  whilst simultaneously recognising the tightening of ableist discourses in the places where we work and learn from one another. This contradiction is perplexing and our salvation: it means we have a fight on our hands.
 

A project: Wellcome Anti-Ableist Research Culture (WAARC)

In late 2023, we were awarded a Wellcome Trust  Institutional Fund for Research Culture award (Lewis-Wilson et al, 2023). WAARC brings together non/disabled academics and professional services colleagues at the University of Sheffield to find and promote anti-ableist practices. This builds on work of the university to develop a suite of activities that centre disability and contest systemic ableism in our university by addressing three aims:

1. To experiment with and create new processes, concepts and practices that create an Anti-Ableist Research Culture at the University of Sheffield.
2. To work in collaboration with disabled researchers and disabled people’s organisations while being intellectually underpinned by critical disability studies theory and research.
3. To pilot a number of activities that will be evaluated and scaled up in relation to three Priority Areas: Environment, Development and Collaboration.
    

With the following deliverables:

1. Evidence of successful inclusive job creation and recruitment practices.
2. Case studies of innovative and inclusive employment practices.
3. A set of Guidelines for hosting anti-ableist and inclusive hybrid research events.
4. A new Inclusive Research Methods course for all researchers in TUOS.
5. Funding of a number of research projects delivered in collaboration with disabled people’s organisations.
6. Cripping the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers 
7. An evaluation framework and set of KPIs to document and benchmark progress towards delivering anti-ableist university environments and systems.

We are in the early stages of the Environment phase; experimenting with new ideas for inclusive recruitment and employment. Our focus has been on Aim 1 and Deliverable 1. We find ourselves at the epicentre of a new wave of disability. Knowing disability equates with a multitude of opinions, assumptions, theories, concepts and beliefs. Engaging inclusive recruitment practices necessitates an entanglement with the complexities of knowing disability and the new wave of disability. Recruitment is a bureaucratic process but can also be aspirational; creating welcoming universities that include disabled applicants. Our paper develops five themes pertaining to building inclusive job creation and recruitment practices.

1. A new wave of disability requires a community response

The WAARC project team is best understood as a community of non/disabled academics and professional services colleagues, audited by three disabled people’s organisations (National Association of Disabled Staff Networks, Disability Sheffield, Speakup Self-advocacy, Rotherham and Pathfinders Neuromuscular Alliance), supported by extensive research and innovation expertise from across our university. The PI of the project is the Vice Chancellor and the Research Management Team includes senior university colleagues responsible for enhancing research culture. The Wellcome Trust’s insistence that all applications to their Institutional Fund for Research Culture be led by senior colleagues was, we think, a helpful one; ensuring high level institutional buy-in. When the Wellcome Trust call was announced our application was internally approved by senior university colleagues who are committed to disability inclusion. They approached colleagues in iHuman (an interdisciplinary research institute at Sheffield), which has an international reputation for critical disability studies research, and we worked together on the grant application. Choosing disability permitted us to tap into an existing pool of researchers and professional services colleagues with the commitment and networks to produce a strong application with, we hope, the capacity to deliver the project successfully. There was institutional knowledge that the university could do far better in supporting disabled researchers than it currently is. Our ever-growing WAARC community brought together human resources, research support, disability researchers and organisations for disabled people together in a genuine partnership at a very early stage to co-produce an approach, based on an understanding of each contributing party's specific expertise and a stronger shared understanding of their constraints. In other words, it was a community constructed with a purpose.

Knowing times demand a community response. Too often disabled staff and students turn up in the university ‘constituted as the custodians of their pathologies. Keeping the problem with the disabled individual inevitably invites a conservative response; an untroubling of the ableist architectures and philosophies of university’ (Goodley, 2024: 6). We aspire to reconstitute disability as the phenomenon through which the wider university community might image and create a more inclusive place of work and belonging. And we come to this work recognising the origins, orientations and design of universities; as places not designed with particular disabled, racialised, gendered, sexed and classed people in mind.

2. Knowing times of disability and writing person specifications
One of our early tasks has been focused upon recruitment: specifically four Researcher posts and one Project Manager. Over a number of weeks, academics worked closely with various professional services colleagues from research and innovation and human resources to ensure a recruitment process fit for purpose. Our aim was challenging; to ensure that as many disabled applicants as possible applied for five new positions. We promoted positive recruitment actions that tapped into our knowing times of disability. Applicants should feel comfortable sharing their impairment, disability or chronic illness when they apply for jobs. We need to recognise a pipeline problem for disabled people. Many disabled people have experienced educational exclusion that means under/postgraduate qualifications have not been easy to access. Some disabled people will not have a PhD but have extensive experiences of researching disability, for example, in the NGO and DPO sectors. Universities are intimidating places, not least because of their classed, racialised, ableist and heteronormative architectures. With these considerations we worked up the following Person Specifications:

Figure 1. Project Coordinator Person Specification
 

Figure 2: Research Associate example Person Specification

 

Both Job Specifications included the following paragraph:

You should provide evidence in your application that you meet the following criteria. We will use a range of selection methods to measure your abilities in these areas including reviewing your online application, seeking references, inviting shortlisted candidates to interview and other forms of assessment action relevant to the post. 

The University of Sheffield is proud to be a Disability Confident Employer. We are committed to recruiting and retaining disabled applicants and supporting positive action. We encourage disabled people to apply for our jobs and to have the opportunity to demonstrate their skills, talent and abilities at the interview stage. We commit to offer an interview to disabled applicants who meet the minimum criteria for the job.  For further information on the Disability Confident Scheme, please follow the link https://disabilityconfident.campaign.gov.uk/ 

We wrote job specifications cognisant of the knowing times of disability supported by colleagues with expertise relating to inclusive and talent recruitment, human resources, research and innovation administration and disability studies research. A number of key headlines emerge from this process:

• We changed the titles of the posts from Project Manager and Postdoctoral Research Associates to, respectively, Project Coordinator and Research Associates. 
• We revised criteria to capture diverse and relevant experiences. We slimmed down our job specifications to 10 criteria which are easier for applicants to engage with than a longer list of criteria.
• For the Project Manager role we included only one essential criteria while also trimming the essential criteria for the Research Associate positions to six. Under the Disability Confident Employer Scheme, if disabled applicants meet the essential criteria then they are automatically shortlisted to the next stage.
• Disability is explicitly acknowledged in the criteria; encouraging disabled and non-disabled potential applicants to engage with these posts as markers of critical research in the area of disability.
• We worked critically with the ableist language often found in these documents, for example, substituting words such as ‘ability’ with ‘experience’.

3. Advertising jobs, knowing disability

The wording of job advertisements can play a huge role in attracting or dissuading disabled applicants. The new wave of disability provides a potentially wide audience who might be responsive to our new posts. Job adverts were written with various online disability networks and participants in mind.

Figure 3: Advert for Research Associate positions

Figure 3: Advert for Project Coordinator position

These adverts explicitly headline our knowing times of disability: asking potential applicants to consider their own engagement with disability research. We also sought to flag flexible modes of working, which we know appeal to non/disabled applicants:

You can find more details of the research grant and our inclusive aspirations in relation to inclusive recruitment and employment here: 

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ihuman/disability-research-job-opportunities
 

4. Tapping into the new wave of disability
Disability is known in many ways. One of these - disappearance - acknowledges the difficulty that some applicants might experience in sharing their impairment, disability and/or diagnosis (see Titchkosky et al, 2023). While honouring the fact that people might not want to self-disclose - especially in the process of applying for a job - we wanted to build a discourse of acceptance and encouragement. People can easily feel exposed when revealing their disability, illness or mental health. We constructed a microsite that used positive disability language; tapping into the new wave of disability:

We publicised these job opportunities two months before the release date of the job details through various online platforms. We received many questions about the posts from the first day of posting. All questions were added to the frequently asked questions (FAQs) of our microsite, which we updated every two days. Applicants told us they welcomed the comprehensive job role descriptions, the use of large text and the compendium of FAQs. Knowing times of disability are also times of contestation, tension and friction. One public post criticised the misuse of hyperlinks. We chose to address criticism by addressing mistakes through regularly updating on our microsite. We aimed to respond with consideration, compassion and humility: reminded of the equivocal nature of disability. On reflection we wonder about some of the wording used in our microsite. Following Price (2024: 13) the choice of the word ‘welcome’ can be read as ‘Sara Ahmed (2012, 43) points out, “To be welcomed is to be positioned as the one who is not at home”. We should have deployed terms such as support, recognition and honour and made more about our emerging WAARC community (which successful applicants will help to build).

5. Knowings of disability during shortlisting and interviewing

We received 172 applications for  five positions. 56 people applied for the Project Coordinator position (11 were Disability-Confident applicants). 10 were shortlisted (8 were Disability Confident). The one essential criteria of ‘Experience of project management and/or supporting project activity’ worked well as a means of attracting a wide group of applicants and  a long shortlist. 116 individuals applied for the four Research Associate positions, with some of the same applicants applying for a number of or all of the posts. Of these 116, 58 were Disability-Confident applicants. We shortlisted 52 applicants for the next stage with 35 being Disability-Confident. Shortlisted candidates were informed of the next stage: 

 

As part of the process for inclusively recruiting for these roles, we’d like to invite you to complete a short exercise. This is as follows: 

Please submit a short written piece (approx. 500 words) or a 2 minute video/audio on the following: ‘What ideas do you have for working with disabled people as research colleagues and partners?’ Please use accessible language and Plain English. 

These submissions will be reviewed by academics on the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Culture team and also by representatives of two disabled people’s organisations who are partners on the project.

If you have any questions about this, please do not hesitate to get in contact. We are not expecting a professionally edited film or audio and would happily receive a recording made on a mobile phone or other device.

If your written task/film is reviewed favourably you will be shortlisted for an online interview. We will let you know this by [date]

All successfully shortlisted applicants will be asked to attend an online interview - which will be held on either [date] (for Research Associate) or [date] (for Research Coordinator). 

We will be sharing the interview questions prior to the interview. 

If you have any questions or considerations about access, please let us know. We consider access to be an ongoing process, conversation and exercise in responding together as a community.

We received some incredibly powerful responses to this task from the candidates. A panel of academics, professional services colleagues and representatives of two disabled people’s organisations rated task submissions out of 5 and gave written feedback. The task permitted applicants to showcase their skills, ideas and experiences relating to ‘Experience of working with disabled people and/or their representative organisations’ (Essential Criteria 7, Research Associate) and ‘Experience of working with different stakeholders including academics and professional services of universities and non-academic partners (e.g. disabled people’s organisations)’ (Desirable Criteria 2, Project Coordinator).  Our panel met to discuss all the ratings and we offered an interview to all applicants rather than shortlist on the basis of the task. 'Offering an interview' to disabled candidates is just one of the ways in which employers can demonstrate that they are disability confident and can be used alongside other inclusive recruitment practices (e.g. inclusive language in job adverts, advertising vacancies where disabled people may be more likely to see them etc). The Business Disability Forum (2021) explains:

What is the ‘Offer an interview’ scheme?

The ‘Offer an interview’ scheme is a commitment made by employers to offer interviews to all disabled applicants who meet the essential criteria for an advertised job.

This forms part of the UK Government’s Disability Confident scheme. Employers participating in the Disability Confident scheme can choose to offer interviews to all disabled applicants who meet the minimum criteria for an advertised job.

This replaced the UK Government’s ‘Guaranteed Interview’ scheme, which ran until 2016.

We understand 'interview' and 'selection event/activity' as interchangeable and could have shortlisted applicants on the basis of an assessment of the task submission. To do so would mean holding a calibration meeting to ensure consistency across reviewers. We did not do this. We decided to longlist all of our applicants regardless of their task scores. This resulted in three full days of online interviews, across two panels, for the three posts. We gathered information on access needs, carefully devised and shared our interview questions with candidates two weeks before the interview date. We fell upon a wonderful Freudian-slip offered by one of the authors; the phrase ‘disability-positive’ rather than ‘disability confident’. While the latter is a bureaucratic and discursive space known and promoted in the university, the former draws upon a potential more-encompassing and inclusive approach. The new wave of disability demands thinking imaginatively about recruitment. And the sheer expansion of ways of knowing disability helped build our community’s capacities.

Conclusions

We have introduced two novel philosophical concepts; arguing that we are caught up in ‘knowing times of disability’ impacted by a ‘new wave of disability’ that requires an urgent response; the generation of community. We are left with a number of questions and considerations that will continue to shape our project.  We wonder how the new wave of disability is being received by the university sector. If the new wave is bureaucratised as a tsunami; then we are likely to find defensive and non-generative practice. The new wave’s generation of these times of knowing disability creates huge possibilities for deep cultural change. We need to ask who is embracing knowing disability? Our WAARC community continues to grow as we pull in the engagement of colleagues in and outside of the university. There is no doubt that those of us with a personal, political and professional interest in disability are often at the vanguard of inclusive work and we maintain that disabled people should be the ones leading this work in concert and with the support of non-disabled colleagues. That said, we know that disabled people are too often expected to drive forward access and inclusion.  We need to address a strange paradox here. As Jammaers et al (2016: 1365) write ‘disabled employees inhabit a contradictory discursive position: as disabled individuals, they are discursively constructed for what they are unable to do, whereas as employees they are constituted as human resources and expected to be able to produce and create value’ (our italics). Such a contrary position is further complicated when disabled academics and professional services shoulder the responsibility and labour of access (Dolmage, 2017).

We should also ask, are university leaders doing enough to support disability access and inclusive university cultures? In terms of our own WAARC community we do feel supported by senior colleagues though we also know that their support and commitment will be essential to institutional embedding inclusive practice across the whole of the university.  We wonder to what extent disability gets pulled into the wider higher education sector’s work on equality, diversity and inclusion as a driving subject of inquiry. We teeter here between being optimistic and pessimistic. Disability is often ignored in the EDI space (Price, 2024) and forms of equity tourism risk reducing EDI to mere tokenism (Lett et al, 2022). We assert that any attempt to engage disability as the driving subject of creating more positive research environments must involve universities working in collaboration and co-production with disabled people’s organisations (Goodley, 2024). 
 

References
 

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