Development
How do we build a new generation of disabled and disability-positive health researchers and professional services colleagues?
Leads: Dan Goodley (±¬ÁÏTV), Jackie Leach Scully (UNSW), Meng Ee Wong (NIE/NTU), Tanya Titchkosky (University of Toronto) and Sandeep Singh (Ambedkar University)
Disability Matters is committed to supporting the career development of disabled and disability-positive researchers around the world. The Principle Investigator and Co-Investigators are working closely with the Research Associates on Disability Matters to put together a suite of activities that will help build this next generation of researchers. We are committed to building a positive and inclusive research culture; creating forms of inclusive mentoring; curating a host of online resources and courses that bring in disabled learners who might have been traditionally excluded from university contexts. Our aspirations are clear; Disability Matters seeks to interrogate and embody equality, Diversity and Inclusion in health and science. We are committed to the creation of anti-ableist research cultures wherein disabled researcher and research professionals can thrive and flourish.
The Global Leaders in Disability and Health Research Mentoring Programme
Mandate for Researcher and Professional Services Development
The Global Leaders in Disability and Health Research Mentoring Programme
This is perhaps our most ambitious researcher development commitment. Our programme will be working with up to 10 disabled researchers from across the world. In 2028 and 2029, we will draw on our transformative knowledge to support five grant applications led by our Disability Matters Research Associates, working in collaboration with disabled people. In 2025 we have launched two initiatives to support grant applications (These sessions will be repeated through 2026-2029):
iHuman Wellcome Hub outlines support from conception, through submission to shortlisted interview, with a specific focus on applications to the Wellcome Discovery Award schemes including Early Career, Career Development and Discovery Awards.
Scholarship session for Social Sciences: Writing about Writing: this face-to-face course held at the ±¬ÁÏTV brings together academics from early, through mid to senior career positions, to dispel some of the myths around writing: with a specific focus on grant applications.
Our Global Leaders are also supported by a wider set of researcher development activities detailed below.
Developing critical disability studies literacy through diverse perspectives
A key objective of the Disability Matters programme. Our pan-national team brings with it a variety of disciplinary and practitioner backgrounds and multiple theoretical, methodological, analytical, political and policy engagement. How researchers approach disability studies inquiry will reflect their own intellectual origins and trajectories as well as their research and scholarly aspirations. The Doing Disability Differently collective , OISE, University of Toronto deploys an approach of interpretivist scholarship, reading and writing that brings together graduate students from a host of disciplines in order to sit with the potential of disability to reimagine the kinds of questions we might ask of social institutions. Critical Disability Studies, iHuman, ±¬ÁÏTV, has been working over the last year to produce A Manifesto for Critical Disability Studies and Letters to Disability Studies. The community enjoys an interdisciplinary and international reputation for critical disability studies. We span disciplines including education, psychology, sociology, history, geography, childhood and youth, health, social policy, arts, humanities and cultural studies. One exciting development of our work in Sheffield relates to the critical, intellectual and pragmatic contributions of professional services colleagues: who are impacting hugely on the development of inclusive research culture.
The , UNSW Sydney, promotes inclusive research as co-production: a process of collaboration and collective decision-making, which involves changing the relations of research traditionally separating users and producers. DIE have recently launched their (October 2024) working in collaboration with people with disability in the university context in Australia. , National Institute of Education, Singapore, brings together researchers from the fields of disability studies and special needs education, with colleagues contributing towards the first edited collection of disability studies essays in the country;
Disability Dialogues
Building on the diversity of critical disability studies perspectives of our programme this venture showcases the emerging scholarship of disability researchers from around the globe. Disability Dialogues is a joint initiative organised by iHuman, ±¬ÁÏTV; Centre for Disability Studies; University of Leeds; Disability Innovation Institute, University of New South Wales; OISE, University of Toronto, and National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University Singapore - invites short, provocative pieces from emerging scholars; thus giving them opportunities to share elements of their work. The Disability Matters team also supports the Critical Disability Studies research cluster in the School of Education, ±¬ÁÏTV with the running of the Disability Dialogues Lounge an online collaborative space for everyone within the CDS community to come together, guided by a key prompt for the month.
Researcher Networks
We know that peer support is key to researcher development. We support the , a collective of Post-Graduate and early career researchers, activists, and advocates based across the White Rose Universities as well as the Disability Matters Research Network. Members of the Disability Matters programme lead a number of Reading and Study Groups which help us connect with scholars from around the globe. To further bring people together we will be organising an International Exchange which will facilitate collaboration across universities. In 2026 we will be sharing a call to Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers about the details of international exchange. Finally, our own team of researchers meet together as a Disability Matters Researcher Group to share emerging work from their phases and to collaborate through writing and discussion.
Seasonal Institutes
Finding disability studies communities can be challenging for all researchers at all stages of their career from PhD, through early, mid and senior career positions. Our seasonal institutes centre early career researchers and bring them together with other colleagues from across a host of disciplines to engage with questions of theory, ethics, methodology, analysis and writing. Examples thus far include the following. A - which brought together Danish Phd researchers and a and our Spring Institute entitled 'Disability Matters and Anti-Ableism' held in Singapore in March 2026.
Online and in-person courses
We are committed to the creation of online courses and are developing these in parallel with the seasonal institutes. Introducing Critical Disability Studies: Indian Contexts, Global Perspectives in is led by Ankita Mishra and Sandeep R. Singh. This 8-week online course is being offered in 2026 as part of a collaborative initiative between Disability Matters, a pan-national research programme based at the ±¬ÁÏTV, and Kamala Nehru College, University of Delhi.
This course will introduce students to critical perspectives on disability that move beyond medicalised and deficit frameworks, fostering a deeper understanding of disability as lived experience, a site of knowledge, and a political and cultural category. By bringing together national and international scholars, activists, and practitioners, the course situates Indian disability contexts within global debates, while also foregrounding local histories, movements, and lived realities. The course is designed as a space for dialogue, reflection, and mutual learning and to cultivate disability sensitivity and ethical responsibility. Our intention for the course is to enable students to emerge as informed, reflective and hopeful ambassadors for disability-driven thinking and practice within their academic, professional and social environments.
In addition, to complement the online course, students are also invited to join a monthly peer-led online reading group for extended discussions on disability inspired by the lectures and reading recommendations. The reading group will also be open to students not enrolled in the online course as well as attendees outside of KNC. This will offer a space for mutual learning and allow students to network with scholars of diverse disciplines.
Disability Matters Course: University of Toronto
Colleagues in the University of Toronto are also working on a new course - Disability Matters - aimed at social science and medicine students that will bring disability studies to a host of disciplines and practitioner groups. The latter has been supported by writing retreats where are number of questions have been posed including: What does it mean that, today, disability and disability studies can be, at least partially, incorporated into the university, even though the university conceptualizes disability in non-socio-political ways enabling primarily the study of disability primarily as a bio-problem and its management as such? In addition to these online courses, the international Disability Matters team has centred the aims of their programme in their teaching with postgraduate students. At the University of Toronto, for example, Elaine Cagulada's graduate course and Tanya Titchkosky's both emphasize how a disability studies orientation (where we might also understand disability to be a driving subject in these courses) can help us reimagine our relationship to the production of disability as a problem.
Mandate for Researcher and Professional Services Development
The PI and CoIs of Disability Matters - along with their host universities - have signed up to a Mandate for Researcher and Professional Services Development and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: Towards Supportive Research Environments that commits us to inclusive job recruitment, career mentoring, leadership opportunities, inclusive approaches to inclusive participant recruitment, enhancing the involvement of disabled people’s organisations in our research, promoting literacy in relation to research integrity (Open Access, Open Data/Management).
We are working with our Research Associates and Programme Manager on a bespoke programme of career development activities that have equality, diversity and inclusion as a central concern. At the start of each year and in subsequent annual reviews, at least 10 days of development activities are agreed with colleagues to avail themselves of specific support from our universities.
Clearly, enhancing the career progression of researchers and professional services colleagues requires a critical and affirmation engagement with the creation of positive research cultures. is one approach that calls upon all university colleagues to ask ‘what is the university for?’ Answering this question encourages us to sit with the disability's opportunistic potential to We recognise the responsibilities of senior university colleagues and those who lead research projects to not only commit to initiatives such as the but to work proactively with career aspirations of disabled researchers and professional services colleagues. In terms of the latter, our Project Coordinator Rhea Halsey, has written and presented a number of pieces in and outside of the ±¬ÁÏTV that reflect on the centrality of professional services colleagues to the building of inclusive research cultures:
Liz Dew, Lucy Dunning and Rhea Halsey, Beyond the Desk: How Professional Services Staff Shape Inclusive Research Culture, 3rd July 2024, Online Symposium
Disability in Education & Work: A Blog from Helsinki, Finland by Rhea Halsey
Rhea Halsey and our colleague Elinor Noble (WAARC Project Coordinator) have also led these sessions in the university:
Project Management Network
Staff Network Day - PM Network presentation/taster session
New researcher projects
Through the work of our Development and Global Leaders programme we are delighted to announce, in early 2026, that Bojana Daw Srdanovic will commence a new project, based in iHuman Sheffield, in September 2026. This Wellcome Trust Early Career Award is entitled ‘The learning disability art of care – centring actors with learning disabilities to develop novel understandings of care’
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.