Disability Matters Online Symposia 2024 is a free event held fully online via Zoom.

What is Disability Matters?

Disability Matters is a major six year pan-national programme of disability, health and science research, funded by a Wellcome Trust Discretionary Award.

A key ambition of Disability Matters is to make disability the driving subject of research. We will be promoting scholarship that demonstrates the contribution of disability studies to a host of fields including medicine, medical humanities, medical sociology, science and technology studies, health sciences, population health as well as other key areas including education, law, business, legal studies, health psychology, social work, etc.

In this series, we ask the question:

How does your area of research engage with disability in the geopolitical south and challenge dominant epistemologies and paradigms of disability?

Over the course of the project, we are going to run a number of online symposia and we are asking speakers to write a short provocative piece that they will then present online for ten minutes.

The format of the symposium will be:

• Introduction by Christina Lee & Dan Goodley (5 minutes)

• Three x spoken provocations (10 minutes x 3)

• Q&A (20 minutes)

• Online plenary and open discussion (20 minutes)

Total duration: 1 hour 15 minutes

Speakers

Jiya Pandya

Jiya Pandya is a scholar of transnational disability studies currently working on a concept history of "disability" in postcolonial Indian welfare as a PhD candidate at Princeton University. Their work has been published in Disability Studies Quarterly, Lateral, History of Anthropology Review, and QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking.

Vishnu KK Nair

Vishnu KK Nair, PhD is trained as a speech and language therapist and a critical scholar of communication disability. Currently, he is a lecturer in the school of psychology and clinical language sciences at University of Reading. His research focuses on understanding communication disability utilising critical, decolonial and global southern epistemologies.

Ankita Mishra

Ankita Mishra, PhD, is the Research Associate: Health Priorities for Disability Matters at The University of Sheffield. Her research, teaching and scholar activism is interdisciplinary using participatory and creative approaches in her work with marginalised communities affected by intersectional oppression. She draws upon critical community psychology, Black feminism, critical race theory, critical disability studies and decolonial theory in her research and practice.

We reserve the right to change the speakers if necessary (due to availability, sickness etc.).

Time zones

We are a pan-national programme and welcome attendees from all over the world.

Please check the time of the event according to your time zone as it may differ from what is listed above.

Access

When you purchase a ticket, you will receive a confirmation email containing the Zoom video link. You will receive a second reminder email closer to the event.

BSL interpretation and live captioning will be supporting the session. Written copies of the speaker’s talks will be made available before the session on our Disability Matters Scholarship Collection.

Attendees are welcome to join or leave the event at any time. Participating in the Q&A and discussion is optional.

A recording of the talk will be available after the event.

If you have other specific access needs or have further questions about access, please get in touch via disabilitymatters@sheffield.ac.uk

Stay connected

For more information and news, follow us on social media and visit our website.

Twitter/X: @DisMatters

Instagram: disability_matters

Website: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ihuman/disability-matters

Header image credit: original image by Marina Leonova