Disability Matters Online Town Hall Circus is a free event held fully online via Zoom.

Friday 19th September 2025, 12:00 - 13:30 BST

Disability Matters Online Town Hall Circus 2025

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.

The Disability Matters online town hall circus is a series of annual knowledge exchange events aimed at science and health funders, policy makers and researchers based across universities, NGOs and DPOs. It forms part of the knowledge exchange activities for Phase 7 of the programme, which focuses on transforming equity, diversity, and inclusion through disability. The first town hall circus event will be led by the Sheffield team.

“A group of puffins is known as a circus, an improbability, a colony, a burrow and a gathering.” (Yorkshire Wildlife Trust 2021)

Town halls are increasingly used by universities as platforms for sharing key messaging, providing policy updates, and gathering feedback from staff and students. However, town halls are often inaccessible to disabled people and tend to favour individuals from dominant groups while excluding minority groups.

Taking inspiration from the social lives of playful birds like puffins to think creatively about the kind of gatherings we want to create, we are turning the online town hall into a circus. At the online town hall circus, we experiment with other ways of being together to reimagine how these gatherings might be transformed into accessible spaces that cultivate joy, wonder, and care.

In this event, we ask the question:

‘How does centring disability drive innovative change and expand equity, diversity and inclusion in health research?’

The format of the town hall circus will be as follows:

• First Act (20 minutes): Four provocations (5 minutes x 4) from the Sheffield team that ask questions of the audience

• Access break (5 minutes)

• Second Act (10 minutes): Q&A chaired by Dan (10 minutes) - A chance for participants/audience to respond to the First Act and also pose their own questions

• Transition break (2 minutes)

• Third Act (30 minutes): Compass session - identifies our direction of research - and continues our conversation now with our panel members in the form of a panel discussion (15 minutes) and open plenary (15 minutes)

• Close (3 minutes)

• Access break (5 minute)

• Optional Rafting session for aftercare and reflections (10 minutes)

Panellists

Dr Katherine Deane is Associate Professor in the School of Health Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich and is also a wheelchair user with a variety of long-term conditions. She conducts research on the co-created management of long-term conditions and disabilities. She is also the University’s Access Ambassador and has improved the accessibility of their campus substantially in the last 10 years. She has provided access advice to a wide variety of institutions, funders, manufacturers, and event organisers. She conducted a survey of lab access in 2023 and created a suite of lab access guidelines. She is currently working on 7 funded research projects worth £9.5 million focussed on applying and evidencing best practice EDI in research.

Professor Kate Sang is a Professor of Gender and Employment Studies at Heriot-Watt University, and the director for the Centre for the Transformation of Work – an interdisciplinary research centre. She specialises in research which aims to improve marginalised people’s careers, with a particular interest in women and disabled people’s careers. Kate’s research is underpinned by an intersectional approach, recognising that our experiences of employment are informed by intersecting structural and cultural inequalities. Further, Kate has expertise in participatory action research, working with research end-users to create workplace interventions which reflect the needs and experiences of organizational stakeholders, including employees, trade unions, employers and policy makers.

More recently, Kate’s research has explored gynaecological health at work, disability inclusive science careers and migrants’ experiences of employment. Kate is interested in the role of technology, including virtual reality, in fostering more inclusive workplaces. Kate is also pursuing research which works to embed the needs of women and disabled people in environmental measures.

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 local time zone as it may differ from what is listed above.

Padlet

We are using Padlet to enable asynchronous engagement and networking at this event.

The networking lounge is where participants can find and connect with others with similar interests. The discussion board is where participants can submit comments and questions relating to the theme of the event.

The Padlet boards are password-protected and accessible only via the link shared with registered attendees. An email invitation will be sent out one week before the event containing the links and passwords to the Padlet boards. For security, please do not share the link or password with anyone else. The Padlet boards will close one week after the event.

For safety and confidentiality reasons, we ask that participants refrain from sharing sensitive data and personal information on Padlet and use only professional contact details such as institutional email addresses, professional networking profiles (e.g. LinkedIn) and professional social media accounts. Duplication of content from the Padlet boards including screen captures will also not be permitted. See Using Padlet for more details.

For further information on engagement and data privacy, see Ensuring accessibility, safety, and privacy at our events.

Access

When you purchase a ticket, you will receive a confirmation email. You will receive a reminder email with the Zoom link for joining 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 talks 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 at https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ihuman/disability-matters

Follow us on social media:

Bluesky: @dismatters.bsky.social

Twitter/X: @DisMatters

Instagram: disability_matters