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The focus of this areas is to promote collaboration between university researchers and Disabled People's Organisations to participate in research that challenges normative research processes and outcomes.  Four Collaborative Projects have been funded through WAARC that seek to address the research priorities of disabled people and their representative organisations. We are working closely with one of our non-academic partners - Sheffield Voices - to support the development needs of the research teams of the Collaborative Projects.

June 2025

Following a competitive funding call for applications (outlined in this page below) the following projects have been funded:

Making Bills Easier to Understand: Promoting Accessibility and Inclusivity
Bev Enion, Leyla Jabbarzade and Turana Abdullayeva, Education, University of Sheffield
Our Vision Our Future
A link to an easy read version summary of this research

Our Vision Our Future (OVOF) is a charity run by and for adults with learning disabilities. The charity provides adults with voices, helping them to make their own choices and live more independently. One of OVOF’s goals is to make information easier to understand so that everyone can fully take part in daily life. This project helps with that and focuses on making household bills—such as gas and electricity—easier to read and manage for adults with learning disabilities. Many members of OVOF want to live independently but often need help from family members to understand and pay their bills. Because of this, our research will explore how to make bills clearer so they can manage them on their own.

Working Together
We have already spoken with OVOF members, who shared their struggles with understanding utility bills. They will be co-researchers in this project, meaning they are helping to decide what to study, and how we will study it and will work with us to find solutions. OVOF members will also review our findings and help us to share the results beyond the university. We will hold a showcase event in March 2026 where participants can help present the research findings.

How We Will Do This
We will use creative and practical methods to explore ways to improve bills. These will include:

• Workshops – Monthly group sessions where OVOF members share their experiences and work on solutions.
• Drawing and Storytelling – Creating pictures and stories together about OVOF’s experiences with household bills.
• Designing Better Bills – Working together to create a Toolkit to provide a clearer, easier-to-read bill format.
• Feedback and Discussion – Reviewing and improving the Toolkit design to make sure it works for everyone.
• Creating a Podcast – Sharing our experiences and solutions with a wider audience.

To keep everything clear, we will use simple language and visual aids in all activities.

What We Will Create
By the end of the project, we will create: 

• A Podcast – A platform where OVOF members can share their experiences and ideas for making bills easier to understand. The podcast will be available online for anyone to listen to.
• A Toolkit for Utility Providers – A guide with practical tips and design ideas to help utility companies make their bills clearer and more accessible.
• An Open Access Journal Article – A research paper written with input from participants, available online for anyone to read and use to improve accessibility.

Our Goal
We want to help adults with learning disabilities feel more confident managing their household bills and finances, reducing their need for support from others. We also want utility companies to understand the importance of clear and accessible information for everyone. By working together, we can create real change in how utility bills are designed, making daily life easier and more independent for adults with learning disabilities.

Knowing together, differently: collaborative performance practices in a disability arts group as inclusive artistic research
Cassie Kill, University of Sheffield
The Professors, Sheffield
A link to an easy read version summary of this research

This research is a collaboration between the lead researcher – Dr Cassie Kill – and The Professors – a disability arts group – exploring The Professors’ collaborative artistic methodologies as creative, participatory and inclusive modes of knowledge production.  The Professors are a Sheffield-based performing arts group, including around six disabled artists and two paid lead artists. Spawned from a political protest in 1985, The Professors are passionate about collaboration, equality and inclusion. In The Professors’ words:

“We work collaboratively. We are an independent company who have worked together for over 35 years. This has afforded us the opportunity to develop a unique approach - an approach which values all members of the company and their contribution. Through collaboration and ingenuity, the lead artists devise appropriate frameworks to enable everyone to contribute equally.  These frameworks are flexible and responsive, experimental and organic. Ideas grow and work is created.”

Over the years, group has gradually moved from a narrative-led model to a more fluid, abstract and collaborative approach. They often use film to allow members to make different contributions flexibly, according to their interests, needs and availability. Inclusive collaboration in The Professors does not have to mean everyone is all doing the same thing; in fact, it might depend on them doing different things. The lead artists provide a structure – the bones of the work – and other members add content, ideas and creativity into this structure, fleshing it out into a piece of performance.

This research acknowledges that established research methods have had a role in reproducing ableist research cultures. Academic texts often claim that participatory research methods are a “solution” to these problems. However, it is still commonly assumed that co-produced research involves academics teaching community co-researchers how to carry out established academic methods (Bell & Pahl, 2018; Gallacher & Gallagher, 2008; Kill, 2022). This model is not actually very empowering because it once again assumes the researcher is the one who knows everything, including how to produce knowledge. By contrast, this project considers what The Professors do as already a valid form of research. The lead researcher and The Professors will collaboratively explore these methodologies, seeking to teach others at the university about how to work in this way, and to challenge ableist research cultures.  

The study has three research questions:

1. How do The Professors do inclusive participatory research through arts practice?
2. What do these approaches to participatory arts-based research do, and what do they not do?
3. How can The Professors’ ways of working inform anti-ableist participatory research in and beyond the university? 

To answer these questions, the lead researcher will do ethnographic research with The Professors. This involves hanging out in their meetings for around eight months: participating in, observing, and documenting their artistic methodologies. In this time, the lead researcher and The Professors will investigate the groups practices through exploring the group’s archives and making a new performance about their ways of working. 

Accessing Archives: creating a network for disabled, neurodivergent, chronically ill or deaf historians
Esme Cleall, History, University of Sheffield
Buckinghamshire Disability Service, BuDS
A link to an easy read version summary of this research

It can be difficult to access archives, online or in person. There are many potential challenges. Travel can be difficult. The archive building may not have accessible access. The seating inside may be wrong. You might feel anxious about going to an unfamiliar place. You might find working in silence difficult. You might struggle to see or read the documents. You might have difficulties communicating with the people who work there. Digitisation may help, but be inaccessible for others. Access can be expensive. There are significant gaps in what is available online too. Not all history can be studied online. Going to archives overseas is, for many people, even harder. All archival work is slow. But disabled researchers face even more challenges. 

This project will set up a network of disabled historians who use archives to discuss these barriers. This network will be open to UK-based historians who self-identify as disabled, deaf, neurodivergent or chronically ill. It is open to family historians, independent scholars, and academic historians of all career stages. Esme Cleall, based at the University of Sheffield and Rachel Bright at Keele University, are leading the project - we are both disabled researchers ourselves who are interested in improving access to heritage.

There are three parts to our project. 

Part One: Sharing Experiences
This strand aims to get disabled historians together to share experiences about using archives. We want to build Accessing Archives as a Disabled People’s Organisation. This includes building collective knowledge and finding out what people would like to get out of the network. We will do this through a mixture of hybrid and online consciousness-raising sessions to pool our collective knowledge.

Part Two: Learning from and with Others
This strand aims to learn from other people. We  will work with  (BuDS) which is a Disabled People’s Organisation. Together we will think about building up our network, facing challenges and overcoming them. BuDS will provide two workshops specifically around Access. We will also work with Archives to have conversations about access in a collegiate, collaborative and constructive way. This is not about criticising archives about what they do and do not offer in terms of accessibility, but about working with them to develop solutions. As part of this, we are inspired by the project , which is a current project seeking to make digital heritage collections more accessible. 

Part Three: Building Resources
This strand will build and share resources for disabled researchers and for archives to use in thinking about accessibility. Based on our experiences, information gathered, and evidence accumulated through our collaborative discussions, we will produce three outputs: 

1. Policy paper advocating for better archival access for disabled researchers.
2. Policy paper aimed at our own institutions for how they can support us as employees.
3. An online resource for disabled, deaf, neurodivergent, and chronically ill researchers with tips and suggestions.

Our methods are designed to be anti-ableist and as inclusive as possible. Most of the events will be held online for accessibility. But, because we recognise that online events don’t work for everyone, we are also holding two in-person events. 

Open Scholarship Summary
Grace Joseph, Education, University of Sheffield
Extant, London
A link to an easy read version summary of this research

Open Scholarship is a collaboration between Grace Joseph, Research Associate on Cripping Breath, and Extant, the UK’s leading professional performing arts company centring visually impaired artists. At Extant, visual impairment is celebrated as a rich source of creative engagement that inspires fresh perspectives. Open Scholarship is continuous with previous collaborative research projects between Grace and Maria Oshodi, the Artistic Director and CEO of Extant (, for example).

Open Scholarship will explore the relationships between: 

• Visually impaired researchers and access to research materials
• Written scholarship and archival practices
• Performance, the archive, and research dissemination. 

Through this research project, we hope to identify—and work towards resolving—a need within academia for presenting research in different kinds of ways, and for this thinking to be led by disabled approaches to and experiences of knowledge. We are convinced that performance can do important work here: by activating access issues; disseminating scholarship to a public audience; and by creating a space for interactive interpretation of research.  

Open Scholarship addresses the following research questions: 

1. What is the current status of access provision in the University for visually impaired and blind researchers, in terms of accessing texts and other research materials?
2. How might accessible archival practices, innovated at Extant and elsewhere, inform approaches to access to scholarship?
3. How might performance capture and accessibly convey complex academic research?

The project will be carried out across three phrases, corresponding to our research questions: 

1. Status of access to scholarship
2. Accessing the archive
3. Performative translation of academic outputs. 

In Phase 1, we will carry out interviews with visually impaired university students and staff to find out barriers and approaches to access to scholarship. We will centre the ad hoc and personal methods visually impaired and blind researchers have developed—often in the face of ableist institutions—to access texts. This is informed by our Open Scripts research. We found that multiple preferences and modes of access were represented across even a relatively small number of participants. We want to capture this plurality, and the ways it resists standardised and unfit-for-purpose access techniques. 

Phase 2 will consist of a literature and practice review, as we explore accessible archives as a potential model for academic access. We will pay particular attention to archival practices that take a re-enactment approach, and to innovative practices in theatre and performance. This research period will inform an anti-ableist and transformative account of access (Jones and Gauthier-Mamaril 2024), which refuses an incompatibility between visual archive and visually impaired researcher.

In Phase 3, we will bring together our findings in order to produce a short piece of performance. This will be devised by three visually impaired performers over a workshop period, directed by Maria. Through this performance, we are aiming to: 

• Disseminate the research to the general public
• Investigate the possibilities of an enactment approach to archiving and academic authorship
• Innovate access methods for performance. 

Open Scholarship aims to advocate for transformative access in the university, and to create access to research through performance. 

Original Research Funding Call for Disability Related Small-Scale Research and Innovation Projects sent out in November 2024

++ PLEASE NOTE, APPLICANTS MUST BE EITHER A DPO OR LEAD BY A MEMBER OF STAFF OR A PGR, UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD ++

The Wellcome Trust Anti-Ableist Research Cultures Project (WAARC) - in collaboration with the Participatory Research Network - are seeking applications for small-scale/pump-priming research or innovation projects.

Projects must focus on promoting the inclusion of disabled people in or within the University of Sheffield and may reflect or build on some of the aims of the WAARC project included; promoting inclusive recruitment; enhancing flexible working; promoting positive research environment and promoting anti-ableist university cultures. More details can be found at our project website:

/ihuman/waarc

We would expect to receive project applications with total costs for up to a maximum of £10,000 in total (staff and non-staff costs) where up to £5000 would be costed to meet disability access and consultancy fees of disabled people’s organisations .

Project or Innovation Requirements

Each project must be participatory and work in collaboration with a Disabled People’s Organisation. It also must be able to be completed within 11 months. The focus of the research or innovation needs to be on disability in research or the university. We understand participatory research to be doing research with communities, rather than on them.

Who can apply?

Any member of academic or professional services staff or postgraduate research student who intends to still be at the university up until December 2025.

How to Apply

There are two ways to apply:

Option 1: For postgraduate researchers or staff who do already have links with a Disabled People’s Organisation: Complete and submit a full proposal form by Friday 13th December 2024, via (google form) or email the word version of the form to prn@sheffield.ac.uk.

Option 2: For postgraduate researchers or staff who do not already have links with a Disabled People’s Organisation: Complete and submit the expression of interest form by Friday 1st November 2024, via (google form) or email the word version of the form to prn@sheffield.ac.uk. Interested Disabled People’s Organisations will also be expressing interest in this time period. We will seek to match interested postgraduate researchers and staff with Disabled People’s Organisations in early November, to enable you to create a full proposal to submit by Friday 13th December 2024. 

When will the research take place?

Research will take place from February-December 2025.

Further Information

If you are interested and would like to ask any questions, please email prn@sheffield.ac.uk for an invite to a Google meet on Wednesday 25th September (12:30-2pm) or Thursday 10th October 2024 (3-4:30pm). There is also more information in the ‘Further Questions’ document.

Closing Date for Full Proposal Applications: Friday 13th December 2024, via google form

Collaboration 
Leads: Kirsty Liddiard and Dan Goodley 
3.1. Inclusive Research
Problem: A need to promote more inclusive disability research activity at TUOS.
Strategic Plan: The TUOS Participatory Research Network (PRN) will lead and manage an Open Call to all researchers in TUOS seeking to support research projects that put into practice inclusive methods with disabled people and their representative organisations, including a ring-fencing of part of this funding for PGR applicants.
Workplan: We anticipate supporting up to a maximum of six research projects running for six months in our Open Call that seek to put into practice inclusive methods with disabled people and their representative organisations, including a ring-fencing of part of this funding for PGR applicants. Each project will involve the participation of a range of stakeholders who will manage their own ethical applications using the TUOS online ethics application systems supported by their own department’s research hubs.

3.2. Cripping the Concordat
Problem: A disconnect between current commitments around researcher development and the barriers faced by disabled researchers.
Strategic plan: Explore how the Concordat To Support the Career Development of Researchers can more effectively support the needs and research aspirations of disabled researchers. 
Workplan: In-depth thematic analysis of the Concordat supplemented by findings arising for Priority Areas 1 and 2. Secondary data related to Concordat and TUOS documents presented on the university website.

The outputs will include a set of resources and recommendations arising from the open call projects and further guidance on enhancing the Concordat. The evaluation will include an assessment of the outcomes of the open call projects and a framework for assessing the impact of enhanced guidance aligned with the Concordat on disabled researchers. 

Deliverables

• Funding of a number of research projects delivered in collaboration with disabled people’s organisations.
• Cripping the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers.