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During the lifetime of WAARC we will be releasing details of collaboration, writing and outputs from our research in a variety of forms.

Collaborative work in progress

Members of the WAARC team are working in collaboration with National Association of Disabled Staff Networks to realise their aspirations in relation to two wider community projects that seek to enhance the work experiences of disabled academics and professional services colleagues: 

is an initiative established by and for disabled staff in Higher Education.

- led by Armineh Soorenian - This NADSN subgroup is for Disabled staff who receive Access to Work (AtW) support, such as Support Workers, equipment, or assistive tech. It offers monthly peer support meetings and will contribute to NADSN’s response to the UK Government’s AtW consultation.

Public engagement outputs

Due to the wider work of our WAARC team we are fortunate to draw upon a plethora of resources that we might frame as public engagement:

Elaina Gauthier-Mamaril's . And you can find the transcripts of each episode here: 

- Imagining the anti-ableist university’ is a collection of frustrations, tensions, and hopes for the future of an anti-ableist university created by a collection of critical disability studies scholars and university professional services staff in the UK. Through sharing some of our dialogues surrounding the concept of the anti-ableist university over the past 6 months, we encourage this zine to be read critically and engaged, critiqued, and used as a starting point for others to share their frustrations with and hopes for the anti-ableist university, whatever that may mean to you. 

Open Access publications

Working Papers - Publications through which the WAARC team critically engage with emerging findings and deliberations with a specific focus on our aims and deliverables. 

Missive from the Accommodations Loop by Daniel P. Jones and Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril
A critical disability studies take on the question of accommodations in the university
  published in the geoz.one -  Editors Daniel Jones and Lauren White and contributors Daniel P. Jones, Lauren White, Liz Dew, Elaina Gauthier-Mamaril, Armineh Soorenian, Ankita Mishra, Cassie Kill, Helen Evans, Christina Lee, & Sophie Phillips (2025). 

Joy in Social Research - created space for postgraduate and early career researchers to collaborate and critically engage in the concept of joy. It was funded by the Participatory Research Network and iHuman

Disability Dialogues a series of short provocative pieces about disability studies and research which is co-edited by iHuman, University of Sheffield and the Centre for Disability Studies, University of Leeds.

And we are accessing a series of Journal articles - Open Access peer reviewed papers - written by the WAARC team that either emerge directly from our work or reflect team members' scholarship that are impacting on our discussions within the team. These papers consider the power of podcasting to promote dialogue and theorisation; theoretical ideas relating to understanding the anti-ableist university; the challenges of particular research methods when these methods are built upon ableist assumptions; the urgent need to engage disabled people and their representative organisations at all stages of research:

- In the third post of an ongoing monthly series exploring podcasting practice and the medical humanities, Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril reflects on how disabled communities of care share practices and knowledges from polio to COVID.

- Bringing together current research with lived experience, this book by Sophie Phillips considers the challenges of being an autistic woman in postgraduate education with the aim to raise awareness, challenge misconceptions and ignite change within the system.

- Reflecting on his own zine-practice as geographer, Daniel P. Jones calls for a shift to the focus on zineing as process and politics of refusal that explicitly challenges neoliberal, capitalist agendas. 

- Dan Goodley's paper develops a conversation with decolonisation to pitch a novel mode of engagement; depathologising the university

- This paper offers an original affirmative proposition: that the university is already depathologising - by Dan.Goodley, Kirsty Liddiard and Rebecca Lawthom

- Through reference to critical posthumanities and critical disability studies theory, attend to broken, patchwork, kintsugi and crip ethnographies that, we argue, allow us to sit in the liminal space between qualitative/post-qualitative research and human/posthuman theory by Bojana Daw Srdanovic, Nikita Hayden, Dan Goodley, Rebecca Lawthom and Katherine Runswick-Cole. 

- Bottomley et al reflect on developing the Participatory Ethics Good Practice Guidelines; as a research team of clinical, academic and advocacy-based researchers with and without learning disabilities.

- Bishop et al's study aims to understand system barriers to research participation for people with intellectual disabilities.

- Dan Goodley posits that being human as praxis—in relation to the lives of People with Learning Disabilities—offers a significant and original insight into critical and social theory across the social sciences and humanities.

Moreover, we are fortunate to draw upon scholarship symposia, films and their recordings which bring together the work of emerging and established disability studies and disabled researchers as well as the writing of the Disability Matters team:

Disability Matters Scholarship Collection is a growing resource of short papers, filmed presentations and Q&A sessions with emerging disability studies scholars from around the world. 

Disability Matters team publications - gives links to outputs emerging from this six year pan-national programme of research that centres disability as the driving subject of inquiry in the health, research and science sectors.

- Daniel P. Jones recently worked with Fennia to produce the first peer-reviewed easy-read only paper that introduces the value of using easy-read formats in Geography. It encourages us to reconsider easy-read formats as more-than afterthought, asking what might come from using the format as a starting point in research dissemination. 

- Daniel P. Jones expands on his work in WAARC on inclusive research methodologies with this new collaborative commentary co-authored with Danni Phoenix-Kane. The paper reflects on the authors experiences of conducting research into Tourette Syndrome as two Tourettic researchers themselves, focusing on themes of representation, additional labour, and data collection, before calling for removing current barriers to research rather than making calls for future involvement of Tourettic researchers. 

Outputs of Disabled People's Organisations 

WAARC partners - Disabled People's Organisations - have produced a number of outputs relating to research, innovation and evaluation. These include:

developed by Speakup Self-advocacy. Employment is for Everyone site. Employers will find information on video CVs examples of inclusive recruitment and the My Employment Plan, which employers could adopt for all colleagues who are in employment within the university who are autistic this would ensure reasonable adjustments were made in the workplace. 

Human activism with Speakup Self-advocacy - human activism as made by self-advocates with learning disabilities

 - thinking differently about doing research through co-production

showcases the humanising healthcare practices created by researchers with learning disabilities including colleagues from WAARC partners Speakup Self-advocacy and Sheffield Voices

 - many reflections on the power of self-advocacy

 - a link to presentations