The White Rose Studies of Ableism Research Collaboration brings together researchers from the White Rose Universities including Angharad Beckett (Leeds), Tom Campbell (Leeds) Dan Goodley (Sheffield), Parvaneh Rabiee (York). Hitherto, our research has engaged with the practices of disablism (the exclusion of people with physical, sensory and cognitive impairments), bodies and technology. Recently, however, disability research and research on embodiment has become more mindful of the wider processes of ableism. These processes include a host of psychological, social, economic, cultural, imaginary and technological conditions that privilege normative ways of living; promote an idealisation of able-bodiedness; cherish particular forms of personhood and psychological health; spatially organise environments around normative citizens; create institutional bias towards autonomous and independent bodies; feed into wider neo-liberal and advanced capitalist forms of production.
Funding from the White Rose Consortium has allowed us to engage in a number of capacity building and collaborative activities including:
• A website http://whiterosestudiesofableism.wordpress.com/about/
• An inception event bringing together researchers from across the three universities
• A seminar on ‘Not Nice’ Children co-hosted with the Centre for Health, Technologies and Social Practice (University of Leeds).
• A resource for feeding into other trans-disciplinary work e.g. Sheffield, 2022 Futures: Goodley, Martin and others were successful in winning the award for best collaborative research group ‘Biohybrids’ which brings together researchers across disciplines to research relationships between the biological and the social. The prize was 2 x fully funded interdisciplinary postgraduate studentships (starting January 2014). The White Rose Studies of Ableism was cited during the competition as an example of disciplinary and paradigm shifting research.
• Networking internationally – Dan Goodley was invited to represent the White Rose Studies of Ableism and to give a keynote address to a specially organized one day Symposium at the University of Toronto, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education on 29th July 2013 entitled Ableism and the Question of the Human. In addition, members of the White Rose Studies of Ableism presented three papers at the European Sociology Association (ESA) conference, Turin, 29 – 31st August 2013.
• Tom Campbell (University of Leeds) and Angharad Becket (University of Leeds). Challenging Ableism: the UK Disability Movement & Practices of Resistance.
• Dan Goodley (University of Sheffield). Theorising Ableism and Disablism: Queer, Crip, Gendered and Raced, for Tomorrow we Ride.
• Angharad Beckett (University of Leeds). Anti Oppresive Education: Towards an Anti-Ableist pedagogy.
• Tom Campbell (University of Leeds). Ableism and the Problematisation of Difference: Towards a Genealogy of Dyslexia