Conference Agenda

Disability research has long grappled with questions of power, voice, participation, and representation. The disability rights movement’s foundational demand—‘nothing about us without us’ (Charlton, 1998)—challenged centuries of research conducted on rather than with disabled people. The social model of disability shifted focus from individual impairment to disabling environments and attitudes (Oliver, 1996), while emancipatory disability research (EDR) insisted that disabled people must control research agendas, methods, and outcomes (Oliver, 1992; Barnes, 2003). Hamraie and Fritsch's Crip Technoscience Manifesto (2019) argues that disabled people are already designers and expert knowledge-makers of their own access—hacking, adapting, and innovating in ways that formal design rarely recognizes. 

Participatory research methods—Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR), and community mapping—have transformed how researchers engage with marginalized communities, shifting from extractive models toward collaborative knowledge production. These methods offer rich foundations for disability research, yet their application in disability contexts remains underdeveloped. This 

Exploration asks how design can contribute to adapting these participatory methods. Design brings distinct capacities: material and spatial thinking that reshapes how participation physically happens; prototyping approaches that allow iterative testing of engagement formats; multi-modal communication strategies that expand beyond text-dominant research; and attention to embodied experience that foregrounds how bodies interact with research processes. These design opportunities can extend participatory methods’ emancipatory potential, centering disabled expertise and deepening meaningful participation across diverse access needs and capacities. This Exploration is co-led by disabled and non-disabled researchers, reflecting a commitment to accountability structures that keep research answerable to disability communities (Stone & Priestley, 1996).