About
DDF
Exploring alternate futures for doing disability justice.
Doing Disability Futures is a British Academy-funded research project that uses speculative and arts-based methods to address histories of colonial violence and ongoing injustices while storytelling alternative futures, disrupting existing knowledges, and challenging power hierarchies.
Doing Disability Futures puts disability justice into practice by having disabled people lead this programme, share strategies of survival and resistance, and collaborate with disabled artists and marginalised communities.
Through a disability justice framework, we aim to address three intersecting issues:
Our work is collaboratively produced by disabled and non-disabled artists, activists and academics. The disability justice framework brings together three aims as ways of thinking, doing, challenging, and creating knowledge that is accessible, contributing in unique ways to the disruption of the global order.
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BUILDING NEW ACCESSIBLE COLLABORATIVE APPROACHES
First, this project recognises that we must engage with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Marginalized communities continue to be disproportionately affected not only by the risk of ill health and death, but also the removal of public health measures that once provided some form of collective protection and care. Our aim is to build and find new ways to meet, collaborate and do public events as a way of putting disability justice into action from the start.
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CHALLENGING HARMFUL NARRATIVES THROUGH ARTS AND COMMUNITY
Second, in a global and local environment that is increasingly hostile to LGBTQ communities and to diasporic and migrant communities this programme takes a disability justice framework to explore how racism, ableism and xenophobia may be challenged and conveyed through both art and community narratives.
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RESPONDING TO COLONIAL HISTORIES, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND HISTORIES OF EUGENICS THROUGH SPECULATIVE FICTION
Third The literary-based strand of this programme explores the original intersection of colonialism in the Caribbean and eugenics in the Nordic countries. Working with these as forms of disabling violence, we examine how speculative fiction both challenges and offers new understandings of and responses to climate disasters.
The Team
The project is led by Dr Donna McCormack (Strathclyde University) and Dr Ingrid Young (University of Edinburgh) in collaboration with Dr Ingvil Hellstrand (University of Stavanger), Professor Lisa Käll (Stockholm University), and collaborators at London-based community organisation, The Love Tank, including Dr Kylo Thomas, Dr Benjamin Weil and Dr Will Nutland.
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PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Donna McCormack (they/them) is a Chancellor’s Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Humanities at the University of Strathclyde. They recently completed an AHRC Leadership Fellowship on Transplant Imaginaries. Their research interests include chronic illness and the critical medical humanities, queer and crip theories, biotechnologies (specifically organ transplantation), postcolonial and anticolonial theories, and contemporary science and speculative fiction. They are the coordinator of the Nordic Network Gender, Body, Health, as well as a founding member of the Monster Network. They also engage with film photography as part of their research and to record daily disabled and immunocompromised life. Donna is the principal investigator on the British Academy funded project Doing Disability Futures.
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CO-LEAD
Ingrid (she/her) is a medical sociologist who works with qualitative methods, including arts-based and participatory methods. She is particularly interested in how experiences of and inequalities across gender, sexualities, race, disability and technologies shape sexual health and wellbeing. Her research explores sexual and reproductive health and social justice, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), LGBTQ+ health, chronic illness and disability, and health activisms. Ingrid is co-lead on the project, and is running Case Study 1 with The Love Tank.
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RESEARCH ASSISTANT
Francesca (she/her) is a neuroqueer scholar who works with feminist new materialist philosophy. She is particularly interested in mad and neurodivergent ways of thinking, feeling, and knowing, and in speculative methods that use fiction, fabulation, and imagination. Her lived experience research focuses on neuroqueering the borderline, finding alternatives to stigmatising discourses on borderline personality disorder (BPD), and on advocating for madness and neurodivergence as ways of knowing. Francesca is the project research assistant.
→ More info here
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Ingvil Hellstrand is associate professor in gender studies at the University of Stavanger (UiS), Norway. She works with science fiction and speculative storytelling as ways of producing and negotiating knowledge and knowledge systems. Her research interests centre around questions of power, difference, collectivity and vulnerability in more-than-human worlds. Ingvil is part of the research team in Case Study 2.
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Lisa Käll is a professor of Gender Studies at the Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies (ERG) at Stockholm University. Her work concerns issues around the body and corporeality, lived subjectivity, intersubjectivity and otherness, and the concept of gender difference in relation to the sex/gender distinction. Lisa is part of the research team in Case Study 2.
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Will (he/him) is a health and social justice activist, researcher, and health promoter. He's an honorary assistant professor at LSHTM. He's the co-founder of PrEPster, and its parent non-profit company The Love Tank CIC. Will’s activism, research and health promotion focus includes the acceptability and implementation of HIV PrEP, global Mpox outbreaks, community activism, health inequalities, queer migrant health, harm reduction, and the long term impacts of COVID. The Love Tank is working on Case Study 1 on DDF.
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Ben (they/he) is the Head of Research and Community Knowledge Generation at The Love Tank, where they have overseen programmes of research on a number of topics, including community responses to MPOX, HIV PrEP equity, and drug and alcohol support for underserved queer communities. Ben is helping to support Case Study 1.
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Kylo (he/they) is a scholar activist and community organiser based at The Love Tank CIC, where his previous projects have focused on the needs and wellbeing of trans people. Kylo has a PhD from UCL, which addressed carceral logic and White supremacy in university spaces and how we might begin dismantling these frameworks. Kylo is also a rhyme writer and associate artist with Anthroɐlay Theatre, where he fuses his abolitionist politic with themes of radical trans care, anger, and joy. Kylo is Project Coordinator for Case Study 1.
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Lynne Zakhour is a multi-lingual visual designer and illustrator. Her work lies at the intersection between brand development, cultural production, and social impact. Striving to amplify voices across the visual medium—whether that be through multimedia campaigns, international traveling exhibitions, or graphic publications—, Lynne’s process anchors itself in the visual materialization of research, exploring the social, political, and cultural terrain that frames her work. Her illustration and independent commissions reflect her commitment for leveraging alternative actors in musical production and queer, non-normative discourses. Lynne is the Project Artist for Doing Disability Futures.
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Richard is a creative director and graphic designer. His practice is research-centered and sits at the intersection of arts, culture, and queerness. Richard is the co-founder of Queer Health and Prepster, and is the creative director of The Love Tank.
