How can art, performance and creativity deepen our understanding of disability - and create powerful ways to share lived experiences?

This thought-provoking panel and exhibit will share stories that explore the impact of ableism, to the possibilities of equitable futures. Discover how creativity and storytelling challenge stereotypes, amplify disabled voices, and open space for new conversations.

Illustration © Lynne Zakhour

To book to join online see : https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/events/the-age-of-self/

Exhibit

Doing Disability Futures

Doing Disability Futures is a British Academy–funded research project that uses art and storytelling to share lived experiences and imagine fairer futures.

Developed in partnership with the community organisation The Love Tank, the exhibition uses speculative and arts-based methods to share stories from disabled people of colour and migrants from marginalised LGBTQ+ communities in the UK. The work explores issues such as histories of colonial violence and ongoing injustices, while imagining alternative futures, disrupting dominant forms of knowledge, and challenging existing power hierarchies.

The exhibition also includes a collaboration with artist-in-residence Lynne Zakhour, who has created original illustrations that engage with the project’s case studies and the emerging themes of the research.

Speakers

Professor Tom Shakespeare FBA

Professor Tom Shakespeare FBA is a leading social scientist and bioethicist, and the Professor of Disability Research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He has more than three decades of experience in disability studies, with his research spanning social policy, ethics, sexuality and global development.

He previously worked with the World Health Organization, contributing to key reports including the World Report on Disability. He has authored or edited numerous influential books, such as Disability Rights and Wrongs and Disability - the Basics.

Tom has appeared on BBC Radio, spoken at the UN, and served on various councils including the Arts Council England and the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. In recognition of his work, he was awarded a CBE for services to disability research.

Dr Donna McCormack

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.

Dr Ingrid Young

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 British Academy-funded project Doing Disability Futures, and is running Case Study 1 with The Love Tank.

Christopher Samuel (Remote Speaker)

Christopher Samuel (he/him) (remote speaker) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in identity and disability politics. Often echoing the many facets of his own lived experience as a Black disabled man, his work tells stories, highlighting the often unseen experiences of his day to day life and those of others in similar circumstances. His practice includes small detailed ink drawings, film, print, audio, research, and large installations. Samuel works alongside galleries, museums, archives and other institutions to address missing representation in our cultural spaces.