Work in this area covers research on a wide spectrum of disabled people’s experiences, including physical and learning disability across the life course.
The Faculty is internationally recognised for its outstanding research with adults with learning disability. Within this theme, researchers are pursuing two key strands of research: the study of advocacy and self-advocacy, and the social history of learning disability. Our research on the history of learning disability includes archival study, biographical research, targeted local history case studies, and policy analysis. Recently completed projects include two studies funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund: Reclaiming the Past and Hidden Heritage. Investigation of advocacy and self-advocacy includes evaluative research into the effectiveness of advocacy in practice, comparative studies of advocacy and theoretical developments in advocacy.
Research and scholarship is successfully combined with participatory methodology and inclusive conferences. Resulting publications are themselves participatory, and include the voices of people with learning difficulties as well as historians and researchers. The ESRC seminar series Service User Agendas in Research: Emancipatory and Inclusive Paradigms, where skills were communicated between life course groups, acknowledged this methodological expertise.
This research theme includes the internationally-renowned Social History of Learning Difficulties Research Group, core membership of which is based at The Open University, but which includes people with learning difficulties and academics from other universities in the UK and in Europe, North America, Japan and Australia.
Other key strands include theory, policy and practice in disability; disability and end of life issues; disability and motherhood; and the experiences of disabled children in the UK and internationally.
The History of Day Centres; How my Life Has Changed; Developing a 'living archive' of life stories.
Dorothy Atkinson, Open University
Pauline Brand, Open University
Lindsay Brigham, Open University
Ian Buchanan, University of York
Rohhss Chapman, University of Manchester
Pamela Dale, Exeter University
Daniel Doherty
Monica Dowling
Sue Dumbleton, Open University
Helen Graham, Newcastle University (Visiting Research Fellow)
Robert Johnson
Sue Ledger, Open University
Sara MacKian, Open University
Duncan Mitchell, University of Manchester
Melanie Nind, University of Southampton
Liz Tilley, Open University
Sheena Rolph, Open University (Visiting Senior Research Fellow)
Louise Townson
Jan Walmsley, Visiting Professor, Open University
John Welshman, University of Lancaster
Majda Becirevic (Families with children with disabilities in Eastern Europe)
Lucy Hadfield (Disabled motherhood: Changing times?)
Lee Humber (Getting a job: an investigation of the impact of the disability equality duty on opportunities and challenges for younger disabled people)
Nigel Ingham (End of an era: An oral history of the closure of the Royal Albert Hospital, Lancaster)
Susan Ledger (Life history work with people with learning disabilities)