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Programme

Conference day programme
The conference fee includes refreshments and lunch. There is a quiet space set aside for those who need a break.

Conference schedule - printable pdf format

Panel speakers

  • Prof Chrissie Rogers (Bradford)

  • Dr Frances Ryan (The Guardian)

  • Prof Kathleen Richardson (DMU)

  • Kitt Bolton (DPAC)

Presentation abstracts

Session 1: Disability, Research and the City (pdf)

  • Bob Williams-Findlay MA, Co-founder Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC/ Being the Boss)

  • Dr. Alex Cockain (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)

  • Julian Harrison, Author of A Year in Melancholia

  • Dr. Armineh Soorenian, Independent researcher

Session 2: Disability and Inclusion (pdf)

  • Dr Meredith Wilkinson (DMU), Kathleen Nthakomwa-Cassidy (DMU) and Dr Annemieke van den Tol (DMU)

  • Kriss Fearon, (DMU)

  • Sam Sharman-Dunn, Independent artist

  • Kelly-Mae Savile (Aston University)

Workshop with SUCRAN

 

Meet members of the Service User and Carer Research Audit Network (SUCRAN) team to learn about their model of service user led research – the strengths, challenges and why it works. The workshop will also examine the vital role of Patient and Public Involvement in research.

Exhibition: Leicester as an emancipatory city

 

To complement the conference theme, Brightsparks (Arts in Mental Health), local artists and Leicestershire service users have created a perspective of Leicester as an Emancipatory City: using mixed media artwork to explore the challenges and benefits of city living, and ultimately to celebrate what the city offers.

More about the exhibition (pdf format)

Professor Chrissie Rogers
Panel speaker: Professor Chrissie Rogers

 

Chrissie Rogers joined the University of Bradford as a Professor of Sociology in September 2017. She graduated from the University of Essex (2005) with a PhD in Sociology (ESRC) and was awarded an ESRC post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge (2004/2005).

Her PhD was qualitative research with mothers and fathers who have children identified with ‘special educational needs’, which she published as Parenting and Inclusive Education in 2007. Chrissie has held academic posts at Aston, Anglia Ruskin, Brunel and Keele Universities.

Over the years Chrissie has written on mothering/parenting, intellectual/learning disability, ethics of care, intimacy, and education. Her latest book Intellectual Disability and Being Human: a care ethics model, develops a care ethics model of disability.

More recently Chrissie has carried out criminal justice research, funded by the Leverhulme Trust called Care-less Spaces: Prisoners with learning difficulties and their families (RF-2016-613\8). This involved carrying out life-story interviews with adults who have been through the criminal justice system (CJS) and have learning difficulties (LD) and/or social, emotional, mental health problems (SEMH), mothers of offenders and professionals who work with these groups of people.

Chrissie plans to publish her next monograph called ‘re-humanising the criminal justice system’ in 2019, as well as numerous articles.

Dr Frances Ryan
Panel speaker: Dr Frances Ryan

Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist and broadcaster. She appears on radio and television, from BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and The World Tonight, to BBC Sunday Politics and Sky News, as well as public speaking for campaign groups, universities and other political events.

 

She has a doctorate in political theory, with a focus on inequality in education. She will release her debut book on disability in Britain with Verso in 2019.

Professor Kathleen Richardson
Panel speaker: Professor Kathleen Richardson

Kathleen Richardson is Senior Research Fellow in Ethics of Robotics and part of the Europe-wide DREAM project (Development of Robot-Enhance Therapy for Children with AutisM). She is also affiliated with the ViR.AL interest group.

Kathleen completed her PhD at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Her fieldwork was an investigation of the making of robots in labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After her PhD Kathleen was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (BAPDF), a position she held at the University College London. Kathleen's postdoctoral work was an investigation into the therapeutic uses of robots for children with autism spectrum conditions.

In 2013, she was part of the Digital Bridges Project, an innovative AHRC funded technology and arts collaboration between Watford Palace Theatre and the University of Cambridge.

Kathleen’s first manuscript on robots is contracted with Routledge: An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines (Routledge 2015).

She has two books in press Sex Robots: The End of Love (Polity Press, 2018) and Challenging Sociality, Robots, Autism and Attachment (Palsgrave-Macmillan, 2018).
She is also the found of the Campaign Against Sex Robots - the campaign out of her work examining the problematic consequences of replacing human interpersonal relationships with machines. Kathleen is also an abolitionist-feminist.

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