Collaborative Projects

Making Bills Easier to Understand

Summary: In our project Making Bills Easier to Understand: Promoting Accessibility and Inclusivity, we worked alongside Our Vision Our Future to explore the (in)accessibility of household utility bills. As part of this, we wanted to make bills easier to understand for adults with learning disabilities. During the project we ran five collaborative workshops in which we used creative methods  to research the current problems with household bills. We then used this information to think about what Our Vision Our Future members would want their bills to look like. Through this partnership, we produced and ‘ideal’ bill, a simple guide and also a podcast:.

Ideal bill  - uses Easy Read, larger text, and more visuals to improve understanding. The Simple Guide – explains to utility providers the current problems adults with learning difficulties encounter with existing bills formats and shows them how to make their bills easier to read. Podcast – we explore our project from the perspective of our participants, talking about their roles as co-researchers and coming into the university. We also explore their hopes for the bill and guide we produced.

The project demonstrated that working directly with adults with lived experience leads to more practical solutions. Overall, this project and our outputs could encourage companies to make bills more accessible, helping adults with learning disabilities manage their finances with confidence. 

• Find out more about the 'Making Bills Easier to Understand' project 
• Final project presentation slides (as powerpoints)

Led by:

• Bev Enion, School of Education, University of Sheffield
• Turana Abdullayeva,  School of Education, University of Sheffield
• Leyla Jabbarzade, School of Education, University of Sheffield

Partnered with Our Vision Our Future

An invitation to listen

Summary: The study had three research questions: (1) How do The Professors do inclusive participatory research through arts practice? (2) What do these approaches to participatory arts-based research do, and what do they not do? (3) How can The Professors’ ways of working inform anti-ableist participatory research in and beyond the university? To answer these questions, Cassie carried out ethnographic research with The Professors. This involved hanging out in their meetings for an extended period, participating in, observing, and documenting their artistic methodologies. Cassie and The Professors explored the group’s history and made new artistic work, including five films.

• Find out more about the 'An invitation to listen' project
• Link to Blog on this project
• Films 

Led by:

• Dr Cassie Kill, School of Education, University of Sheffield

Partnered with The Professors (Sheffield)

Accessing Archives

Summary: This project was about making archives more accessible for disabled, deaf and neurodivergent historians. Archives are collections of records and documents, related to the past. They can be digital or physical. They can be big or small. They might be ‘official archives’ owned by the government, such as The National Archives or by local councils, or they might be owned by charities, institutions or private organisations. They may have very old materials, or they may be relatively recent. Most have textual records, but some might also have pictures, photographs, or more unusually examples of material culture. Archives are important because they hold information. If we want to know what the past was like we could use secondary sources, such as books about the past, but in order to research areas that have not already been written about we need to consult primary documents. This is particularly the case if we’re researching historical people, events or phenomena outside of living memory. There are lots of reasons why disabled people might find it hard to access archives. There may be physical barriers or sensory challenges, the unfamiliar environment might cause stress, and the material contained in the archives might lead to overwhelm. Through creating a network, disseminating a questionnaire, having online and in-person meetings and working with a Disabled People’s Organisation (BuDS), our project explored questions around archival access and created some resources both for prospective researchers and archives themselves.

• Find out more about the 'Accessing Archives' project
• Final Project presentation (as powerpoint slides)
• Script from the presentation
• Accessing Archives recommendations

Led by

• Dr Esme Cleall , School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities, University of Sheffield
• Dr Rachel Bright, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Keele University

 Partnered with Buckinghamshire Disability Service ( BuDS) 

Open Scholar

Summary: Activities and Outputs - The project began by convening a roundtable discussion between 12 blind and visually impaired academics and artists about how their work is done – the barriers and the workarounds – in academia and beyond. In the next stage, we developed our findings in a devising process with a team of visually impaired actors, which culminated in a performative sharing, provisionally titled Know How. This was shared at Battersea Arts Centre, in London, and we created a film of the performance, including post-show interviews with audience members and the creative team. During the devising process, visually impaired sound engineer Ian Rattray made audio recordings and conducted interviews. This has been made, by Ian, into a podcast, telling the story of the process and our in-the-room activities and insights.  Maria and Grace are also co-authoring a paper for the Theatre and Performance Research Association annual conference, which is being held this year at Queen Mary University of London. Grace will give a multimedia presentation as a member of the Performance, Identity and Community working group. 

Findings - Through Open Scholar, we have (re)discovered the desirability of both independence and interdependence in the context of disability and access – and argue, in fact, that these ways of being, researching, and practicing, are not so neatly opposed.  Our roundtable contributors described the value of their one-on-one and unassisted engagement with both people and research materials, encountering both without the mediation of access, while at the same time emphasising the collaborative relationships and research made possible by and peer-to-peer support.
We therefore take up the DeafBlind poet and essayist John Lee Clark’s advocacy for ‘direct experience’ (2021). We recognise the unhelpfulness of access work when it introduces bias and distance – when it intervenes both on the page and interpersonally – while also wanting to think together about how to make direct contact possible in performance and research.

• Find out more about the 'Open Scholar' project
• Final Project Presentation film on Vimeo

Led by

• Dr Grace Joseph, School of Education, University of Sheffield

Partnered with Extant, London