Disability Now! Symposium and UKDHM Launch Event

This event, which launches Southampton UKDHM 2025 (20 November to 20 December), will centre the lived experiences of disabled people as vital to the cultural, intellectual, and structural life of the University and its broader partnerships. We seek to challenge and move beyond frameworks that pathologise disability or treat it as a deficit to be overcome. Instead, we aim to explore the multiple ways of being, relating, and contributing that disabled people bring to research, teaching, practice, and community life.

This year’s theme, Disability Now!, complements the overarching ethos of UK Disability History Month: Awareness and Celebration. While the national theme for 2025 invites reflection on the rights and experiences of disabled people, focusing on Disability Life and Death, our emphasis at this event and symposium is on research and knowledge exchange activities in the present, showcasing the important work currently being done now by members of our community. This focus highlights how disabled people across all ages are actively shaping education, services, and wider society today.

Disability is no longer something that can be confined to institutional margins. It is a central concern for how we organise society, structure our environments, design our services, and understand justice. It intersects with diverse disciplines, professions, and life experiences. It shapes, and is shaped by, how we approach accessibility, understood broadly to include digital, physical, sensory, communicative, and cultural access. It also demands that we attend to how ableism operates, structurally, culturally, and systemically, across education and other important services that should be inclusive of disabled people.

As a large and research-intensive institution, the University of Southampton plays a central role in the development and dissemination of knowledge. But we are also part of a wider community. Disability-related work does not begin or end within the university’s boundaries. The symposium will, therefore, warmly welcome presenters who collaborate with or are led by people and groups beyond the university, including those based in Southampton, Hampshire, and wider regional or international contexts.

To submit an abstract for the event before the 27th October, please go to our abstract submissions form

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