Intersecting Realities of Discrimination and Disability

We will have a panel discussion followed by a Q&A. Refreshments provided afterwards. The event will take place in Room S211 Paul Webley Wing - the room is accessible.

Panel:

Kym Oliver (City)

Anna Landre (UCL)

Duncan Mercieca (UCL)

Nicolette Busuttil (SOAS)

Kym is a Thinker, Public Speaker, Published Writer, Guest Lecturer, Multifaceted Creative, Producer, Consultant, PhD Researcher, Mentor and Professional Cackler with an international, diverse list of credits including Google, UNFPA, AJ+, University of Oxford and NASA. Kym is passionate about psychosocial approaches to understanding the cultural harmonies and dissonances within marginalised communities and holds a related Masters Degree. They are Co-Founder of The Triple Cripples - a platform dedicated to Disabled Women, and Gender Expansive people; and Our Living Archives - a charitable, intracommunal healing organisation. Kym is a Black Feminist Fund board member and strongly believes that funding grassroots Black feminist movements and Black Disabled feminist researchers can help pave the way toward truly loving Black Feminist Futures. On a deeper level, Kym is a serious lover of comics and anime (subs), who dreams of playing a Nollywood villain, and genuinely believes that dimples are a character trait.

Anna Landre (she/her) is a wheelchair-using activist & researcher whose work focuses on what she calls the disability law "implementation gap", which is when good laws on paper fail to translate into better outcomes for disabled people in practice. She pursues this work in a diverse array of fields including humanitarian response, social care policy, transport access, and more. Currently, Anna is pursuing a PhD at the Global Disability Innovation (GDI) Hub at UCL where she studies and maps disabled people’s organizations (DPOs) globally. Previously, she was twice elected to local government in Washington, DC as an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner and ranked as the 4th most influential disabled person in the UK on the Shaw Trust's Disability Power 100, winning the Politics & Law category. Anna's advocacy efforts have been featured

I am committed to listening to the voices of children with disabilities, as well as those of their families, carers, and educators. My work in special educational needs and disabilities challenges assumptions about disability and seeks to disrupt the barriers—material, social, and pedagogical—that restrict children’s participation. The values that guide my pedagogy also ground my research: a commitment to social justice, advocacy for those who are marginalised, and an awareness that educators’ identities shape their relationships with learners. My research brings philosophy and educational theory into conversation with empirical inquiry, drawing on post‑structural thought to rethink concepts of diversity, otherness, inclusion, and disability. Working within qualitative paradigms, I critically examine and deconstruct methodological processes, offering alternative ways of engaging with data that honour complexity. My teaching and research continually inform one another, using theory to question educational practices while foregrounding disabled children’s perspectives as central rather than peripheral.

Dr Nicolette Busuttil (she/her) is a Lecturer in Law at the College of Law (SOAS) where she lectures on and researches the rights of refugees and other migrants under international and EU law, with a focus on persons with disabilities. Nicolette specialises in the intersection between international and European Union (EU) human rights law for this cohort, focusing on the implications of the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities for migrants within the European Union. Her work examines the role of law in creating and perpetuating disability for non-citizens with her wider research interests including the impact of inter-state and regional cooperation on the effective implementation of rights in the migration and asylum sphere.

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