Nikita Hayden, Barod and Sunderland People First presented at the 2025 Seattle Club Conference in December 2025. This is an example of a collaborative conference presentation.

We are delighted to be able to share this wonderful write up of our event from Love Sheffield's host and founder Brian Mosley

Wed 3 Dec 2025 12:00 PM - 4:00 PM

'To mark the International Day of Disabled Persons, you’re invited to a creative event exploring how we can make systems more caring and human. This event is for community members, practitioners, local authority staff, and people working in health, education, and social care services – anyone who wants to be part of making things better. Whether we call it "the system" or "the services" — it’s the web of relationships, rules, and routines that shape people’s everyday lives. Together, we’ll explore how to bring more compassion, care, and connection back into that web. We’ll hear from Sheffield Voices and Speakup Self-advocacy Rotherham — groups led by people with learning disabilities, including those who are neurodivergent. Their work will help us reflect on what humanising really means and what it might look like in practice.  During the event Sheffield Voices and Speakup will launch the Reclaiming the Human in Healthcare Manifesto'
 

Location:  Millennium Gallery, Arundel Street, Sheffield, S1 2PP
Link to tickets - click here 

Brian Mosley - founder and host of Love Sheffield - and a speaker at our Humanising the System event has produced this idiographic to capture the main themes of the day. We think it is beautiful.

We are sharing some of our data from the project but with a big caveat. Nikita Hayden, Bojana Daw Srdanovic and Dan Goodley have written a document entitled 'Thinking of using this dataset? Read the team’s approach to Open Data that involves people with learning disabilities'.

This explains how we have approached Open Data with a firm commitment to the lives and aspirations of people with learning disabilities. This document is a compulsory read for anyone who wants to use our data which. This document and the data can be found here deposited here

The university and advocacy-based members of the Humanising Healthcare team met in July to start co-producing our Manifesto. We are going to be working with our clinical researchers to refine this work - and we will be publicising 

Humanising Healthcare: Disability Matters, University of Toronto

Rebecca Lawthom and Dan Goodley represented the Humanising Healthcare team to share thoughts around promoting inclusive forms of leadership and project management. More details of the event can be found here and you can find a link to all of the presentations of the Humanising Healthcare team here

This week (Wednesday 12th March 2025) we have given a keynote address for Bild’s ‘Growing Older with Learning Disabilities’ event. Bild has a human rights based approach and seeks to ‘help those supporting people with learning disabilities’. The audience was mostly made up of healthcare professionals. Dr Nikita Hayden and Dr Bojana Daw Srdanović gave a keynote talk. We began this talk by introducing the Humanising healthcare project. We then introduced an initial two themes we have identified in the study’s fieldwork: (1) the use of touch in healthcare (sensorial) and (2) healthcare workers as allies (political). During the Q&A, the audience asked questions about encouraging clinicians reflection around the use of touch and how clinicians can become better allies. 

Dr Nikita Hayden gave a keynote talk to University of Exeter medical students on Monday 3rd March 2025. The talk focused on the Humanising Healthcare project, including health inequalities, co-production, creative and inclusive research methods, posthumanism, and some ideas from the research around touch and allyship. 

During the discussion, medical students considered what Humanising Healthcare meant to them. Students talked about humanising clinicians taking the time to listen to the patient, not dismissing patients’ concerns, and avoiding jargon. One student spoke about how they particularly admired the more humanising ways that the nurses that they had worked with provided care. What was striking was the parallels between what the students saw as humanising practice, and what the researchers from self-advocacy organisations on the project conceptualised as humanising healthcare. 

Students talked about inequalities, their own privilege, judgements about groups of patients, and hierarchies within healthcare. Students spoke about balancing the need of having some element of hierarchy in medicine, but also spoke of a desire to disrupt patriarchal elements of medicine, and value knowledge and expertise from all sources. For example, one student suggested that porters and cleaners can have clearer views of in-patients over time than doctors who spend relatively less time with individual patients.

Several students also noted some pragmatic issues with getting individual clinicians to change their practice within a culture of an already overstretched NHS. This is an important question for us as a research team, as we consider the ways of thinking about Humanising Healthcare that moves beyond simply a ‘gift of the practitioner’. 

On the 5th of March Bojana traveled to Oxford to talk about Humanising Healthcare at the event ‘Empathy in Clinical Psychiatry’. The slides for Bojana's presentation can be found on the leftside of this news

The speakers included clinicians, theorists and researchers who are focussing on empathy. Bojana thought the event was very interesting – she learnt that there are many definitions of empathy, and that empathy is not necessarily a positive emotion. Rather, as Dr Sarah Songhorian suggested, empathy is neutral: it simply describes the ability to understand (perhaps even feel) someone else's feelings. Whether the ability to empathise propels us to act in ethically sound ways, is another matter altogether.

Several of the speakers also mentioned that one of the issues is that people tend to find it easier to empathise with others who are close, or at least similar to them. That issue – sometimes referred to as parochialism – connects to Bojana’s talk where she focussed on the possible tensions between dehumanisation and empathy. In other words, Bojana suggested that empathy can be problematic in the context of learning disability: people with learning disabilities need empathy in healthcare because they are so often devalued and dehumanised; yet, they may find themselves outside of ‘empathy’s reach’ precisely because they are dehumanised. We notice in the interviews we conducted that dehumanisation is  an issue, because interview participants, including people with learning disabilities and their close others, often feel the need to remind others that people with learning disabilities are human.

Drawing on the coproduction work we do at Humanising Healthcare, Bojana argued that while empathy in healthcare is important, collective social and political action are key to improving the situation of people with learning disabilities. She highlighted that self-advocacy politicises people with learning disabilities. This, in turn, leads to higher expectations of healthcare and activist action towards better healthcare. Lastly, self-advocacy can improve the health and wellbeing of people with learning disabilities, because it creates communities where people look out for and support each other, and develop new forms of care which, in turn, can inform care practices in healthcare.

Members of the Humanising Healthcare team have teamed up with Aarhus University to deliver an Engaging with Critical Disability Studies: New Perspectives and Established Dilemmas, 14 - 15 November 2024.

The Humanising Healthcare team met together in Manchester to analyse together our emerging data from our ethnographic and interview data. This two day Analysis Workshop provided us with opportunities to:

• develop accessible methods and means for analysing data

• build our research dictionary which defines in readable ways complex research concepts

• reflect on the role of researchers with learning disabilities and the relationship with experts-by-experience

Our team presented at the University of Leeds Disability Conference. We held a 1.5 hour symposium which reflected on the research methods and emerging findings of the work - and soft launched a new film co-produced with Sunderland People First. Check out this space for its launch this autumn!

Dan Goodley's third edition of Disability Studies: An interdisciplinary introduction comes out this month, with a link to inspection and early copies available here:

https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/author/dan-goodley

This book centres Humanising Healthcare as an example of disability studies research to consider questions of theory, method, politics and activism.

New academic publication out now!

Bottomley, M. et al. (2024) ‘Co‐producing ethics guidelines together with people with learning disabilities’.

is out now OPEN ACCESS

Nikita Hayden gave a workshop entitled: Humanising Healthcare: Theories of subjectivity to theories of connectedness and care at the National Student Psychiatry Conference. This year's conference was hosted at the University of Sheffield on 13th-14th January 2024. 

The slides for the talk are available here. 

Reflections on the workshop by medical students Elizabeth Mullins and Mameh Bockarie can be read here. 

Our Podcast had some great listeners this year! 

https://open.spotify.com/show/0yPtykYOY5BqRk9wXwHqlq?si=3ceb0df16fec4fa9

Please check out this link

Some thoughts on the non-disabled folk getting their act together in relation to supporting the politics of disability.

The importance of the International Day of Disabled Persons, which took place on Sunday. Interview with Dan Goodley

Voice of Islam - (item starts: 31:14)

Bojana and Nikita presented at the Radiant Event on November 24th. This brought together practioners and researchers and an opportunity to discuss the project. A link to the introductory slides can be found on below

Dan, Nikita and Bojana's paper was presented by Dan at a keynote at the 

Faculty of Psychiatry of Intellectual Disability Annual Conference 

Date: Wednesday 1st – Thursday 2nd November 2023 

Venue: Leeds Hilton Conference Centre 

New paper out! Disability and the Posthumanities - with particular reference to Humanising Healthcare

https://journals.library.brocku.ca/index.php/posthumanismstudies/issue/view/237 

Dan Goodley was invited to present as part of a panel on Inclusive Leadership at the EDIS2023 event at the Francis Crick institute in London. Dan joined Hamied Haroon, the Chair of National Association of Disabled Staff Networks, to lobby for the centralisation of disabled people in the conceptualisation and management of research. Dan spoke about the leadership offered by Barod, Speakup, Sheffield Voices and Sunderland People First to the Humanising Healthcare project. More details of the EDIS2023 event can be found here:

https://edisgroup.org/edis-symposium-2023-delegate-booklet/

Dan Goodley represented the Humanising Healthcare team this week, delivering a keynote paper entitled People with learning disabilities as public intellectuals. Invited keynote address, Goodley, D. (2023). People with learning disabilities as public intellectuals.Sociology of Health and Medicine in the Public Arena: During the Covid-19 Pandemic and Beyond, Research Network of Sociology of Health and Medicine, Prague, May 2023. As a team we are committed to a number of outputs - including plain English, Easyread and academic paper - and this paper was written for academics and practitioners. A version of this paper will be published in the journal Subjectivity in 2023.

Bojana Daw Srdanovic presented at the event ‘Don’t leave us behind’. The event was organised by our partner’s CIDER from Cornwall. It was about getting ideas on how people with learning disabilities can become involved in research. It asked the question of how to make research accessible. 

Bojana’s presentation was about how caring for each other can help us make research accessible. When people care about and for each other, they can be honest. They feel safe and get creative. When we care for each other we become serious about meeting each other’s access needs.  

Bojana also presented the Good Practice Guidelines we developed for Humanising Healthcare. It was great to get some feedback on it - one attendee said that the guidelines are clear and should be used for all inclusive research projects.

Dan Goodley and Rebecca Lawthom presenting at the Nordic Network of Disability Research Conference in Iceland, 9th to the 12th May as part of the Critical Disability Studies iHuman/ School of Education community. Our paper showcased some of the aims and ambitions of the Humanising Healthcare team and connected with researchers from Nordic countries.

Earlier this week (26th April 2023) I  joined an end of project event for the Reimagining Trustworthy Autonomous Systems project, led by Lauren White and Dan Goodley. The project involved working with young disabled co-researchers at Greenacre School to explore how to co-design and co-produce new technology that works for disabled young people. An important focus of this work was thinking about what it means to be trustworthy? This thread of trustworthiness ran throughout the event. We talked about how we need to build trust to get schools and disabled young people on board with a project like this, and we heard discussions about what it would take for the co-researchers at Greenacre School to trust new technologies such as self-driving cars. These topics of technology and trustworthiness pose essential questions for the Humanising Healthcare project. For example, what does it take for a healthcare service or a healthcare worker to inspire trust in people with learning disabilities? What is the link between trustworthiness and delivering humanising healthcare? What can healthcare providers do to rebuild trust with patients with learning disabilities once trust is lost? 

The technological aspects of the Reimagining Trustworthy Autonomous Systems project also offer new opportunities and challenges to providing humanising healthcare. Recently, I’ve been reading and thinking about “rehumanising” healthcare. For some, digital health technologies are the reason why we need to think about rehumanising our healthcare services — as there is a risk that new technologies remove the more human(e) aspects of healthcare. Others see technology as a tool for rehumanising healthcare — by improving access to services, creating more user-friendly services, and freeing up clinicians’ time so that they can do the interpersonal, human stuff that computers can’t do that well (yet!?). An important part of our work then on the Humanising Healthcare project, will be finding out what people with learning disabilities think about technology’s role in humanising healthcare.  

We are delighted to be joined by two new members of our team: our Research Associates Nikita Hayden and Bojana Daw Srdanovic. Click on 'Meet the Team' to find out more.

Members of the Humanising Healthcare have been awarded a large grant from Wellcome Trust entitled Disability Matters. Finding from the Humanising Healthcare project will feed directly into this six year programme of work that starts in September 2023. For more information click here

We held the first Co-production Workshop on 20th January. In this first meeting we discussed our plans for our research methods and ideas we have for understanding theory (ideas and concepts that can might help us to explain humanising healthcare'. The workshop brought together our Advocacy-based organisation researchers (Barod, Sheffield Voices, Sunderland People First and Speakup Self-advocacy) and our social science and clinical researchers to discuss the management and leadership of the project. We discussed plans for accessing the research sites and also put in place Mentoring Arrangements for our researchers: so that advocacy-based organisations help support the development of researchers.

Episode 1 of our new Podcast Series ‘The Art of Medicine: Love of Humanity’ is released today (18th November 2022). In this first episode we talk to Simon Cramp. Simon has been a leading force in many campaigns to ensure that people with disabilities are treated as full human beings - with rights and the full capacity to play a meaningful part in all aspects of community life. 

As a person with learning disabilities himself he has first hand experience of the healthcare system and  has written about his campaigning life in his book - the brilliantly titled 'Don't Cramp My Style' (2017, available on Amazon). 

We ask Simon to consider the idea of Humanising Healthcare which, he reminds us, has to be considered in relation to the values that society attaches to people with learning disabilities. You can listen https://open.spotify.com/show/0yPtykYOY5BqRk9wXwHqlq?si=3ceb0df16fec4fa9 

Members of the Humanising Healthcare team presented our Guidelines to Co-producing research ethics as part of the Open Research Conversation on Co-production, University of Sheffield, 12 October 2022. A recording of this presentation is now available to view in the University of Sheffield repository, ORDA 

We are advertising for a new Research Associate to join our team based in Sheffield. The post lasts for 2.5 years and begins in March 2023. More details can be found here. Also, please contact Dan Goodley if you need any more information 

Below is a word version of the original Case for Support that was part of the successful application to the Economic and Social Research Council