Giving Volume to Voices

People working in engineering

At UEL, we understand that empathy is not the same as experience. Our researchers are championing new ways to support people with disabilities to speak out and up about things which are important to them.

How to Know About Me

Professor Andy Minnion and Gosia Kwiatkowska have developed a new, easy-to-use software called RIX Wiki which allows people with disabilities to create their own roadmap to tell carers, friends and families all about themselves.  

The tool uses lots of different types of media like videos, pictures and sound clips to help people tell whatever story they want to. The personal sites are safe, secure and are full of features to make them easy to use.  

The software is being rolled out to as many people as possible. It was even featured in New York’s Times Square.  

Read more
male hands on laptop

Include Duchenne

Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) is a genetic disorder which causes progressive weakness in the muscles. Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy is often described as a ‘life-limiting’ condition but Dr Janet Hoskin is working hard to broaden the horizons for affected children and their families.   

Through her work with charities such as Action Duchenne and Duchenne UK and research projects like ‘Include Duchenne’ and ‘Takin Charge’, Dr Hoskin supports and encourages young people living with Duchenne to set and achieve goals for their life and education.  

Read more about Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy Read more about Duchenne UK Read more about Janet
woman in wheelchair

Not Your Circus Dog Collective!

"We are sick of being your circus dogs. We are everywhere, & we can do more than you will ever even imagine, and we are Not F**ing Sorry!"

Liselle Terret  restages learning disability and neurodiversity in exciting new ways. Identifying as neurodivergent herself, Terret is forging pathways with and for learning disabled actors and creatives to access new stages and for audiences to rethink their own implicit discrimination. Terret has a very bold and tight rehearsal and production ethos that still challenges many current models, whereby she insists that there is a poetics of access and inclusion  at every point whereby the company operate as a non-hierarchical collective. Liselle's Performance-Practice is conducted collaboratively with learning disabled and neuro-divergent artists, co-constructing radical and political questions about continued exclusion and discriminatory assumptions around binaries of ‘ability/disability’.

Through Not F**kin' Sorry!, a sexy crip punk theatre production that premiered to a sell-out audience at Soho Theatre, Terret co-devised and directed Not Your Circus Dog Collective, using parody, verbatim, testimonial theatre that drew on experiences from the actors’ own lives.  Read more about the show. 

Terret, Xandri/Emma Selwyn, Adam Smith, Stephanie  Newman and DJ Housni Hassan (Not Your Circus Dog Collective) present and facilitate workshops internationally and publish work on their evolving model of inclusive and political performance-making. Click below to read more on their practice, to see some of their publishes articles and a snap shot into their productions.

Read more about the show
Liselle Terret on stage at the Not your circus dog collective performance