Disabled people are more likely to be unemployed or underemployed (work in jobs below their qualifications). Moreover, disabled people are less likely to be in senior or managerial positions. I aim to understand the lived experience of disabled people at work and how they navigate their careers. I understand work broadly and include paid employment (casual, part-time, full-time) as well as running a business, working as a free-lancer or volunteering just as much as unpaid household work.

Project: ABLED – Calling among disabled entrepreneurs, clergy, police and healthcare workers

This project is funded by the Bundesministerium für Arbeit and Socials (BMAS; Federal German Ministry for Labour and Social Affairs). Our aim is to understand the experiences of calling in four distinct professions. Calling is a term taht describes work taht a person feels a profound desire to work in. We focus on disabled people working within the police, the healthcare sector as well as those working as clergy or running their own business. We use arts-based workshops and interviews to investigate how they navigate their calling while being disabled. We want to understand how they impact each other and lead to opportunities or challenges for the called disabled person.

Project: Disability, Work and the Covid-19 pandemic

Professor Oana Branzei (Ivey Business School, Canada) and I worked together on this British Academy funded project. We asked 24 participants in the UK to keep a diary for two years throughout the pandemic (late summer 2020-autumn 2022). W These diaries could take the form taht best suited the participant. We received written diaries, typed diaries, photos, drawings and even poems. This study has provided us with lots of amazing insights on how the various stages of pandemic measures impacted the experience of work of your participants.

The first paper from this project has been published in the Journal o Business Ethics. “Our disjunctive process model shows that, at the beginning of the pandemic, disabled workers performed either dramas of suffering or on dramas of thriving. However, as the global pandemic unfolded, disabled workers begun crafting composite dramas that deliberately juxtaposed thriving and suffering. This conjunctive process model stabilized meaning-making at work by acknowledging the duality of the disabled body, as both anomaly and asset. Our findings elaborate, and bridge, emerging theories of body work and recursive meaning-making to explain how disabled workers explicitly enroll their bodies to make meaning at work during periods of societal upheaval” (from the abstract). Find the full article here.

Project: Consortium to Research Individual, Interpersonal & Social Influences in Pain (CRiiSP)

In this research project, our research will focus on how people perceive pain, how others affect their pain and considers wider social and environmental influences on pain. This project is funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and Versus Arthritis and forms part of the Advance Pain Discovery Platform. 

I am part of Work Package 3 that looks at social factors of chronic pain including work and work package 7 that aims to find consensus around the most relevant psychosocial mechanism of chronic pain. This project is interdisciplinary. 

Disability & Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship can be an amazing career path for disabled people that allows them to use their skills and engage in work that has meaning to them. However, some disabled people are pushed into entrepreneurship as there is no other alternative for them.

In various smaller projects, I I investigate how and why disabled people engage in entrepreneurship. Here, one project looks at mental health social innovations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (with Health and Hope Inc and the Global Minds Collective). Another looks at people affected by leprosy in the Philippines and another at farmers in KaZulue Natal (North South Africa) and small business owners in Uganda.