Dr Jess Mannion is a Lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences at Atlantic Technological University, Ireland. Drawing on her perspective as a disabled academic and Social Care Practitioner, her research focuses on co-produced disability research, creative methodologies, and inclusive knowledge production. Her work explores how participatory and creative approaches can make research more accessible, meaningful, and socially just while challenging traditional academic hierarchies and ways of producing knowledge. She has contributed to the development of innovative collaborative methodologies, including Creative Collaborative Data Analysis and Collaborative Sandboxing.
Jess is Co-Principal Investigator of Disabilities Without Borders, an international, interdisciplinary research collective between Atlantic Technological University and the University of Cincinnati, USA, that explores sexual citizenship, sexual health education, and inclusive research practice. Her work is grounded in collaboration, accessibility, and social justice, with a particular focus on creating opportunities for disabled people to shape, analyse, and lead research.
This keynote begins not with my voice, but with the voices of intellectually disabled and neurodivergent researchers whose experiences, insights, creativity, and leadership have shaped our collective research journey.
Drawing on lived experience and a body of co-produced disability research, I explore how, despite significant advances in inclusive and participatory research, disabled people continue to face barriers to shaping, analysing, and leading knowledge production. I argue that meaningful inclusion requires more than participation; it requires a redistribution of power and a reimagining of who is recognised as a legitimate knowledge producer.
Using examples from the International Disabilities Without Borders research, I reflect on the possibilities and challenges of co-produced action research. Together, we developed innovative methods for analysis, reflection, and collaboration, including Creative Collaborative Data Analysis and Collaborative Sandboxing. Alongside these methodological innovations, we developed accessible research meetings, inclusive approaches to ethics and informed consent, and practices designed to support meaningful participation, leadership, and decision-making by disabled researchers.
These innovations emerged from a simple yet persistent challenge: how can research be made meaningfully accessible to disabled researchers while ensuring its findings reach audiences beyond academia? Drawing on our work, I explore how creative approaches, including art, poetry, rap, drama, third objects, LEGO® (FUN) PLAY, and comic zines, can support reflection, analysis, dissemination, and collective action.
Rather than viewing creative methods solely as tools for engagement, we position them as collaborative practices that support knowledge production, challenge traditional academic hierarchies, and create space for alternative ways of knowing and communicating. These approaches invite us to think differently about expertise, evidence, and participation, while centring the voices and experiences of people whose knowledge has too often been overlooked.
Ultimately, this keynote explores how voice, power, and imagination can challenge silencing practices and transform how research is conducted, experienced, and understood. It asks what becomes possible when disabled people are recognised not merely as participants in research but as researchers, methodologists, knowledge producers, educators, and agents of change.
