Disability, sex, and relationships in conversation

Last year, Disability History Month (DHM) UK had two themes: ‘Disability and Hidden Impairment’ and ‘Disability, Sex and Relationships’. During DHM we focused on the first of them with our event, ‘Empowering Neurodiversity’, which you can watch again here.  

Our second event on Monday 25th April focuses on the interconnectivity between disability, sexuality and relationships. 

Our Chair 

Dr Allán Laville. As Dean for Diversity and Inclusion, Dr Allán Laville plays a leading role in supporting a culture of diverse representation of staff at all levels of the institution – identifying opportunities for the University to benefit from diversity and inclusion initiatives across a broad spectrum of activities. He also oversees the management of all submissions for recognition and/or accreditation for a range of diversity and inclusion indicators (e.g. Athena SWAN, Race Equality Charter Mark, Stonewall Champion, Disability Confident Scheme). 

Our panellists

Dr Kirsty Liddiard is currently a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield and a theme co-leader in iHuman.  

She is the author of The Intimate Lives of Disabled People (2018, Routledge) and the co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Disabled Children’s Childhood Studies (2018, Palgrave) with Tillie Curran and Katherine Runswick-Cole. She is also co-editor of Being Human in Covid-19 (in press, Bristol University Press) with Warren Pearce, Paul Martin and Stevie de Saille.  

She tweets at @kirstyliddiard1. 

Dr. Shweta Ghosh is a National Award-winning documentary filmmaker, practice-based researcher and lecturer at the Department of Film, Theatre & Television, the University of Reading. 

Shweta is interested in onscreen representation and the politics of access to film production and creative processes. Her work explores interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches to understand filmmaking, identity and cultural practices in India and the Global South. Her latest film We Make Film (80 mins) is an outcome of her doctoral project (in film practice), which aims to understand and amplify the creative work of filmmakers with disabilities in contemporary urban India. 

Shweta has previously directed and edited three feature documentaries on a range of issues such as disability and sexuality (Accsex, 2013), culinary memory and identity (A Slice of Memory, 2015), and the politics of tea drinking in India (Steeped and Stirred, 2016), which have been screened at film festivals worldwide, telecast on Indian television and used extensively for research, training and advocacy. More on her work here: https://shwetaghosh.com/  

You might like to watch Accsex prior to the event, to enrich your understanding of the subject of the conversation.  

Professor Andrew Mangham is Professor of Victorian Literature and the Medical Humanities; his most recent book  entitled We Are All Monsters:,  considers the relationship between body difference and nature in literature and science. 

 “Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?” 

“In We Are All Monsters, Andrew Mangham offers a fresh interpretation of this question uttered by Frankenstein's creature in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel in an expansive exploration of how nineteenth-century literature and science recast the monster as vital to the workings of nature and key to unlocking the knowledge of all life-forms and processes.  

Even as gothic literature and freak shows exploited an abiding association between abnormal bodies and horror, amazement, or failure, the development of monsters in the ideas and writings of this period showed the world to be dynamic, varied, plentiful, transformative, and creative.” (The MIT press, 2022)