Keynote Lecture: Dr Ailsa Grant Ferguson
Making space:
Reflections on chronic illness and disability in UK academic research cultures - where are we and where can we go?
10:30 - 11:30am - Cornwall Suite
​This keynote lecture will also be livestreamed to view online via Zoom - a link to register for the online stream will be circulated in due course.
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Before the lecture we will have a welcome address by Dr Danielle Sands, Techne Director.
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What are the unique barriers facing researchers with disabilities and debilitating chronic health conditions in UK research cultures? Or should we instead be asking, what is unique about UK research culture in the nature of the barriers it forms? How have these challenges developed and evolved? This talk will offer a series of reflections, from national data and practice to autoethographic recollections, to open up conversations on the specific challenges of our academic world for those who identify as disabled and/or chronically ill. How do these challenges interact with other barrier-forming conventions, expectations and environments? How, as Arts and Humanities academics, can our research speak to personal experience of EDI barriers such as these? Presenting the case for an intersectional understanding of disability, and a call for communities of action, this talk suggests starting points. It will encourage critical exploration of the unique complications of our sector - and the role we can all play in effecting positive change through across our shared Arts and Humanities fields.
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Dr Ailsa Grant Ferguson is Principal Lecturer in Literature at the University of Brighton, joining the University in 2014. Her research is interdisciplinary, as a literary historian and focusing across Shakespeare and early modern English literature and their afterlives in 20th and 21st century contexts, and memory studies (particularly commemoration and heritage presentation). Having completed her PhD in Shakespeare Studies at University of Bristol in 2009, Ailsa held a post at King’s College London before being named the National Theatre’s first Academic Associate. Her books include Shakespeare, Cinema, Counterculture (2016, Routledge), The Shakespeare Hut (2019, The Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury) and, with Kate Aughterson, a co-authored research-led textbook Shakespeare and Gender (2020, The Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury). Her most recent research has been as PI on a major AHRC-funded research project in collaboration with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, exploring Susanna Hall (eldest daughter of William Shakespeare) in cultural memory. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2022, in recognition of her contribution to historical research.
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