Disability Matters will transform health research and research environments through a paradigm shift to disability as the driving subject of inquiry. We will develop anti-ableist and anti-disablist approaches that promote inclusive research cultures, broaden health research priorities, innovate research methodologies, generate positive disability representations and cultivate a new generation of equitable health researchers across five countries. Health research still tends to adopt disability as a passive object of intellectual curiosity, empirically investigate disability as a chronic illness or understand disability in terms of impairment or pathology. Disability exists as an ‘absent presence’ - a present problem to be solved by research but absent as a research colleague or scholarly authority - and disabled health researchers are conspicuously absent. Health research often ignores the specificities of disabled people’s lives and the health inequalities that they endure as a consequence of disabling systemic factors. Poor, working class, female, LBGTQ+ and black disabled people are particularly at risk of being forgotten. Our programme of work will address these omissions and generate transformative equity, diversity and inclusion knowledge; thus supporting Wellcome’s strategy to lead the Science and Health sector in challenging ableism and disablism in the practices and cultures of health research.

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