Transforming Disabled Girlhoods: Addressing Educational Inequalities Through Creative and Inclusive Practice, Policy, and Research

This fellowship builds upon my award-winning doctoral research, which focused on understanding the unique challenges and opportunities faced by disabled girls and young women. Through presentations, training, knowledge exchange, and publications, this fellowship deepens, co-designs, and shares knowledge about the educational experiences and inequalities faced by disabled girls and young women in local (Scotland) and international settings, and exchanges this learning with a wide range of audiences, including academics, practitioners, policy makers, participants, and the public.

In doing so, this fellowship contributes to policy change, empowering marginalised communities, and advancing inclusive and creative research practices, focussing on the lives of disabled girls and young women. Supported by my research and activism in disability and community development, the fellowship will support me to develop the educational dimensions of the work, furthering my commitment to addressing social problems and solutions from different perspectives.

This will be supported through collaboration with my mentor, Professor Barbara Read, and through my appointment within the School of Education at the University of Glasgow. Prof. Read is a world-leading scholar in the field of gender and education, whose leadership of the ESRC funded international project Gendered Journeys and Editorship of the British Educational Research Journal has led to significant impacts in understanding and addressing educational inequalities. 'Tackling Educational Inequalities' is a key research priority within the School of Education.

With educational exclusion emerging as a priority area for change in my doctoral research, this arrangement presents the ideal environment to support the development of my research.

My thesis demonstrated that the barriers disabled girls and young women encountered in formal education often resulted in their 'slow exclusion', a term I forwarded to conceptualise the accumulation of barriers over time, resulting not only in their exclusion from formal education, but their willingness to engage in informal and future learning environments. My doctoral research indicated the importance of early intervention, prior to post-secondary school transitions, to provide disabled girls and young women with the support they need earlier in their educational journeys.

This will be a core focus of the fellowship, specifically through co-design activities with policy makers, practitioners, and activists. Publications, presentations, and the development of training materials will further catalyse this reach of this learning, as well as connecting the work with other scholars working at the intersections of disability, gender, and education.

In addition, the further development of these findings and methods are timely given the ongoing development of policy and legislation relating to disability, youth, and gender in Scotland, and plans to incorporate UN Conventions into domestic law including the Convention on of the Rights of the Child, which has provisions for disabled children and young people (Article 23); the Convention on the Rights of Disabled Persons, with provisions for disabled children (Article 7); and a new Learning Disabilities, Autism, and Neurodivergence (LDAN) Bill. These developments are taking place against a backdrop of stigma and social injustice for disabled and neurodivergent girls including the perspective that ADHD and autism diagnoses are 'trends'.

This fellowship will provide vital examples of robust research and best practice for disabled girls' inclusion and participation in educational spaces, critical to influencing and informing policy building in this space. In doing so it will also contribute to international efforts to achieve gender equality and empower women (Sustainable Development Goal 5).