Conference Agenda

Public debate on science and society involving citizens in scientific research, has led to an increasing collaboration with older adults in research projects. This shift has opened new possibilities for engaging older adults as co-researchers, meaning research conducted ‘with’ or ‘by’ older adults, rather than ‘to’, ‘about’ or ‘for’ them. Co-research provides both a methodological and experiential framework for collaboration with professional researchers. It also creates a space for older adults to reflect on their life course, experiences of aging, and roles as societal actors.

Our study explores how co-research shapes older adults’ perceptions of themselves as active agents. The research is based on an 18-month co-research project in which four older adults collaborated with professional researcher throughout all phases of the study—from planning to reporting. The data consist of a retrospective group interview, analysed using thematic analysis. The themes of the interview were informed by 15 hours of video material collected during ten workshop meetings held throughout the research process.

The findings illustrate how participation in co-research can become a turning point, prompting older adults to reinterpret events from their lived life. It activated anticipated changes in agency that were personally meaningful, not merely methodological. While previous studies have mostly emphasized the empowering aspects of co-research, our study reveals that it can paradoxically both enhance and restrict older adults’ perceptions and expectations of themselves as agentic actors. The analysis demonstrates how engaging in co-research can lead to reflections and decisions with significant impacts on everyday life, such as giving up bicycling or ending a long-term friendship. Becoming aware of one’s own life course through co-research may strengthen a sense of responsibility and safety, while simultaneously narrowing one’s social sphere and constraining future opportunities for participation.

In this paper we reflect on the depths of ableism that persist in UK social care research, theory and method. In this context, care is constructed in ways that exclude people with learning disabilities from being recognised as care-givers, positioning them almost exclusively as passive recipients of care in binarised caring relationships of carer and cared-for. We share how, as part of a larger co produced UK based project [NIHR135080 Tired of Spinning Plates] that explored the mental health experiences of family carers of adults with learning disabilities, we found our own research planning to be unwittingly reproducing ableist logics of care.

We always understood the importance of including people with learning disabilities in our research and did so in our public involvement group, however not in other phases of research. Only as the project progressed to co producing digital stories about care with family carers, did we realise the extent of our failure to include the stories of people with learning disabilities. We share our response to this failure as a process of relational learning; we revised our research protocol and ethics to include digital stories co produced with people with learning disabilities. Drawing on insights from the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Cultures study, we reflect on this mistake as a site of critical anti-ableist academia emerging through collaborative research.

We call for an attentiveness to the ableism and resulting social injustices that persist in dominant logics about care and the consequences of reproducing injustice through social care research that fails to pay attention to unwittingly reproducing complicity in marginalisations of people in challenging times.

A substantial literature indicates that autistic children and young people are much more likely than their non-autistic peers to have difficult childhood experiences, poor educational outcomes and increased levels of mental ill health. While a great deal is known about the particular difficulties autistic children face, how they experience and make sense of these challenges has historically received less attention. Much extant research has been conducted with ostensibly non-autistic parents, teachers and allied professionals. While offering valuable insights into stakeholder perceptions, prioritising informant accounts over autistic voices has arguably contributed to their marginalisation in research, making them a largely “muted group”.

In an effort to promote more equitable knowledge production and to address epistemic injustice, the present study adopted a participatory research approach. Seven autistic young people, aged 8 to 17 years and representing a wide range of support needs, were invited to take part in a project designed to explore what they most wanted others to understand about “being me.”

Each participant began by identifying their own priorities - what they wished others to know about them - and then worked one-to-one with a researcher to design their interview. Together, we developed a bespoke topic guide for each child, after which a professional film crew recorded the interviews. Themes constructed from the participants’ accounts included feeling misunderstood, the joy and challenges of sensory experiences, and what others can do to provide effective support during times of distress.

The resulting videos are now being used within the [redacted in case of anonymous review] as a key resource for work with families, professionals, and students, helping to centre autistic voices in education, training, and practice.

In times of uncertainty, when global crises expose our shared vulnerability, creating inclusive spaces of knowledge production becomes an urgent task. This paper tells the story of a collaborative project at the Tell Qana Archaeological Laboratory that invited adults with high-support-needs autism to take part in archaeological research. The project asked a simple but profound question: what happens when people who are usually excluded from academic spaces become active partners in the making of knowledge?

The participants—six autistic adults—joined the laboratory’s daily work of restoring pottery fragments, scanning artifacts in 3D, and organizing digital records. Their work was carefully structured and supported, but their contributions were genuine and recognized. In the act of repairing broken vessels, they not only advanced the research but also brought their own ways of seeing and attending to detail.

The project became a space of dialogue: between archaeologists and autistic participants, between scientific procedures and creative adaptations, between the fragility of human experience and the resilience that emerges through collaboration. It also revealed challenges—mentor turnover, the complexity of restoration, and challenges faced by neurotypical students in the laboratory in accepting those who are different.

This case study shows how archaeology can move beyond being a discipline that studies fragments of the past, and become a practice of mending connections in the present. It demonstrates how neurodiversity enriches research, how inclusive practices generate new forms of knowledge, and how citizen science can open pathways for more just and interconnected futures.