Disability Research Principles

This paper presents lessons learned from a project titled Advocates Assembly: Disability Research from the Ground Up. Hosted by Ontario Tech University’s Institute for Disability and Rehabilitation Research (IDRR), the series featured representatives from disability-led activist and rights advocacy groups and disability-focused healthcare and social services providers. Across the series, speakers collectively articulated a number of key principles that ground disability research in community. In this paper the authors organize and analyze themes from these events, to show how community-based research principles have the power to confront and transform institutionally entrenched forms of disability research. Those principles are as follows: researchers should seek out contextually specific knowledge, researchers should unsettle their role as experts, researchers should acknowledge and enact their accountability, and researchers should commit to sustainable and transformational change, which challenges the temporal parameters to projects.