Disabled Young People as Researchers, Designers and Makers: Aligning Makerspaces, Co-production and Critical Disability Studies

Abstract This paper considers the research possibilities afforded by disabled young people as researchers, designers and makers. We centre an interdisciplinary research project that sought to bring together critical disability studies, co-production and makerspace methods when exploring disabled young people’s aspirations in developing new automated technologies. This emerges from makerspace workshops in collaboration with 9 student co-researchers at a send school in the UK. From these workshops, we learnt lessons about the possibilities of starting from assumptions of capacity with disabled young people, promoting the affirmative qualities of making, and the role of interdependencies when researching and making together. Our workshop encounters demonstrate examples of the significant theoretical and methodological possibilities that emerge when bringing together making as a collaborative research practice within critical disability studies. Our workshop examples illuminate the entanglement between makerspace methods, co-production and critical disability studies. These alignments of affirmative methods and theory make for not only an affirmative process of capacity, diversity and difference but a celebration of it. As such, this paper offers a novel contribution in centralising makerspaces within critical disability studies, and the value of disability as the driving force of inquiry within collaborative, creative and maker methods.