Khawla Badwan, PhD
Khawla Badwan is Reader in Applied Linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has research expertise in a range of areas including the role of language in social justice struggles, intercultural communication, language education, sociolinguistics of globalisation, and education for ‘good living’.
Dr. Chris Bailey (he/they)
Dr. Chris Bailey (he/they) is an academic, philosopher and artist working at the intersection of neurodiversity and culture. His current multidisciplinary project, 'Escaping the Post-Affect Society', is an exploration of how living a collective grand narrative that has misrepresented the nature of the human mind has resulted a society that denies the internal world of the self. He is currently also writing under the name Samuel Siddell.
David Ben Shannon, PhD
David Ben Shannon is a Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield. He is a former primary and special education teacher, and school leader (SENCo). His work explores neurodiversity, sound, and literacy in special and early childhood education, as well as links between cutting edge social theory and education practice. His recent publications include the monograph Research Mobilities in Primary Literacy Education, as well as articles in Qualitative Studies in Education, Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, and Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.
Marguerite Haye
Marguerite is a neurodivergent qualified specialist teacher with broad teaching experience across various sectors. Marguerite holds fellow status with the Society for Education and Training. She has also successfully achieved multiple qualifications, which include an MA in Autism.
Marguerite is also a parent of an autistic adult and embeds a neuroaffirming approach in her work and assessments. Marguerite focuses on the intersection of Race and Disability, using cultural understanding to increase disability awareness among racialised groups. Knowledgeable in UK SEND legislation, she collaborates with several organisations championing racial and social justice, and is passionate about building meaningful relationships with parents, young people, and professionals alike.
Betty Yu, PhD
Betty Yu is a Professor in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences and a managing co-editor of the Journal of Critical Study of Communication and Disability. Her research and clinical interests are in how communication access among racially-minoritized, disabled children in multilingual communities are shaped by institutional practices/policies, family socialization, and dominant ideologies about race/language/disability. She has investigated the communication and socialization experiences of autistic children in Bay Area Chinese communities as they and their families interact with disability services, school systems, and healthcare. She employs different empirical methods including discourse analysis, conversation analysis, phenomenological interviewing, and ethnography. She is the co-director of Project ASCEND, a project funded by the U.S. Department of Education to prepare speech-language therapists to support communication access for autistic students who are non-speaking, limited speaking, or who prefer not to speak.
Vishnu Nair
Entangle Collective Founder
Vishnu grew up in Kerala and completed a Bachelors and Masters in Audiology and Speech Language Pathology from Mangalore University, India. He graduated with a PhD in Cognitive Science from Macquarie University, Australia and finished a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Communicative Sciences and Disorders from New York University, USA.
Vishnu uses his clinical and theoretical training in speech and language therapy and cognitive science to understand and critique how communication disorders are constructed using standard language and ableist ideologies. His current research and teaching centres critical, decolonial and global southern theories and combines perspectives from a number of fields such as crip linguistics, more than human research, neurodiversity and critical disability studies. At the heart of Vishnu’s philosophy and research is a commitment to epistemic justice and plurality that resists the hegemonic Global Northern notions of language and communication disability based on developmental psychology and cognitive frameworks. He is dedicated to building scholarship and research that seeks to unravel the complexity and beauty in children’s languaging, in particular, for those who are at the intersections of racialisation and disability.
Warda Farah
Entangle Collective Founder
Warda’s work sits at the intersection of Race, Language and Disability. Most importantly her approach is guided by her own experiences as a neurodivergent Black African Woman and subverts from the traditional medical model of Speech & Language Therapy by centring language as a multimodal emancipatory tool that resists standard language ideologies imposed on minorities. This lived experience infuses unparalleled depth and authenticity into her approach, resonating powerfully within the realms of academia and beyond. In her personal time she loves buying vinyl records, listening and dancing to Jazz fusion with her friends and attempting to read Tarot cards.
Abigail Hackett
Entangle Collective Founder
Originally trained as an archaeologist, she spent a decade working in the cultural sector focussed on community engagement, before studying for a PhD at the University of Sheffield. Her doctorate looked ethnographically at young children’s meaning making in museums and her post doctoral fellowship funded by the British Academy focused on home literacy practices in communities. This marked the beginning of an enduring interest in, the role of body, place and materials in how children communicate; and what we can learn about language and literacies by starting with the everyday in communities.
Abi’s work is located mostly in non-formal learning spaces, looking at the communication practices of children and families in communities, which she argues is emergent, provisional and political, deeply entangled with body and place. The context of young children’s lives today is characterised by precarity, increasing inequality and environmental uncertainty. Education has an important role to play in redefining human / planetary relations, informed by historical understandings of how the current situation emerged in a context of colonial expansion and exploitation. Abi’s research looks at how young children could be involved in these conversations, and what kinds of learning and care are relevant for young children’s thriving in a precarious environmental future.
New person
Entangle Collective Founder
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