For this week’s CMP conversation we will be in engaging in the work of three of the departments PhD students.

About the speakers

Carmel Cardona

“’I left that part blank because the future isn’t written yet.’ Creativity, Knowledge Production and Reclaiming the Self.”

In my PhD thesis, I explore how pleasure, embodiment and creativity contribute to the remaking of the self following a cancer diagnosis. This chapter focusses on creativity. Following the silencing, stigma and shame of a cancer diagnosis, my research methods provided participants with the opportunity to ‘think through their bodies’, eliciting a wider range of thoughts and feelings than traditional qualitative research methods. I reflect on the implications for knowledge production, power balances within medicalised contexts, and epistemic justice.

Rigobel Azanwi

“Justice Without the Word: Implicit Values and Equity-Driven Practices in Health Research Funding.”

This paper examines how health research funders understand justice and how their interpretations shape access outcomes associated with the research they support. Using a constructivist grounded theory methodology, the study conducts in depth interviews with nine decision-makers from six health research funding organizations across three countries. Interviews explored participants and their organizations’ perceptions of justice, its relevance to funding decisions, and its role in shaping organizational priorities. The data were iteratively coded to generate conceptual categories explaining how justice is understood and applied within funding processes. Findings reveal diverse and sometimes conflicting interpretations of justice: while some participants viewed it as peripheral to funding decisions, others regarded it as a core — though often implicit — organizational value. Participants also differed in whether justice was understood instrumentally, as a means to improve outcomes, or intrinsically, as a moral principle guiding responsible investment. These conceptual differences influenced how decision-makers understand their obligations to address inequities, including transnational disparities. Overall, the study demonstrates that funders’ interpretations of justice shape investment priorities and processes, underscoring the need to both clarify justice as a central consideration in funding deliberations and address the challenges funders face in operationalizing justice-oriented commitments.

Emediong Jumbo

“How do Black Disabled people with non-visible disabilities navigate being both hyper visible yet invisible within society?”

My doctoral research project explores the lived experiences of Black Disabled people with non-visible disabilities in the UK. My research questions engage with following: perceptions of belonging, how embodied belonging is imagined and experiences of anti-Black racism and ableism. Both anti-Black racism and ableism, directly and indirectly, shape people’s socio-political environments, identities and how people negotiate group membership and belonging internally, within and across different spaces. Exploring non-visible disabilities creates another layer of lens of examination. Exploring non-visible disabilities helps to interrogate and disrupt normative ideas on who counts as disabled and disability as needing a physical, visual signifier. Invisibility and visibility are nuanced concepts that are related to power, privilege and social stratification processes (McLeod, 2023). There can be no meaningful interrogation of invisibility without applying analysis of other social categories alongside disability, race and the social conditions which (re) produce invisibility (Hirschmann, 2014). Feminist theorist Sara Ahmed, in ‘phenomenology of whiteness’, provides a helpful examination on how some bodies are more noticeable than others, how bodies are orientated and mutually shaped through how they ‘take up’ space and what they ‘can do’ (Ahmed, 2007).