I am writing up my PhD research on disability employment law. My supervisors are Dr Liz Oliver, Prof Beverley Clough, Dr Jana Javornik.

My research hopes to contribute to improving disabled people’s access to and experiences in work, by investigating how current law could better support workplace disability inclusion.

I have analysed 100+ appeal judgments and identified 3 ways of thinking evident in judicial decision making that limits the effectiveness of the Equality Act 2010 to address disability discrimination in work. I show how current law and legal principles could be applied differently to avoid such limitation, by rewriting one appeal judgment for each of the 3 restrictive ways of thinking identified, with commentary on the proposed alternative approach. The critical rewriting of judgments is a feminist legal research method. Click here to find out more about the original UK Feminist Judgments Project in 2010.

CW – academic geekery follows, skip if you’re not fascinated by multidisciplinary social research methodologies, critical jurisprudence, & social philosophy.

I adopted a constructivist grounded theory methodology to document-based theoretical research with case law as primary data (Charmaz, 2016). My research incorporates multi-disciplinary literature, situated analysis, and doctrinal analysis within a new legal materialist framework (Davies, 2017). Presenting the results of this research through critical judgment rewriting with commentary brings ‘unlimited law’ back to work (Fudge, 2013) in Tribunal decision making, demonstrates how the affective capacities of the disability provisions of Equality Act 2010 can be improved in practice.

The 3 disabling forms of thinking addressed are theorised as epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007). Outside my PhD, I am working on a model of affective hermeneutic injustice with Kerr and Scharp. In brief, the three modes of epistemic injustice I identified are:

(1) a medical-minimalist conception of disability, where judicial decision-making fails to adequately engage with relational aspects of experiences of disablement, detriment, or disadvantage;

(2) a transactional burden approach to reasonableness and proportionality defences, that credits employers for incompetence without acknowledging the cumulative disabling impact of incompetence on the disabled person;

(3) a distorted scale framework that obscures trigger points for positive duties on corporate employers behind management / HR individual culpability, and prejudices disabled claimants