Reflecting upon a Busy 2024 and Towards the Final PhD Stretch of 2025
Reflecting upon the past year and my positioning now going into 2025. I feel thankful and surprised for how far I have come but grounded by how much more work is left to be done towards an inclusive U.K voluntary sector for disabled people.
My PhD explores the experiences of disabled volunteers in the U.K. although most of the participants in my dataset are geographically located in Wales. The barriers that exist in society for disabled people are what prolongs them from accessing volunteering, education, housing, employment, health and social care and other services they require. Primarily research into volunteers usually sees disabled people as the receivers of help and often do not take into consideration disabled people themselves as an untapped and valuable resource often under-utilised and not given access to volunteer.
2024 was a busy year for my PhD. The intensity of data analysis, drafting my methodology chapter and beginning to piece together the puzzles of my finding’s chapters. The writing phase isn’t a simple one. Some participants experiences overlapped in almost echoed choruses of one another, others diverged subtly or completely contrasted across health conditions. These differences highlight the problematic nature of viewing disabled people homogenously. There were times of frustration, days of writer’s block but also sunnier days of flow. Redrafting…redrafting and more redrafting and times where the dots were just not joining up, and sunnier days where things just click!
Although I truly believe my research findings will highlight ways to navigate these issues for the voluntary sector specifically. The problem is multifaceted, with a sector that is under financed, competing for funding and often working beyond their capacities to provide services for people where the public sector is failing to keep up with demand. There is no easy fix and work towards an inclusive society in the U.K including Wales with accessible and equitable opportunities to work, whether paid or voluntary work will continue to be on ongoing feat. I often feel privileged as someone who identifies as a disabled person to begin to unpack these issues with my own work and help towards changing them.
Research in this area is limited, we do have some statistical evidence to work on, but for Wales is missing, incomplete or has not been conducted. Qualitative work is even less commissioned in Wales, even as far as almost non-existent making measurements and working towards improvements difficult to conduct when the initial numbers aren’t known.
Knowing so many people need change in society, gives me such a fire in my belly and passion but also often keeps me up at night, with so many people it feels relying on me to convey my work over in chapters…accurately. It feels like a heavy weight on your shoulders on times, but also a push to get through these last hurdles, to finally finish off the discussion, tie up all the chapters into a neat bow and away we go to attempt to bring solutions.
I have been testing the academic waters at conferences with my work for the past two years. Throughout 2024, I took part in Leeds Disability Studies, Swansea University PGR and BAM conferences.
In 2025, I am on a mission to begin making a ripple of change that I hope in time will become a wave. I plan to knuckle down in my writing and get through the nitty gritty of the thesis write up. I have a passion for the volunteer sector, raising awareness of the myriads of activities it encompasses. Volunteering is not just the traditional helping in a charity shop. Some volunteering roles are dangerous, intensive, and can include and leadership roles that are often overlooked when we think about what volunteers do. This is even more inaccurately perceived when we think about disabled volunteers and the work that they are conducting.
The most exciting update for 2024 has been where my work has led to, I have now been in a new role as research and policy officer for Disability Wales for three month. A job I could only have dreamt of having this time last year. As part of the role, I went along to the International Day of Disabled People event at the Senedd, where I drafted a briefing. It was a complete pinch me moment being sat in the Senedd gallery and hearing words that I had written being read out.
Although I am excited for my own career path and where my PhD has this far taken me, and where I am yet to go, what I do take very seriously is the positionality of privilege to use my voice, and the need that disabled people have for me to help make their voices heard and make changes for them.
There is a stigma in society, deeply engrained, regarding both volunteering and disability, we can do things that people don’t believe we can, and we are often not given the opportunities to be seen in different parts of society. Within Wales, this is even more profound, than in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland where universities all have a department specifically for disabled studies. In Wales, although my research may be within the minority, I am so excited to start unpacking this large data void with rich experiences that are valuable and hold some of the answers we need to make actionable changes towards an inclusive voluntary sector in the U.K
