• Call for Contributions: Routledge Handbook of Global Indigenous Disability Knowledge Systems

Building on the success of Indigenous Disability Studies, this handbook aims to further expand global conversations on disability by centring Indigenous knowledge, awareness, cultural practices, and lived experience.

We seek chapter contributions that will advance the disability and Indigenous understandings of disabilities from a global representation but also how disability has been interpreted through various pivotal points in our past.

Your participation is vital to shaping a comprehensive and meaningful collection. To guide your contribution, the following ten thematic threads outline key areas through which your insights can strengthen and enrich this important work. As you consider your chapter focus, please select one or more of the themes below:

· Elders, Aunties, and Uncles can inspire change in disability wisdom or insight

· Indigenous theoretical frameworks and methodologies

· Ways of transferring knowledge

· Data Sovereignty

· Decolonizing – Postcolonial platforms

· Emerging Areas – new ways of transmitting knowledge – the next generation

· Reclaiming self: An Indigenous framework for spiritual well-being and the lived experience of disabilities

· Intersectionaly’s – How to view and understand self

· Barriers to employment for Indigenous peoples with disabilities

· The impact of culturally competent leadership on Indigenous employees with disabilities

Please contact the editors if you are interested in contributing a chapter to the book:

· john.ward1@sydney.edu.au

· john.gilroy@sydney.edu.au

· rodney.adams@sydney.edu.au

• Share Your Voice: Disability Leadership Video Collection

As part of the Disability Leadership Forum, we are building a growing video archive of reflections from the public about disability leadership. Hosted on the Vloggi platform, this archive brings together short, candid video contributions from people with disability, allies, students, professionals, and community members across Australia. 

Anyone can take part. Simply record or upload a brief reflection (30 seconds to 3 minutes) responding to one of our guiding questions, such as: 

What makes leadership by people with disability different?

What would change if it were genuinely valued?

What is one bold step that could help disability leadership thrive?

Your contribution will help spark discussion at the Forum and support a richer, more diverse national conversation about leadership, inclusion and social change. 
Visit our Vloggi page to share your voice or explore the growing collection:

Vloggi: Disability Leadership

• 'Being kind to people - the new challenge for the public service'

Professors Jennifer Smith-Merry, Damian Mellifont, Justin Scanlan, and Nicola Hancock's review of academic research on organisation kindness was recently explored in an article by The Conversation. The researchers review, published in June 2025, asks what are the barriers, enablers, and outcomes for clients and stakeholders in relation to compassion and kindness displayed by organisations. The Conversation article can be read here, and the full research article publication can be found here.

• $2M for Aboriginal-led disability workforce research

Professor John Gilroy will lead a team of Aboriginal researchers on a research project that aims to identify ways to make the disability services sector an attractive occupation for the recruitment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

• Sydney academics receive ARC Linkage grants

Associate Professor Sophie Lewis has received funding under the Australian Research Council's (ARC) prestigious Linkage Project grant to examine, from multiple perspectives, how young people and their families navigate the social, educational and financial aspects of growing up while living with a chronic condition.

• Short film encourages cervical cancer screening among those with disability

University of Sydney researchers debut short film made for - and by - people with disability to encourage cervical cancer screening.

• Disability services need to employ more people with lived experience

Research from the University of Sydney finds almost a quarter of Australian disability services do not employ any people with disability, and 20 percent employ less than three people with disability.