Carol Thomas' seminal work on the contested relations of and between the sociologies of health, illness, and disability has resulted in a plethora of critical insights into disabled people’s sense of socio-political identity. This includes a growing body of critically engaged scholarship that has demonstrated the significance of working across interdisciplinary frames and transnational geographies in addition to cripping research practices in studies of the everyday experiences of disabled people and community members who live with longstanding chronic illnesses and un/diagnosed health conditions. This research has to date enriched the disability sociological imagination, generating new insights and potential alliances that are necessary to build, mobilize, and sustain crosscutting communities of wellbeing.

This Research Topic aims to explore innovative methods in sociological research that distill shared and mutually constitutive practices of wellbeing for disabled people and community members that live across the continuum of disability - health identities. Research that seeks to connect the lived experiences of uniquely marginalized people with wider patterns of local and global inequity and relations of exclusion offers opportunities to advance goals of disability justice and improve accessibility in research, work, healthcare delivery, advocacy, and beyond. Centering disability in sociological methods has the potential to expose inequities and disrupt normative standards, systems and practices. By exploring the intersection of sociology, disability studies, and other schools of thought and activism, this Research Topic will provide new empirical and methodological insight into interdisciplinary scholarship and collaborative action. The Research Topic aims to contribute to decentering the Global North in health and disability research and advocacy by incorporating insight from the Global South. Scholars from the Global South and research focused on transnational connections are encouraged.

We invite empirical, analytic, or theoretical papers exploring emerging sociological methods and practices of engagement across diverse disability communities, noting how communities of care are often transnational. We encourage generous and generative understandings of disability and seek contributions from scholars and community-based researchers in sociology, disability studies, political science, science and technology studies, anthropology, Mad studies, Deaf studies, and other disciplines that are considering these connections. This Research Topic welcomes critical and situated contributions from all geographies, especially including disabled scholars, scholars in the Global South, and transnational collaborations, towards more equitable global knowledge production.

Submissions on various themes are encouraged, including:
• Interdisciplinary ruptures or points of convergence in methodologies related to disability, health and illness
• Cripping research methods and modes of analysis
• Innovations in research accessibility
• Reflections on a disability lens for sociological methods
• Diverse disability identities and practices of community engagement
• Technological advancements in research engagement and dissemination.

Karen Soldatic, Danielle Landry, and Temba Middelman are funded and supported by the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Health Equity and Community Wellbeing at Toronto Metropolitan University

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Frontiers in Sociology

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