Design research around access and interdependence. Treat disabled people as the experts on their own lives.
Key thinkers: Sins Invalid, Mia Mingus, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
The longer story
'Nothing about us without us.' Disability justice, developed by activists like the Sins Invalid collective, insists that disabled people lead research about disability. But it goes further: access isn't an afterthought or a accommodation—it's a design principle. If your methods exclude disabled participants, that's not their limitation; it's your failure. Universal design means thinking from the start about multiple ways of participating. This extends beyond studying disability itself. Any research design that assumes narrow ways of engaging excludes people unnecessarily. The challenge to ableism is a challenge to how we think about method.