Connecting Marginalised Speakers Across Disabled and Multilingual Communities: Co-designing radically accessible creative research approaches for communication justice

Dysfluency studies is an emerging subfield within disability studies that pushes back against “compulsory fluency” (St Pierre, 287) that normalises ‘negative listening’ as a response to a range of diverse voices. We term this as ‘dyslistening’ – listening habits that are “biased, selective, insulated, disruptive, narcissistic, defensive [and] pseudo (pretending to listen)” (McLeod, 17). Joshua St. Pierre argues that ableism ‘organises the perceptual world for the uninterrupted pleasure of the able-bodied’ (287). Anglo-hegemony does the same for the native English speaker creating the expectation for a seamless monolingual environment. Monolingual ideals mask both the priority given to English and what disabled sound artist Gemma Nash (DATE) calls “the vocal supremacy of non-disabled voices”. Multilingualism is aligned with dysfluency pride, in that both seek to deconstruct the illusion of and expose the power dynamics within a monolingual environment.

Over 3 co-design workshops (2024), we have established a diverse leadership circle to co-develop a programme of creative research that includes community workshops and an arts-based participatory festival of dysfluency (spring 2026), with the aim of creating cohesion across multilingual and disabled communities, and developing approaches to challenge ‘dyslistening’. Bringing together performers, theatre makers, poets, comedians, and designers, who represent intersectional communities (migrant, refugee, neurodiverse, stammering, communication device users, dysarthria, deaf/BSL) we explored how the term dysfluency resonates and ways to create dysfluent, radically accessible experiences for audiences/participants. Thus, this research introduces a new framework informed by lived experience for achieving communication justice for marginalised communicators across linguistically diverse and disabled communities.