Dr. Caroline Jagoe

Summary

The research collaboration between Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and WFP seeks to develop an evidence base for the inclusion of persons with disabilities in food security programming. With expertise and experience across different disciplines, the partnership provides an opportunity to explore how WFP can ensure that food insecure people with disabilities are fully included in their programming.

Funding Agency

World Food Programme

Summary

Conversation is co-constructed and addressing barriers often involves helping communication partners (like family members or healthcare professionals) to use different communication strategies. These communication access strategies are the communicative equivalent of a ramp for wheelchair users to access a building, in that the access is achieved by addressing the barriers to inclusion, rather than aiming to `fix" the impairment. Despite their seeming simplicity, we don"t know how or why each of the communication access strategies works in conversation; we don"t know if the strategies work in the same ways for people with different communication needs; and we don"t know how the strategieswork across different languages. Addressing these challenges requires radical change in how pragmatic theory (the theory of how communicators use language and achieve meaning in context) is used to understand communication disabilities. This radical shift will pave the way for a unified theory of communication access and a programme of inclusive communication strategies that will work across different languages, for people with different communication needs, living in contexts with different levels of resources.

Funding Agency

IRC Laureate Starting Award

Programme

Laureate

Summary

Heartland Alliance International, in partnership with the Iraqi Alliance of Disability Organisations, is conducting a 3-site study in Iraq assessing perspectives of PwD and older people, family members, GBV service providers, and community leaders to better understand environmental and attitudinal barriers to inclusion in GBV care and identify strategies to increase access. My role is to support the inclusion of people with communication disabilities through developing accessible data collection tools and training of enumerators.

Funding Agency

ELRHA

Programme

Humanitarian Innovation Fund (HIF)

Summary

It is not known the extent to which research on Communication Partner Training in Aphasia has been published in languages other than English and the highly contextual nature of language and cultural factors make it important to document the full range of material. This project aims to systematically review research on Communication Partner Training published in some of the most widely spoken languages other than English - specifically Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian

Summary

This exploratory, patient-driven research project aims to explore and develop the speech & language therapy (SLT) intervention of message banking, whereby patients with progressive conditions record phrases that can later be used on Electronic Communication Devices. These messages, recorded in the patient's own voice, have an important role both in optimizing communication, but also in maintaining a 'sense of self' and the individual's identity as a communicator.

Funding Agency

Research Motor Neurone (www.mnd.ie)