Fin Tams-Gray and Graham Pullin
Fin Tams-Gray and Graham Pullin from Dundee attended Communication Matters Conference 2024, held at the University of Leeds from 8 to 10 September, which welcomed over 400 attendees this year. Communication Matters is an AAC conference featuring international experts and professionals in the AAC community, as well as AAC users.
They took part in a discussion panel titled ‘Starting a conversation about identity, specialty, individuality and AAC’ which was led and proposed by project collaborator and co-researcher, Jamie Preece, and his partner, Emma Sullivan. The other panellists were Dr. Darryl Selwood, who joined remotely from Australia via video call, Jonathan Toogood who is a writer and researcher from the University of Sheffield and is part of the VoiceUp group in Barnsley, Patrick Bates – all of whom also use AAC – and Fin Tams-Gray. Graham Pullin facilitated the session.
The Abstract for the workshop began:
“We want to start a conversation that is currently not happening enough, if at all. A conversation about the identity, sexuality and individuality of people who use AAC and about how AAC could do more to support this aspect of their lives.
This is a conversation that needs to happen in many different ways, at many different levels at once. People need AAC to give them the freedom to create and explore their sexuality. They need to be able to build, maintain, navigate and nurture relationships, whether platonic, romantic or sexual. And they also need to be able to discuss their sexual identity with others.
At the same time there needs to be increased awareness and acceptance of the sexuality of people who use AAC: among carers, professionals and AAC developers and manufacturers.
And beyond all this, people who use AAC should be directly involved in debate and policy making relating to the ethics of sexual freedom and agency…”
The panellists were asked to respond to three questions and the audience invited to contribute to the conversation:
Q1. In what ways is the identity of AAC users denied, and their freedom to explore their sexuality?
Q2. How do you establish your sexuality with your support network and if there are any barriers, what are they?
Q3. How might you be better supported in editing your AAC vocabulary to reflect your individuality?
The workshop was really well received by attendees; the audience participation was very engaging and prompted many conversations, such as how institutions (e.g. schools) influence young AAC users’ vocabulary by censoring them and how access to – or lack of – language about one’s body impacts an AAC user’s sense of independence and the implication that has on safeguarding.
There was a shared feeling that the session seemed too short to approach such rich and nuanced topics, and that many of the attendees of the workshop would value this conversation being continued in the future with more time and opportunity to discuss. Jamie intends to run a follow-up session at next year’s Communication Matters conference due to the interest gathered during the workshop.
Fin also presented an academic poster on the Between Things collection designed by Fin Tams-Gray, Katie Brown and Graham Pullin titled ‘Five ceramic objects to seed conversations about AAC futures’. This poster showed the Between Things collection in full; all five ceramic objects and their companion boxes, with annotations explaining the function and role of each. The poster is shown below.
