Building Japanese research capacity around disability studies and sport to positively impact the lives of people with disabilities - 2020 and beyond

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The aim of this bid is to expand an already existing international collaboration and foster a long term sustainable multi-partner network in order to further develop our understanding in the field of disability studies and sport (DSS). This project will bring together a network of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities (SSH) researchers across the UK and Japan, including ECRs, who will both strengthen and develop current relations. In 2020 Tokyo, Japan, will become the first city to host the Paralympic Games twice, having previously hosted them in 1964. This, therefore, provides an ideal opportunity to both meet the aims of this grant call, whilst at the same time improving our understanding of the field of DSS by furthering our cultural understandings of people with disabilities (PWD) using an interdisciplinary approach that adopts participative methodologies to foster co-creation of new knowledge in the field.The researchers from the UK come from three universities: Coventry, West of Scotland and Worcester). The Japanese network members are drawn from three universities based in or around Tokyo: Juntendo, Tsukuba and Waseda, as well as one publicly-funded non-academic research body: the Nippon Foundation Paralympic Research Group. The Japanese group also includes the founding Director of the Co-Innovation Laboratory (COIL) who will act as a stakeholder representative and a direct conduit to groups of PWD in Tokyo with whom COIL work towards achieving an inclusive society. Both the UK and Japanese networks include experienced and early career researchers as the project is designed to make this area of research sustainable over the long term by involving and developing the capacity of young researchers who will lead the field in the years to come. The two groups of researchers will experience a programme of knowledge exchange and collaborative research planning (in both the UK and Japan), assisted by other key stakeholders including PWD and policy makers in Japan, to which various members of the overall network already have access. This will culminate in a planned longitudinal programme of collaborative research to take place before, during and up to four years after the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games that will form the basis for a larger funding application to be written as the final part of the proposed project. As a baseline, the planned research programme for the larger bid will be aimed at investigating many of the claims made by the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) that are often repeated by Paralympic host city organising committees, regarding the potential social impact of sport and the Paralympic Games themselves upon the lives of PWD in the host country. These include: improved health, greater inclusion, better transport and infrastructure, environmental accessibility, enhanced support services and improved attitudes towards PWD amongst the non-disabled population (Brittain, 2018). This would be underpinned by a narrative analysis of the role of prejudice and normative values within Japanese society using ableism as a lens to see how disability is currently constructed and the impact hosting the Paralympic Games has on this narrative.