Jackie Carter appointed Academic Lead for Disability
05 Dec 2022
Jackie will take on this role in February 2023
Jackie Carter has been appointed Academic Lead for Disability. Jackie will take on this role in February 2023
The role will provide leadership and direction on driving Equality, Diversity and Inclusion with a special focus on Disability across a range of aspects. These include staff recruitment and development, and learning and teaching.
Jackie started at the University in 1996 and has held a number of roles including Methods@Manchester Director, School of Social Sciences Employability lead and the Q-Step Data Fellows Director.
Jackie is now a Professor of Statistical Literacy in Social Statistics in the School of Social Sciences and holds university and national teaching awards. She also teaches a first year course on Measuring Inequalities where students examine local and global inequalities across a number of themes: poverty, health, education and wellbeing.
Commenting on her appointment Jackie said: “I would like to thank my predecessor Professor Alys Young who has left a strong legacy – a hard act to follow, but I will try my best!
I am thrilled to be joining the team following the launch of the new EDI strategy. I will be working closely with Rachael Cowen (Academic Lead for Gender) and Dawn Edge (Academic Lead for Race and Religion) whose work I respect enormously.
I have held a number of roles at the University and I have not always been a disabled person. I had cancer in 2017 and then in 2020, during lockdown, suffered from a rare neurological condition called Ramsay Hunt Syndrome (Justin Bieber has also had this!). I now need hearing aids and suffer with severe balance issues and cognitive difficulties – although you wouldn’t know any of this to look at me.
Through acting with integrity, and from a place of lived experience, I want to raise the voices of those of us at the University who are disabled. I intend to not just raise awareness of what disabled staff and students need, but how their working lives are affected by their disabilities.
I want to use my experience to ensure that we welcome staff and students with disabilities, we give them the best experience whilst they are here, and above all else we do this from a place of care.”
Banji Adewumi, Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion said: “I’m thrilled that Jackie is our new Academic Lead for Disability. Jackie’s wealth of experience at the University in both Professional Services and academic roles, without and with a disability, will help us to become a truly inclusive organisation where EDI is embedded in all that we do and who we are.”