Event Details

Join us for a thought-provoking conversation with Dr Natalia Pamuła and Dr Magda Szarota on challenging assumptions about motherhood, family and care through disability studies.

Centre for Child and Family Justice Research Webinar

Monday 30 November 2026 | 4:00 pm (GMT)

Dr Natalia Pamuła in conversation with Dr Magda Szarota

What happens when love and care become entangled with obligation and coercion? Who carries the responsibility when the state fails to provide adequate support?

Join us for a thought-provoking conversation exploring these questions through Natalia Pamuła's new book, Disability Disruptions: Gender, Family, and Care in Post-1989 Poland (University of Illinois Press, 2026).

Drawing on cultural narratives of disability in post-socialist Poland, Pamuła challenges established assumptions about motherhood, family and care. Her concept of violent intimacy reveals how relationships rooted in love and commitment can also become sites of constraint when families have little genuine choice about how care is organised.

In conversation with disability scholar and advocate Magda Szarota, Natalia will explore these ideas and consider a broader question: whose knowledge counts in disability studies, and what can we learn from perspectives beyond its established academic centres?

The webinar will be of particular interest to social workers, family practitioners, disability advocates, policymakers and researchers concerned with disability, family life and social justice.

About the speakers

Dr Natalia Pamuła is Assistant Professor at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw, Poland. Her research sits at the intersection of disability studies, gender studies and Polish culture, with a particular focus on the cultural history and representations of disability. Her scholarship has appeared in journals including Aspasia, East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, and Canadian Slavonic Papers. She has also co-edited a special issue of Studia de Cultura devoted to disability studies in Poland and translated Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's influential book Extraordinary Bodies into Polish. Her new book, Disability Disruptions, brings perspectives from post-socialist Poland into wider debates about disability, gender and care.

Dr Magda(lena) Szarota is a scholar and award-winning disability rights advocate whose work bridges disability, gender, policy and human rights. A Lancaster University PhD graduate, she is recognised as a pioneer of the disabled women's movement in post-socialist Eastern Europe and co-founded Poland's first association of disabled women in 2004. She is actively involved in international disability rights advocacy and was appointed to the OSCE/ODIHR Advisory Panel on the Political Participation of Persons with Disabilities in 2026. She is also an exhibited and published art photographer.