PGR Student Spotlight - Katie Munday

Our Student Spotlight for September is Katie Munday, a South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership-funded PhD student in the School of Psychology Sports and Health Sciences. Their research explores the health and social care experiences of trans and gender diverse autistic adults in the UK.

Over a Turkish lunch celebrating our recently published paper on gender identity healthcare access for autistic people, Steven Kapp asked me whether I planned to undertake a PhD. I had only just finished my MRes at Portsmouth and was conducting research in the charity sector focused on cancer service experiences of disabled, and trans people, and substance use service experiences of autistic people. I asked what would bring all of these different topics together. He answered simply, “Healthcare accessibility”. Those two words, a lengthy application and a lot of grit, got me to here: starting the third year of my PhD based in participatory action research. My PhD studies follow my curiosity with health and social care accessibility, and the research that underpins it, not just as a point of inclusion but also as a fundamental location of belonging, connection and joy.

Through this work I centre the experiences, knowledge, and culture of trans and gender diverse autistic adults, appreciating that we are the experts of our lived lives. The studies champion the active involvement of people with lived experience with a continued commitment to openness, vulnerability and holding space for myself and co-researchers (four amazing trans and gender diverse autistic people with varying experiences of health and social care). Together, we appreciate participatory action research as an approach to epistemology that questions who is considered an expert and why, what “counts” as knowledge, and who is counting.

Throughout the PhD I will use ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘our’, and other collective nouns so as not to erase my own identity and experiences, and those of the co-researchers. It is vital for us to reflect on our positionalities as knowledge holders, and we must ensure that we do not centre our own experiences, especially mine as the white, passing, and economically stable principal investigator. We are blessed to share some of our own stories within these studies and analysis and appreciate that writing is a political act and writing together is social movement.

Katie writes a regular blog at https://autisticltd.co.uk/ and can be found on LinkedIn and Bluesky.