Comic- Living with a Hidden Condition: Alan's Story - EDICa

Living with a Hidden Condition: Alan’s Story

The DICE project commissioned Dekko Comics to create a comic based on interviews conducted with disabled staff in industry.

Published : 13/12/2025

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DICE – Disability Inclusive Careers in Engineering & sciences – was a spin-out project based on EDICa’s work, and predecessor projects DISC (Disability Inclusive Science Careers) and EnDISC (Enabling NeuroDiverse Inclusive Science Careers). It was funded by EPSRC’s Impact Acceleration Award administered by Heriot-Watt University.

DICE commissioned Dekko Comics to turn two composite storylines into visual comics, a medium that can help some people better absorb and retain information.

“Alan” has a health condition resulting in lack of energy and lack of bladder control. He struggles with lack of bins in toilets at work, and the stigma attached to incontinence. Read more about Energy Limiting Conditions and how employers can support employees with an ELC.

Feel free to use the comic in conjunction with the social model of disability; where we seek to remove barriers for Alan. If using, please give due credit to DICE.

Check out our other comic strip focusing on menstrual health at work, telling Frances’ story as a technician in a research laboratory, and the DICE comic of Zara’s story– a neurodivergent interviewee navigating the recruitment process.

Read the recommendations from DICE on improving workplace support for neurodivergent and disabled employees.

Living with a Hidden Condition: Alan’s Story

Click here for alt text in a Word document

Other resources

EDICa hosts a regular blog and seminars, as well as collecting a library of resources of equality, diversity & inclusion practices in research & innovation.

Screenshot of the comic strip behind a banner saying EDICa Resource. Full alt text of comic is within the link.

Comic- Disabling Interview Practices: Zara’s Story

Date: 13th May 2026 –

A two-page comic depicting the barriers experienced by a deaf researcher in computer studies with menstrual health conditions.

Screenshot of the comic. Full alt text can be found in the resource itself by following the link.

Menstruation cartoon

Date: 15th March 2026 –

A one-page comic depicting the barriers experienced by someone with menstrual health conditions in a laboratory environment.

An aerial view of the two road bridges over the Forth River

Improving workplace support for disabled and neurodivergent engineers and scientists

Date: 15th Sep 2025 –

Report from EDICa side-project, DICE: Disability Inclusive Careers in Engineering & sciences.

Dr Anjali Mazumder

AI and Justice and Human Rights Theme Lead

The Turing Institute

Anjali Mazumder is the Theme Lead on AI and Justice & Human Rights. Her work focuses on empowering government and non-profit organisations by co-designing and developing responsible and inclusive data and AI methods, tools and frameworks for safeguarding people from harm – particularly those most vulnerable, building resilient institutions and systems, and accelerating the opportunity for inclusive, fair and just services, systems, economies, and communities. She is passionate about fostering multi-disciplinary collaborations and multi-sector partnerships to co-create pathways for innovation that improves services, policy, and actions to safeguard human rights and address humanitarian challenges. Her research interests are in developing integrated Bayesian decision support systems to manage uncertainty with complex data structures, value of evidence, causal reasoning in the wild; expert judgement; detecting bias and algorithmic fairness; socio-technical solutions to harnessing multiple disparate sources of data whilst enabling responsible and inclusive data and AI principles and practices; communicating uncertainty and risk; and safeguarding rights and the Rule of Law.

She has over 15 years’ experience tackling fundamental statistical problems of societal importance – human rights, justice, security, the Law, education, public health & safety – working at the interface of research, policy and practice in the UK, the US, and Canada, fostering multi-disciplinary and cross-sector collaborations. She was appointed to Canada’s National DNA Databank Advisory Committee (2012-2018) and currently serves on the UK Forensic Science Regulator’s fingerprint interpretation subgroup, and the senior management board of the UK’s Policy and Evidence Centre for Modern Slavery and Human Rights. She has also served the Royal Statistical Society in a variety of ways, most recently appointed to the Statistics & Law Section and the Data Science Section committees. She holds a doctorate in Statistics from the University of Oxford and two masters’ degrees in Measurement and Evaluation, and Statistics from the University of Toronto.

Dr Jenny Douglas

Senior Lecturer in Health Promotion
Faculty of Wellbeing, Education & Language Studies

Dr Jenny Douglas is passionate about the health and wellbeing of black women as evidenced through her research and public engagement. She has a PhD in Women’s Studies and completed her doctoral thesis on cigarette smoking and identity among African-Caribbean young women in contemporary British society. This research brought together two divergent research traditions: medical public health and health promotion approaches with sociological approaches to researching cigarette smoking. This interdisciplinary research approach brings together sociology, public health and women’s studies. Her commitment to comparative approaches finds expression not only in working across disciplinary and national boundaries, but also across theoretical and methodological traditions. Her research is both varied and wide ranging spanning 30 years on issues of race, health, gender and ethnicity. The key theme unifying her research and activism is intersectionality – exploring how ‘race’, class and gender affect particular aspects of African – Caribbean women’s health.

Jenny Douglas established and chairs the Black Women’s Health and Wellbeing Research Network. (www.open.ac.uk/black-womens-health-and-wellbeing) and her ambition is to establish a research institute on the health and wellbeing of black women. She is a contributing author to ‘Inside the Ivory Tower’.

Jenny Douglas is a Senior Lecturer in Health Promotion in the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies at the Open University. She has a PhD in Women’s Studies from the University of York, an MA in Sociological Research in Health Care from the University of Warwick, an MSc in Environmental Pollution Control from the University of Leeds and a BSc (Hons) in Microbiology and Virology from the University of Warwick. She is module lead of the K311 – ‘Promoting Public Health’, is an honorary member of the Faculty of Public Health and is a director of the UK Public Health Register.

Jenny is a Research Affiliate of the Institute for Intersectionality Research and Policy, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Psychology at The George Washington University, Washington D.C., USA.