Menstrual Health and Deaf Communication Comic - EDICa

Menstrual Health and Deaf Communication

EDICa commissioned Maria Stoian to create a comic based on the interview we conducted with “Isabella”, a deaf researcher in computer studies.

Published : 13/05/2026

Menstruation

Deaf

Disability

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EDICa uses and produces a variety of resources in training and dissemination. Maria Stoian produced the comic strips and illustrations for Flexible Fund project “In Their Own Time”. We commissioned Maria to convert one of our interviews with deaf employees in the UK’s research & innovation sector, into visual comics, a medium that can help some people better absorb and retain information.

Feel free to use the comic in conjunction with the social model of disability; where we seek to remove barriers Isabella experiences, not to change Isabella to fit the environment. If using, please give due credit to the EDI Caucus.

Check out our other comic strip focusing on menstrual health at work, telling Frances’ story as a technician in a research laboratory.

Menstrual Health and Deaf Communication – Isabella’s Story

Click here for Alt Text in 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. 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 empty lecture hall, with curved fixed desks and chairs pointing towards the corner where there's a large screen and a lecturn

Deaf Researchers’ Experience Seminar Recording

Date: 24 September 2024

A recording of EDICa’s panel in British Sign Language on deaf researchers’ experience in the UK.

An industrial workshop has a row of hooks on which are slings, a row of hooks containing different size chains, and a big sign saying Lifting Tackle. Stairs go to an upper mezzanine level.

Report on recommendations for improving support for managing menstrual health

Date: 10th June 2024
Report

Report on “Recommendations for improving support for researchers
managing menstrual health”

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.