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Overview

Professor Brett Smith

Director of Research, Professor of Disability and Physical Activity


Affiliations
AffiliationTelephone
Director of Research, Professor of Disability and Physical Activity in the Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences 
Fellow of the Durham Research Methods Centre
Fellow of the Institute for Medical Humanities

Biography

Brett Smith was a Professor at Loughborough University and then at the University of Birmingham before joining Durham in 2019 as a Professor of Disability and Physical Activity and the Department Director of Research (2019-2024). He is also a Visiting Professor at universities in England, China, Greece, and South Africa. Brett’s extensively funded research on physical activity and disability integrates different disciplinary knowledge (e.g., psychology, sociology, public health, and critical disability studies) to address complex problems. It is also often co-produced. Brett led the first UK Chief Medical Officers’ Physical Activity Guidelines for disabled adults (2018) and disabled children (2022). Working with disabled people and disability organisations, this work also set new standards for communicating national physical activity guidelines by co-producing them. Brett continues to advise the UK Government Department of Health and Social Care as well as national and local organisations, like ParalympicsGB, Youth Sport Trust, Sport England, and Durham Mental Wellbeing Alliance, on disability, physical activity, and co-production. 

Brett is currently the principal investigator of the award-winning transdisciplinary project Moving Social Work. With Disability Rights UK, this 5-year £1m+ funded co-produced research is about embedding physical activity in social work education and practice so that these professionals can work with disabled people to be more physically active. As part of this, Moving Social Work advances physical activity research on co-production, intersectionality, interprofessional working, champions for wellbeing, social justice, and health inequalities.   

In addition to expertise on disability, physical activity, and co-production, Brett is a methodologist in qualitative research. He has a particular interest in narrative inquiry, rigor, and arts-based research. Brett is the co-founder and former President of the International Society of Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise. He is the founder and former Editor of the journal Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health. Brett has also supported the advancement of qualitative research by not only serving as a journal Associate Editor for Psychology of Sport and Exercise (9 years) and Sport, Exercise and Performance Psychology (4 years). He has served on 13 journal Editorial Boards, including currently on Qualitative Research in Psychology, Methods in Psychology, and Qualitative Inquiry. Brett is the co-editor of the Routledge book series Qualitative Research in Sport and Physical Activity. He is regularly invited to deliver international keynotes and contribute to prestigious handbooks, including the Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (6th Ed - 2024) and The APA Handbook of Research Methods in Psychology (2nd Ed – 2024). He has guest edited 3 journal special issues, most recently, with Dr Javier Monforte, on critical posthumanities and postqualitative inquiry in psychology. The impact of Brett’s work on qualitative research and disability can further be found in him being consistently a Top 100 Cited Researcher in the World in the Sport Sciences.

Learn more about Moving Social Work here

Orcid: 0000-0001-7137-2889

Google Scholar: https://bit.ly/3Q0kBlG

ResearchGate: https://bit.ly/3Q1a6yz

PhD supervision Brett welcomes applications from potential PhD students interested in the psycho-social aspects of disability, sport, physical activity, and/or social justice.

Research interests

  • Disability
  • Physical Activity
  • Co-production
  • Qualitative Research

Publications

Authored book

Chapter in book

Edited book

Journal Article

Supervision students