Cripping Collaboration: Science Fiction and the Access to Disability Worlds

• Published in: Medical anthropology Vol. 42; no. 8; pp. 720 - 736
• Main Author: Dronkert, Leonie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Routledge 17.11.2023; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Academic standards; Access; Anthropology, Medical; Cognition & reasoning; Cognitive skills; Collaboration; Community-Based Participatory Research - methods; crip theory; Crip-theorie; Disabled Persons; ethnography; etnografie; Fiction; Humans; Intellectual disabilities; Intellectual Disability; Knowledge; Learning disabled people; licht verstandelijke beperking; Motion pictures; Multimodality; Neurodiversity; participatie; People with disabilities; Research methodology; Research subjects; science fiction; Science fiction & fantasy; visual anthropology; visuele antropologie; Crip-theorie; science-fiction; crip theory; visuele antropologie; participatie; etnografie; science fiction; Collaboration; licht verstandelijke beperking; ethnography; intellectual disability; visual anthropology
• ISSN: 0145-9740; 1545-5882; 1545-5882
• DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2023.2230345

Inclusive participatory approaches strive to make participants with mild intellectual disabilities (MID) co-researchers. However, academic standards of knowledge production and the need for cognitive skills can complicate collaboration. I argue that collaboration with people with disabilities is not about efforts of inclusion, but instead, it is our methodologies that need to be "cripped." This means moving away from the ideal of inclusion, toward a more interdependent and relational understanding of access and collaboration. This multimodal article shows how my "research subject" Olof and I explored this way of working together by describing the coproduction of the science-fiction film "O."