From the Margins to the Center: Disability and Disrupting Normativity in Qualitative Research

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 80

Abstract

Purpose
In this paper, we argue that disability remains backgrounded and is even erased at times in normative qualitative research practices. Historically, qualitative researchers have often privileged particular ways of being in the world (e.g., people who use spoken language), with much of the language produced by research participants being presumed to fall within the confines of expected patterns of ‘abled-bodiness.’ Recognizing this, we call for reclaiming disability in qualitative work (Linton, 1998), noting that disability can serve as a “platform or plateau through which to think through, act, resist, relate, communicate, engage with one another against the hybridized forms of oppression and discrimination that so often do not speak singularly of disability” (Goodley, 2013, p. 641).

Theoretical Perspectives
We locate our writing within a commitment to “…challeng[ing] the view of disability as an individual deficit or defect” (Society for Disability Studies, n.d.). Indeed, disability studies has served to recast disability and disabled identities, while calling for and producing activist oriented scholarship and displaying a commitment to intersectional and layered analyses. Alongside this commitment, we are informed by French theorist Henri-Jacques Stiker (1999) who argued that disability is transhistorically disturbing, as it makes visible that “an aberrancy within the corporeal order is an aberrancy is the social order (p. 40). Disabled people, he argued, are often oriented to as an ontological threat; that is, they “are the tear in our being” (p. 10). Thus, in writing this paper, we sought to identify how normative practices in qualitative research perhaps function to resist this presumed ontological threat. We argue, instead, for qualitative methodologists/researchers to invite that which might disturb, disrupt, and counter ableist hegemonic ways of ‘doing’ research and ‘being’ a qualitative researcher.

Methods
To build our argument, we drew upon both critical disability studies literature and historical and contemporary writings around qualitative research practice. We gave particular attention to those qualitative writings that seek to ‘teach’ qualitative research practices and introduce theories of being-knowing.

Scholarly Significance
Minich (2016) asserted the primacy of disability and disability studies, not as a field of study, but rather as a methodology, noting methodological concern about the separation of the study of marginalized locations and those who occupy them, as they relate to disability. Kuntz (2015) relatedly argued that much of qualitative research has become devoid of the recognition of context, power, and material impact and offered “…an articulated vision for alternative spaces of possibility, places where we might act and be as other than we currently are” (p. 14). And, it is with a commitment to revisiting, questioning, critiquing, and even resisting “legitimated forms of knowing and being” (Kuntz, p. 14) that we call for centering disability in qualitative research. In doing so, we argue for not simply describing what is, but considering what could be (Noblit, Flores, & Murillo, 2006). Through such a consideration, we suggest that qualitative researchers can generate new and varying “spaces of possibility” (Kuntz, p. 14) – spaces where disability is centered and reclaimed in and through qualitative research.

Authors

• Jessica Nina Nina Lester, Indiana University

• Emily A. Nusbaum, University of San Francisco