Critical Qualitative Research, Disability, and Community: Seeking a Disability Justice Framework for Qualitative Inquiry

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This panel is a response to the call for engaging in a new critical qualitative inquiry, considering issues of power, privilege, voice, identity, and agency, while examining the hegemonic power of ableism and ableist epistemologies. The contributing authors/panelists work to advance qualitative methods and methodological discussions from the ways in which “disabled people” are viewed primarily as “research informants who have little say about the intellectual purposes their input serves,” to a place where disability embodiment and the lived experience of disability are sources of method and methodological advancement. This panel addresses the call to “engage further” and pursue “crip horizons”-- horizons that engage the alternative possibility in which disability is “rendered desirable, and the structures which surround it, profoundly contested.”

Sub Unit

• Division D - Measurement and Research Methodologies / Division D - Section 3: Qualitative Research Methods

Chair

• Emily A. Nusbaum, Mills College

Papers

• (Re)Framing Qualitative Research as a Prickly Artichoke: Peeling Back the Layers of Structural Ableism Within the Institutional Research Process - Brianna J Dickens, Syracuse University; Holly Pearson, Framingham State University

• Bodymind Legibility and Possibilities for Qualitative Research - Emily A. Nusbaum, Mills College; Jessica Nina Lester, Indiana University

• When Participatory Approaches Are Inaccessible: Creating Space for Both Individual and Group Engagement - Kathleen Caroline Sitter, University of Calgary

• Disability Visibility: Qualitative Methods, Online Archives, and Advocacy - Alice Wong, Disability Visibility Project

Discussant

• Michelle Fine, City College of New York - CUNY