Vulnerable Agencies: A Performative Research Assemblage on Dis/Ability

Abstract

In this article, I describe an artistic research process stemming from my work as a dance pedagogue in disability services. Describing and reflecting on the process that led to the artistic part of my research, a performance installation at the New Performance Turku festival in Finland in 2018, I aim to develop a nuanced and ethically sensitive understanding of diverse and vulnerable agencies in the boundary areas between arts, research and social care. The ethical dilemma I address in this article concerns the paradoxical nature of situated and shared vulnerability. I reflect on how the different vulnerable agencies have been negotiated in my research project, and what ethical insights this negotiation brings forth. Methodologically, my research is situated at the intersections of artistic and performative research, post-qualitative inquiry, and feminist ethnography. Based on methodological experiments and theoretical discussion, including the ethics of care, vulnerability, dis/ability and ableism, I consider the complexity of participation, power relations and decoloniality in artistic research. Through the example of my research project, I describe how frictions between different contexts in the arts, academia, and social care become tangible in light of the social-material-discursive phenomenon of dis/ability. In the conclusion I suggest that we should continue to reflect on the complexity of the possibilities of participation, problematising artistic and academic practices, in which disabled people’s agency is determined and mediated by abled people.