Paper short abstract:

Drawing on STS, disability studies, and research-creation, I introduce "Craft-based Interviews," ethnographic research through textile co-creation that fosters an ethics of care to address research barriers for participants with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Paper long abstract:

The haptic vibration when ripping fabric, the hum of the sewing machine, the place where needle, flesh and fabric meet. Each are moments that transform the ethnographic experience into something that cannot be reached through words alone.  This presentation introduces "craft-based interviews," an anti-ableist method where ethnographic research is mediated through textile co-creation. Qualitative methods privilege written and spoken forms of communication and self-representation which inherently create participation barriers for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), who often communicate in other ways that words. As such, the experiences of individuals with IDD have been relegated to the margins of STS research, where they are often positioned as passive subjects. Research is completed about them, and technology is designed for as opposed to with people with IDD. Through analysis of fieldwork videography, I introduce "craft-based interviews" as a transdisciplinary research method informed by STS, critical disability studies, and research-creation. Often appearing in micro-moments of relational materiality, textiles are a media that enable a dynamic agency between researcher and participant, disrupting power dynamics and lingual hierarchies of communication. This enables a broader ethics of care demonstrating practices of “crip-technoscience,” to articulate how disabled people and their kin alter and reinvent the material-discursive world (Hamraie & Fritsch 2019). To conclude, I consider how this approach opens new channels of communicating in ways that resist intellectual ableism in research practices.