Contribution short abstract:

This paper discusses the potential of performance ethnography to challenge conventional understandings of ethnographic disability activism. It focuses on my project Unspoken Futures, developed in collaboration with d/Disabled artists in Toronto, as an embodied and multisensory form of future-making.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper discusses the potential of performance ethnography – an approach to research that uses theatre performance as a form of ethnographic process and representation – to challenge conventional conceptions of ethnographic disability activism. It focuses on my performance ethnography project, Unspoken Futures, created in collaboration with d/Deaf and d/Disabled artists in Toronto, Canada. The project encompassed workshops, a public performance open to an invited audience and the general public, and a post-performance Q&A session. This paper examines how participants employed strategies such as devised theatre, physical theatre, improvisation, clowning, collective creation, and creative writing to draw on ineffable aspects of their lived experiences in order to engage in interventionist future-making. I argue that performance ethnography, as an embodied, affective, metaphoric, physical, and visual methodology, can constitute a form of imaginative activism, potentially politicizing participants, the ethnographer, and audience through empathic, multisensory, critical, and collaborative engagement. This paper problematizes how we practice disability activism by arguing that imagination can unlock new possibilities for experiences and actions, laying the groundwork for an ethnography that challenges the dominance of textual representation.